PDC-16: Awareness: The Art of Reading the Minds of the Audience

PDC-16: Charity Awareness: The Art of Reading the Minds of the Audience

 

When a charitable project is mentioned, there are many questions that arise in the minds of the common man. An effective awareness program tries to read the minds of the audience and provides the answers as a part of the information being present in the awareness phase. It must go the extra mile to provide additional information to gain the confidence of the masses.

 

Having openness in the organization for all of its accounts, helps the awareness pitch. Every charity project must envision the common questions that the common man would have been trying to provide answers to it and the awareness phase. An FAQ must be created for different categories; for example for volunteers, for applicants, and so on.

 

When a question arises in the minds of the common man and he gets the answer from the information circulated as part of the awareness, he/she knows that the organization has done its homework in thinking through all these scenarios.

 

Our leaders and elders must fully make use of the opportunities to pass on the awareness about our initiatives to audiences whenever they visit churches and other gatherings. If it is the celebration of important days, awareness must be spread on the importance of the day. One such example of making use of the opportunity to create awareness that I came across in the ICON forum was in an article by Dr. Vinu Mathews summarizing the thoughts of His Grace Philippose Mor Eusebius during HG's visit to their parish.

 

Ref: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IndianOrthodox/message/12661

 

No doubt that the factional litigation has a very negative influence on the charity initiatives of the church. One of the funds that are greatly affected by the factional litigation is the Catholicate day collection (IMHO). Later in the series, we will spend more time on the discussion about this fund. Even though a major part of this fund is used for charity initiatives (grants to mission board, orphanages, social welfare, etc…), there are quite a number of people who think that this fund is a straight pass-through into the pockets of Nariman.

 

While appreciating thirumeni for creating the awareness about the fund, it would have been great if we could have gone the extra mile towards reading the minds of the audience and present more facts to reduce the negative influence of the litigation. Let's focus on one sentence in the article of Dr. Vinu Mathews quoting HGs words

 

"Every penny collected as Catholicate day cover collection from members of Church is exclusively used for sustenance and developmental activities of the Church. 'Not even one naya paise is used for conductance of factional litigation in the Church'."

 

Say, if one of the listeners in that room had a pre notion that the Catholicate day cover collection is the cover collection for Nariman , could the person after listening to HGs comments be thinking "Ok, if it does not go from the Catholicate day cover collection, where does the money come for paying Nariman a fortune?"

 

If HG had made one more sentence that would answer this question, we would have mastered the art of reading the minds of the audience.

 

It's key to the success of a charitable project to spend the time and effort to analyze the minds of the audience and prepare information to answer the questions in the minds of the common man.

 

To be continued…

The next two topics:

 

PDC-17: Awareness: The fine line between Awareness and Marketing

PDC-18: The transformational effect of Awareness: Information and Timing

 

Thanks,

Rajesh Vargheese

St. Gregorios Orthodox Church, Austin , TX