At ONE/Northwest, we often think about our partners’ relationships with constituents as a sort of funnel. At the top of the funnel, your job is to get more of the right people coming to your organization. This is often the purview of PR firms, advertising agencies and marketing gurus. Yet once in the funnel, your job is not just to keep them there, but to begin to move them to deeper levels of engagement with your organization. Your website and email strategies can serve to assist this process by being of service to your target audiences, and working to educate and convert lightly engaged individuals to deepen the connection between your mission and their own goals and passions.

Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, is where your relationships have the greatest value to your organization as well as to your constituents. This basic vision for power building is at the core of the assumptions in this document. Your job is always to keep new people coming into the top of the funnel, while moving individuals from the top of the funnel down to the bottom, where your mission becomes theirs and they become critical to fulfilling it.