The vision of Friends of the Family is plain and simple: to end homelessness. Their full mission statement reads: “To provide safe shelter, confidential services, and housing assistance to individuals in crisis due to homelessness, domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.” In order to do this, they provide domestic abuse sheltering, sexual assault housing & sheltering, human trafficking assistance, and homeless housing assistance. Read more about the services they provide on their website. https://www.fofia.org/services
To learn more about the work Friends of the Family does, I spoke with Maria, the Transitions Specialist. In this role, she goes into the homes and helps their clients find jobs and prepare for those jobs. The goal for each client of Friends of the Family is to reach self sufficiency. They set goals with each client and require them to actively work toward those goals.
Founding Friends of the Family
This non-profit began 30 years ago, out of a local church in Waverly, IA. Their goal was to help domestic violence survivors, so they established a shelter for these victims. This took off, and allowed them to develop other housing solutions. From there, Friends of the Family has continued to grow to what it is today. If you want to learn more about their history, visit this site.
Creating the Brand
I learned from Michelle Simon, the Director of Community Engagement, to learn more about the marketing for Friends of the Family. “We went through a rebrand in 2017 with a company called FusionFarm. We worked with their design team to create a new logo, tag line, and usage/style guide. Then we hired VGM Forbin to create a new website for the organization. Our marketing and development teams worked with their staff to create a site that is user friendly and serves as the hub of FOF information. For social media, we are active on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. We use each of these platforms to serve different information to different audiences. Through all of these avenues, we use our style guide to keep us uniform and easily recognizable.”
Marketing Struggles
Michelle told me that their struggle with marketing is that “As a nonprofit, our target market is three pronged: donors, volunteers, and clients. So it’s important for us to craft messages in three different directions, while keeping them directed towards our vision of everyone having a home.”
Standing Out
The biggest way that Friends of the Family sets themself apart is that they are “low barrier”, examples of this mean that they don’t drug test or discriminate off drug test, they don’t require anyone to seek mental health resources, and they don’t require clients to have jobs to receive their services. Friends of the Family is not forcing anyone to do anything, and they really encourage clients to heal at their own rate. Clients can’t work on their mental health or drug recovery if they don’t have a home to go to at night, which is where Friends of the Family comes in.
Non-Profit Growth
Maria’s advice was to always be open to learning if you’re working in a field similar to hers. She said, “Clients teach you something new every single day.”
Michelle said: Determine where your supporter base is at and hit them hard. For us that is Facebook and email. We have been able to grow our email database to 2500 and our Fb following to almost 8000 – we reach the largest number of people in these two places and they include our 3 target markets.
Want to get involved?
Friends of the Family has a variety of internships and volunteer opportunities in all of their offices. Maria said that for anything you want to do, they likely have an internship or volunteer opportunity for it. If you want to learn more about their available employment and internship options click here. For more information about volunteer opportunities, click here. Check Friends of the Family out on Facebook!
Read about more amazing non-profits in the Cedar Valley here.