Building Communication Capacities Within Nonprofits Through Service-Learning

Abstract

Previous research suggests that non-profit professionals struggle to effectively utilize digital media and that service-learning is an effective pedagogy for teaching communication-related classes (i.e. communication, technical communication, English, etc.). However, we do not know what impact these strategies have on community partner organizations. Our chapter reports preliminary findings of a study of a service-learning class in which graduate technical communication students were asked to help improve the communication capacity of local non-profits. An important finding of this research is that organizations who were able to clearly identify a gap between organizational and communication goals at the beginning of the class were more receptive to student feedback and found the class more useful than those who didn’t. Ultimately, we argue that through a collaborative study using participatory action research methodology, this work generated research outcomes and, at the same time, helped to build the organizational capacities of selected regional non-profits.