Minority Outreach

Minority outreach is a key component within the multicultural communications arsenal at Interlex.

As the nation's only multicultural communications firm devoted exclusively to advocacy marketing, social marketing, cause-related marketing, and corporate social marketing, minority outreach is a strategy we employ consistently and effectively to engage, educate and empower multicultural communities to adopt new and beneficial behaviors as well as learn and exercise new skills crucial to advancement.

Minority outreach is a strategy of specifically reaching out to minority multicultural audiences and engaging with them on their own terms, in their own cultural context and community. Minority outreach – when done correctly – can be extremely effective in connecting with multicultural communities on issues requiring behavior change. Thus, minority outreach – as an element of a broader multicultural communications campaign – is a very important strategy.

Tactically, minority outreach can take many forms, all of which Interlex employs as a full-service advertising agency. These various iterations of minority outreach are typically rooted in a multicultural branding strategy and can include in-culture and in-language advertising and public relations.

Traditionally, minority outreach also relies heavily on non-profit partnerships and grassroots engagement. Interlex forges non-profit partnerships for our clients, gaining privileged insider access to invaluable opportunities to gain the trust of multicultural communities on their own home turf, where they are most likely to overcome barriers of trust and consider our clients' messages. We then work in tandem with clients and partners to create and execute culturally relevant grassroots outreach events and interactions that align with the advocacy marketing goals and branding strategy of our client. This process is essential to successful implementation of advocacy marketing and social marketing campaigns in multicultural communities due to the often-engrained distrust of government entities and corporations.

Within the emerging sphere of public relations online, minority outreach includes targeted multicultural social media outreach, digital PR and blogger relations. This is an important new area of minority outreach, as multicultural populations are the fastest growing segments of Internet users.

Interlex has conducted extensive minority outreach efforts as part of broader multicultural communications campaigns for clients including: American Cancer Society, American Express, Care Improvement Plus, National Education Association, Texas Department of Health, TracFone, US Department of Homeland Security and Western Union.

The success of our minority outreach efforts is fueled by our team's thorough understanding of branding strategy and multicultural marketing, but what really renders our results unique are the in-depth understanding of subject matter that we bring to the table and the passion with which we deliver vital knowledge to multicultural communities.

Our work in minority outreach has yielded measurable results detailed in the Case Studies featured in the Work section of our site.

Featured Article:

Minority Outreach Can Be an Essential Growth Strategy

[Posted on March 3]

In these turbulent economic times, adapting and remaining profitable will require competitiveness, resourcefulness and innovation. This is especially true for the marketing efforts of public companies and private organizations whose success relies on gaining favor with the community-at-large – one strategy for reaching the community and meeting marketing and business goals is minority outreach.

As the socio-political spectrum in the United States continues to change and represent the increasing diversity of the United States, minority groups will continue to increase their share of economic and political power. To tap into this growth whether for economic or political reasons, a company or public organization will need to rely on an effective minority outreach strategy that will on one hand engender trust and goodwill with the community and on the other facilitate message delivery and a desired behavioral change whether it is the purchasing of medical insurance or adapting healthier eating practices.

Implementing a successful minority outreach strategy must begin with the overall marketing plan, which is to say it shouldn’t be an afterthought, rather a key area of focus that should begin when evaluating target markets. Starting off with research will lay a solid foundation allowing for the development of not only an informed minority outreach marketing strategy but also the identification of valuable insights that will drive overall branding strategy. Integrating minority outreach in the planning stage will also allow for more effective multicultural marketing materials and overall multicultural communications as it will provide copy writers and designers the direction and messaging requirements they need for the transcreation of marketing materials for the appropriate audiences outlined by the minority outreach strategy.

Like all successful marketing efforts, effective minority outreach efforts are just as diverse as the audiences they are designed to reach, it is more than just transcreation of multicultural marketing materials, minority outreach also requires the selection of communications vehicles that lend themselves to the objectives of minority outreach. These minority outreach vehicles can be corporate social marketing tactics, advocacy marketing programs and/or cause related marketing that provide a true benefit to their intended targets, all of which are very effective at facilitating minority outreach as they engender trust and goodwill in the minority community. Successful minority outreach will utilize these channels to not only provide a benefit to the community, but also effectively position brand-marketing messages within the overall messaging platform to aid in reaching company or organization goals.