Foot traffic: getting in the transportation zone.

Cars, planes, trains, buses and boats. They're all just different ways of getting from one place to another. But there's more to it than that. Streetsmart nonprofit managers will recognize in these mundane things the roots of a powerful impact on their organizations. Shrewd leaders and managers will turn them to their organization's advantage.

Broadly speaking, transportation zones are the general routes that large numbers of human beings take to get from one place to another. Lewis and Clark were trying to establish a kind of transportation zone many years ago, and the Panama Canal was created to cut short a notoriously long and dangerous transportation zone over the open ocean and around the southernmost tip of South America.

In today's world, transportation zones are usually clearly marked. One of President Dwight Eisenhower's enduring contributions to this country's economic development was his advocacy of the interstate highway system. Those ubiquitous multilane highways bordered by low-slung guardrails have transformed just about every aspect of modern life, from where we live to what we eat to our national security. The highway system was initially conceived as a way to rapidly move troops and material around the country.

But what do transportation zones have to do with nonprofits? A lot. Whenever people move along established transportation routes they bring their plusses and minuses with them. Virtually all organizations are affected by transportation zones in one way or another, but few realize it.

Yet, they are extremely powerful determinants of behavior, including whether whole parts of the nonprofit sector flourish. For instance, community hospitals thrived during much of the early part of the last century, in part, because of the deficits in transportation zones, and they have declined in large part recently because people can now more readily seek medical care elsewhere thanks to better transportation.

Transportation zones have some potentially major strategic implications for your organization. Here are a few of them:

Labor

Most nonprofits today have two fairly distinct labor forces. The bigger workforce is composed of relatively transient, modestly-paid individuals who often work in direct service or non-managerial administrative jobs. The smaller workforce usually consists of longer-term, higher-paid individuals in management and/or with some type of credential. This group typically drives to and from work, whereas for many members of the first workforce, driving is not economical. Moreover, the larger group tends to make job choices based on lifestyle desires, such as proximity to work or convenient public transportation.

For nearly a decade it has been a hard labor market for nonprofit employers, which means that labor is harder to find and/or more expensive. By all accounts, the shortage will continue. Nonprofit employers who need large numbers of the first type of workforce must make strategic location choices, if possible, based on good transportation zones. If they can't do so they risk losing members of their largest work force, who will tend to favor other more convenient employers in their preferred transportation zone.

Volunteers

Many nonprofit service models rely extensively on volunteers. Along with everything else, the span of the typical volunteer's time commitment is shrinking. Practically everyone is time-stressed, it seems, and volunteers are no exception.

Especially for volunteers in a long-term relationship model (such as mentoring programs), streetsmart managers must make it easier and easier for volunteers to offer their services. One of the best ways of doing this is to locate one's organization in the transportation zones where those volunteers are most likely to move.

One nonprofit with a heavy emphasis on volunteers made a strategic decision to locate their offices in a downtown area. Within a block was the headquarters of a major bank, several law firms, financial services firms, and two subway stops. The office location was instrumental in reassuring volunteers that the organization was just as business-like as the potential volunteers were, and the organization practically brimmed with volunteers (one needs more to attract volunteers, of course, but the location in such a key transportation zone was instrumental).

If you have a substantial component of volunteers, try this analysis. Collect the home ZIP codes or city/town names of each volunteer, and enter this data into one of the inexpensive computer mapping programs available in any computer store. Plot the volunteers' home regions in the mapping program. Chances are you will find that most of your volunteers fall in a distinct transportation zone. For example, one youth -serving organization making heavy use of volunteers discovered by this method that their most productive zip codes for volunteers fell along the two major commuting routes that intersected near the organization's building. Volunteers seek a fulfilling experience, but they also must balance many other demands on their time. Crossing transportation zones just takes too much time and effort.

Fundraising

Repetition is the essence of advertising. (Say it three times.) In a fundraising world dominated by individual donors, nonprofits hoping to do any significant amount of fundraising have to find a way to keep their message in front of every potential donor they can reach. Transportation zones help accomplish that.

Being well positioned in a heavily utilized transportation zone can help reinforce an organization's market presence. The nonprofit whose recognizable building entrance lies at eye level as one is emerging from the subway gets a few free seconds of publicity every day with every user of that stop. The nonprofit whose building is next to a major commuter route into a city is subconsciously imprinted onto the minds of most regular commuters along that route.

While that kind of recognition won't translate directly into fundraising dollars, it does predispose consumers to have favorable associations with the name if only because of the number of times they see it.

Many nonprofits of all kinds have to be in the transportation business themselves, transporting users from home to the services, or from one service site to another. The vehicles that do the transport should bear a consistent and recognizable image. They too make thousands of quick little connections with potential donors ("eyeballs," as Internet marketers say), laying the groundwork for favorable associations when it comes time for fundraising.

Sources of the need for services

Of course, transportation zones bring negative things too. In India, for example, AIDS initially spread along a north-south axis because those were the established trucking routes and drivers using those routes visited prostitutes all along the way.

In this country, the northeastern corridor out of New York City is well known to college students going home or back to school in Boston. But drug traffickers know it as an aid in diversifying their markets. This is why drugs smuggled into the Port of New York can often be traced to New Haven, then to Hartford, Conn., and then to the Springfield, Mass., area. All are dense population centers along that route. Coastal fishing ports bounded by secluded coastlines are often centers of high drug usage because fishing boats going in and out are natural carriers of contraband.

This means that organizations seeking to serve or mitigate these problems need to be located right in those transportation zones. The outreach workers of the 1970s and the gang workers of today understand that need intuitively. Most of the effort to combat Avian Bird Flu when and if it makes a wholesale jump to humans centers around transportation routes.

Transportation routes mean more than just feverish activity as people and goods move from one point to another. The size, location, behavior and overall nature of transportation zones have strategic implications for all types of nonprofits. They may not seem relevant to your organization, but if you want to get where you're going it's worth making them part of your strategy.

Thomas A. McLaughlin is a national nonprofit management consultant with Grant Thornton in Boston. He is the author of the forthcoming book Nonprofit Strategic Positioning (John Wiley and Sons, March 31, 2006). This column is drawn from that book. His email address is [e-mail]