Culturailiteracy:MEETING ETHNICALLY DIVERSE MEMBERS ON THEIR OWN TERMS HELPS CO-OPS BUILD WELL-ROUNDED COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

摘要

Employees at Magic Valley Electric Cooperative (MVEC) know a thing or two about communicating with a diverse audience.The Mercedes, Texas, co-op, headquartered about 15 minutes from the Texas-Mexico border, serves more than 92,000 members, nearly half of whom are bilingual or non-English speakers.That doesn't mean engaging this key member community was an easy or even natural process, though. And over the past several years, the co-op has made a concerted effort to create outreach campaigns that engage their Latino members."We really had to start from scratch," says Luis J. Reyes, Magic Valley's communications coordinator. "We asked our friends and family to be our test audiences to find out if our messages resonated. It was a lot of trial and error."