Notes from the 2026 Community Action Partnership Annual Convention, St. Louis
Earlier this month we spent time in St. Louis at the Community Action Partnership Annual Convention (NCAP) with rooms full of people who spend their lives closing gaps — in heat, in housing, in food, in opportunity. Between sessions, one conversation kept repeating, almost word for word.
It sounded like this. We post on Facebook. We updated the website. We're on Instagram now, too... but it’s not making a difference.
The issue wasn’t a lack of effort, as agencies were doing more to communicate, but they couldn’t figure out why the information still wasn’t reaching the people who needed it or what they were missing.
Community Action Agencies have invested significant time and money in reaching people online—with new websites, service locators, social media, and other digital tools.
But despite all that effort, the same problem remains: the people who need these services most often aren’t seeing the information.
New sites, service locators, social calendars. The effort is genuine — and the frustration is genuine too, because enrollment windows still close with seats unfilled, recertification deadlines still lapse, and the people who most need to see a message are the least likely to have seen it.
It isn't about content quality or posting frequency. Ninety-one percent of American adults now own a smartphone, but among households earning under $30,000 a year, nearly half (46%) lack home broadband, and roughly four in ten lack a desktop or laptop computer. Most striking: one in three adults in the lowest-income households is “smartphone dependent” — they own a smartphone but have no home broadband at all. And that dependency has doubled nationally since 2013.
Now look at where the sector invests in communication: websites designed for browsing and social platforms where algorithms, not agencies, decide who sees a message and when. Research shows recommendation algorithms drive an estimated 75% to 95% of content consumption on major platforms. In other words, posting something doesn't mean your followers, or the people who need the information, will actually see it.
The numbers behind organic reach tell a similar story. Facebook's average organic reach rate is just 0.42%. And posts that send people away from social platforms to an external website can face an even steeper penalty: one analysis of 15,000 social media profiles found that posts linking to external websites saw a 219.49% decline in reach.
These channels aren’t bad, but they assume reliable internet access and consistent online habits that many community members don’t have. More importantly, they leave agencies with limited control over whether critical information is actually delivered. They work well for funders, partners, and volunteers, but they weren’t built for the family trying to find out about a LIHEAP program before funding runs out.
Community Action Agencies Know They Need to Meet People Where They Are
What struck us most in St. Louis is that community action has already diagnosed the problem in an improvised form. We met agencies printing QR codes on outreach workers' business cards. Agencies whose intake staff text families from personal phones because it's the only thing that gets a reply. Agencies whose sites ask, almost verbatim, “Don't know where to start?” — an honest admission that reaching people is the hard part.
Those improvisations are the tell. The instinct is exactly right: meet people on the device that is actually in their hands. What's missing isn't insight; it's infrastructure that treats the phone as the front door rather than the fallback.
Every program in this network shares one operational shape: deadlines, documents, appointments, recertifications. Every missed message is a missed benefit for a family and unspent funding for an agency. So, the question is simple:
If nearly everyone you serve carries a smartphone, and one in three low-income adults relies on that phone as their only connection to the internet, why is the website still at the center of your communication strategy?
Community Action Agencies already use needs assessments and ROMA to follow the evidence and adapt their approach. The evidence on communication is pointing somewhere specific: to the phone, not the browser.
That’s the thinking behind Patter COMPASS: a mobile-first way for Community Action Agencies to put programs, resources, deadlines, and other critical information where people are already looking.
The question isn’t whether people are online. It’s whether they can find what they need when it matters.
Sources: Pew Research Center, National Public Opinion Reference Survey (Feb–June 2025, published Jan 2026); Pew Research Center digital divide research, 2021–2024.