06/15/2022

The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association Recipe for Success

Community-building measures have helped them increase their donors

The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association (MCFA) knew that in order to extend its reach, it had to extend its community. In the past five years, it has made concerted efforts to reach new audiences, and it’s paying off—the association increased the number of individual donors from about 50 to nearly 600.

One of those outreach efforts is particularly appetizing: a cookbook. While Catch: A Maine Seafood Cookbook helps raise money, its true purpose is to drive a deeper connection between the association’s base and the public that reaps the benefits of a strong fishing culture.

“A vibrant fishing community takes a lot more than just having good, smart, innovative fishermen; it takes the community buying into it,” said Ben Martens, MCFA’s executive director, which is what the cookbook—and the group’s other community-building initiatives—aims to do. “As we were growing as an organization, we knew the next step was to bring the broader community around the fishermen into our work.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.