Reader, do you feel like attendance at your coalition meetings is dwindling, or that everyone’s logging onto Zoom but multitasking during the meeting? Or maybe folks are showing up and engaged, but it feels like pulling teeth to get anyone to provide input or take action between meetings?
If you’re having troubling engaging coalition members, there’s likely one thing you’re missing. SPECIFICITY.
Specificity shows up in a number of different ways in coalition work. Here are some ways to get more specific:
✅Make sure your members each have a clear, specific role: Collaboration doesn’t mean everyone does everything. You’re going to have trouble both getting and keeping a member in your coalition if they don’t see a clear role for themselves. People’s time is limited and valuable, and coalition membership is often on a volunteer basis, something taken on in addition to a person’s day-to-day job responsibilities. If they feel that their absence from the coalition isn’t going to have an impact, they will not care to join or stay. When you ask someone to join the coalition, make sure you talk together to specify their exact value-add and responsibilities, and why they are uniquely suited for it.
✅Make sure your coalition has a clear, specific role: If your members aren’t clear on what value the coalition is adding to your community, they aren’t going to be engaged. You can’t (effectively) be everything to everyone, so niche down, both in terms of what your coalition is offering to your community and who within your community you’re aiming to reach. As we often hear in the consulting world, there are “riches in the niches.” When you “niche down” and narrow both your offer and your audience, your value as a coalition becomes crystal clear. And that’s going to keep your members excited and engaged.
✅Foster specific collaborations for specific purposes: A leader of a coalition we work with recently reached out to me for some advice on how to better engage their health system partners, who had stopped showing up to meetings and contributing their ideas. I suggested they consider if there are specific healthcare/community organization collaborations that can be designed and implemented via the coalition - if we ask X healthcare system to work with Y community organization to partner on Z activity (that's mutually beneficial to both organizations), then they have a reason to show up and stay engaged. If we're not taking action, there's no reason for them to show up. If we're taking action but it's very broad and vague (i.e., "we want to strengthen collaboration between healthcare and community organizations"), they don't really see why they/their health system SPECIFICALLY matters or needs to show up.
✅Get specific about what capacity and connections you’re building for coalition members and in the community more broadly: What do coalition members gain from participating in the coalition? Are you going to offer ways for them to build their capacity in a particular area like evaluation? Coalitions often serve as a connector and convener, both for coalition members and the community writ large - but exactly what kinds of connections are you building and to what end? Are you going to offer ways for policy and advocacy organizations to connect with community members to inform their priorities?
What do you think, Reader? How else can we get specific in what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for? Drop me a line and let me know!
Until next time,
Vinu
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PPS Want to learn more about PoP Health and how we partner with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in communities through policy and systems change? Check out our website!
