Maximize your Coalition’s Efforts
Coalitions. They can be a force to be reckoned with, or they can be just a list of organizations on a webpage. Below are three tips for helping ensure any coalition your organization is involved with is more the former than the latter.
1) Be clear about the purpose of the coalition, and make sure that drives how you participate.
Ideally, coalitions form to maximize efforts, amplify successes and leverage resources so organizations can become stronger together around shared goals. Successful coalitions stay focused on shared goals and the best ways to work together to reach them. If Organizations A and B have a shared legislative goal, and Organization A has a treasure trove of policy research to back up the legislative case while Organization B brings a powerful grassroots capacity to the table, it’s clear where the synergies are and the coalition should be the platform to marry solid policy research with messages to mobilize grassroots activists.
I’m guessing we’re not the only ones who have have been in coalition meetings where the main agenda item was the order and size of the logos on the website and whether the materials should refer to “people” or “persons”. In our experience, coalitions focused on form over function rarely succeed.
2) Don’t just meet.
Meetings and conference calls are means to ends. The ends are actions that bring the coalition, and its member organizations, closer to the coalition’s goals. Meetings can be productive and important for fostering relationships, information sharing, and planning, but they should always result in to-do lists filled with next steps to move the ball forward.
The secret to a successful meeting is to make sure everyone who attended leaves with at least one thing to DO when they get back to their office. The best to-dos are things like, “Organization X has a relationship with Senator Y, so we will call her office,” or, “Organization A has 4,000 members in that state, so we will send a mobilization email to call Senator Y’s office.”
3) Structure to Take Advantage of Important Competencies
Research has demonstrated that smaller groups are better at solving problems and completing tasks, while larger groups might be better at brainstorming. Put the research to work in your coalition: structure so that you have smaller groups of individuals working together to resolve conflicts or taking responsibility for specific action items, and reserve large group communications for brainstorming and reporting.
So, if you’ve got 5 organizations with political advocacy capacity, 3 organizations with policy research capacity, and 2 more with stellar media relations capacity, you’ve got the perfect set up for 3 “Task Forces,” each can take the lead on the area of expertise the members bring to the table.
Structuring to take advantage of organizational strengths not only allows your coalition to organize more effectively, but it helps include everyone and surface the real rock stars – those individuals and organizations who always deliver.
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Successful coalitions are always focused on the end result: achieving the goal that brought the coalition together in the first place. They have individual members who help remind the others of this larger vision any time it looks like something small is about to derail the coalition’s activities. They are made up of organizations who understand that giving up a small level of control and sharing credit is a reasonable price if it means the goal will be met. And, it is comprised of individuals who understand that victory is all the sweeter when it can be shared with friends.
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For more: we’ve worked with a wide variety of coalitions and have developed materials we’ve used to train coalition leaders. You can download them here (both are PDF files):
The most successful coalition I ever participated in was the Title IX Coalition that brought the Bush Administration to its knees when it tried to dismantle women and girls’ rights to participate equally in sports. It was perhaps the only 100% victory for the progressive side during the Bush years. I’ve often thought about why that coalition was so successful and others fail so miserably. (The Title IX Coalition was written up in a Packard study of best practices in communications.) This may not be a PC thing to say, but I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that everyone, with a few exceptions, was female. I don’t recall anyone bringing ego into the room. Everyone was genuinely there to help other women and girls keep their educational opportunities. The other thing, as this article suggests, was that each organization brought a unique skill to the table. For example, the National Women’s Law Center brought legal and policy expertise. AAUW had a great field operation. And the Women’s Sports Foundation provided excellent leadership, as well as special skills such as access to celebrities for Hill events like Geena Davis and Holly Hunter. As this article suggests, everyone in the coalition readily deferred to the special skills of everyone else. There was incredible respect and no backstabbing. I don’t know how you create that if the people don’t feel it themselves.