Faye L. Wong on "Community Partners"

I think community partnerships are very essential in social marketing campaigns. For one thing, in the social marketing campaign you’re trying to make community-wide and population-based changes, and the success of the campaign itself in terms of the advertising and the public relations, for example, is not enough if you don’t get buy-in by community and community groups. So where it may be or it may seem like a painful process and a long process, it pays off in the end.

I think that when planning partnerships ideally, they should be planned strategically. The reality is that probably 95% of the time it doesn’t happen that way. So in the ideal mode, strategically you would know exactly what it is that you want to accomplish with partnerships. You would then use that to drive who and what kinds of partners will help you to deliver on the goal that you’re trying to reach, and know enough about those groups to be able to say what is it that I want them to do. And then implement a plan to bring these people on board and to work with them. The reality is that oftentimes, especially with a new campaign, you yourself are still evolving what you’re all about at the same time, you want to bring partners on board to work with you. And, in that case, I would say it’s a matter of taking the best guess and bringing the right people on board that make it a goal to clarify mutual goals and objectives as you move along and not leave people in a fog for too long.

Partnerships, I think, need to be flexible, so as the campaign moves along and you have a change in the focus of your goals and objectives, I think it’s important to communicate it to the existing partners that you have and to see how they fit into those revised goals and objectives. It may be very well that they are right in line with you and can move forward with you; it could also be that others are saying, “jeez, that’s just not what I’m about and not what I’m interested in, so, thank you very much. It’s been fun to be part of the game, and good look.” And that gives you an opportunity to offer it to other people to work with you.

…with the VERB campaign, we’re trying to get a message out there that kids, in particular tweens, 9 to 13 years old, should be physically active and enjoy doing that and have had fun doing that. The campaign has sparked a level of interest across the country where there’s lots of people knocking on all doors to be a part of the campaign. So that’s where you have the challenge is reversed. You basically have to evaluate the people coming to your door to see if they fit in terms of what you need to move forward.

I think that there’s a role for everybody to help a campaign move ahead. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to do the same thing. So there are some partners that might do something as little as making that one critical phone call so that you make a connection to the people you need to reach. It could be for some other people as simple as distributing brochures for you. And on the other end, it could be that there’s organization that wants to donate $100,000 to your cause and develop a parallel program within their organization. So my personal feeling is that in the majority of cases, there’s a role for every partner. It’s a matter of finding out what is appropriate for their role and getting into alignment.

I think that there’s a multitude of roles for partners, and I think it’s a reflecting of the campaign itself. So, for example, with the National Diabetes Education program which I worked with a few days ago, it was a very inexpensively-funded program -- if I could say that -- and so what we did is we formed work groups. We had an Asian work group, Hispanic work group, African-American work group, and American Indian work group. And these work group members helped us in a number of ways. They were instrumental in helping us to define the audience because we didn’t have money to go out and do original formative research. They were instrumental in helping us to critique the original concepts that came forth for television ads and print ads by letting us know when the creative agencies put out something that was culturally inappropriate, for example. They were also instrumental in helping the campaign to do focus group testing with the audiences because, again, we did not always have money to go out and do focus group testing of concepts and of messaging before final production occurred. So they’ll go back to their own clinics, gather a group of people who had, people with diabetes, that met the criteria and presented code of concepts them and presented brochures to them and got their feedback on what they thought of them, what they understood about them, and so on. So on an informal level, they were instrumental in helping to shape the direction and the products and messaging of the campaign. And once these products were available, they were instrumental in helping to disseminate them. And I think the best example of that is with the American Indian population where it’s very hard for the rest of us to find entry points into American Indian communities; and so an American Indian work group took it on themselves to be the ones to actually market the campaign products for American Indians, to speak at American Indian conferences, and to work with tribal leaders to basically highlight what the campaign had to offer in terms of educational materials for American Indian populations.

I think it’s quite feasible and probably quite common for community partnerships to be less success than desired or to even fail, and the usual reason is because they have no agreement on common goals, common objectives. There is no clarity usually on who does what, and oftentimes there was inadequate communication between the parties that needed to be involved so that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, or because of poor communication there wasn’t sufficient inclusion in decision-making. So when community partnerships begin to fall apart, it’s usually for those kinds of reasons.

They are absolutely retrievable, but it depends on a number of things, such as timing. Did the bad partnership go on for too long to be retrievable? It depends on I think some honesty and frankness and sincerity in communicating between the parties about what went wrong, how can we mutually contribute to fixing it and moving forward. And without those kinds of commitments and, and efforts to resolve the problem, it can’t move forward. And that usually means each party needs to admit they had some contribution to the problem, and that they also each have an opportunity to make it better.

Well, it’s people relationships. You know, with community partnerships that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people. People have -- people that come to the table as partners -- everybody has their own agenda. They don’t come to the table to serve your needs alone. They have their own needs and they have their own egos. They have their own wishes for recognition as well, and so all partnerships have to be win-win. It’s not a partnership that they come to the table to win for you. I mean, that would be a sheer formula for failure.

I think that if you’re in the community and you’re trying to start a partnership, as I said earlier, the first thing is to know what it is that you want and then beginning making phone calls to people you know, sharing what it is that you’re to do, and asking them who they know in the community who would be really good in helping you as part of your campaign efforts. And oftentimes those kinds of conversations will lead to people who know people and usually it wouldn’t take long before you have around the table a handful of some of the most gifted people and community partners that you could find. But it starts with asking questions. I don’t think anybody expects to know exactly the right people when they start off, so asking questions, pursuing leads and suggestions is what I would recommend.

…probably my last suggestion would be I think it’s really very important to acknowledge people. That goes everywhere from a thank you to official recognition in some way by a letter signed by your agency director, or it can even include some token that says, “Thank you for participating in campaign XYZ,” and it could include in some situations a party for people to recognize publicly with plaques and certificates and things like that. But recognition is enormously important, and it doesn’t have to cost much.