Other organizations and allies who support your
mission, goal or objective.
Coalitions come with their share of challenges.
However, they also offer the benefits of shared
resources, expanded reach and a louder voice.
Think through these points as you evaluate
whether a coalition is right for your campaign:
- What are the likely advantages of partnering with another organization?
Possible advantages include: additional resources; training opportunities;
enhanced capacity; wider audience for your message; more open doors; more
thoroughly vetted work; new funding opportunities; and diminished likelihood of
duplicated effort.
- What are the likely disadvantages? turf wars; mismatched
risk tolerance; disparate views on key concepts like goal, strategy or theme;
competing priorities; diluted goals; and wasted resources.
- Are you willing to subject your process of
goal-vetting and strategy creation to members
of the coalition?
- Is it possible to structure the partnership
to maximize the coalition's efficiency and
minimize turf wars?
- Think about what the other people in the coalition
want and need. What are their assumptions?
What are their must-have results from this
campaign? Will you need to give up anything
or compromise with them so that everyone gets
what they want out of the coalition?
- Can you develop a system for working with
the coalition to revisit the goals, strategy or
theme throughout the life of the campaign in
order to manage disagreements and turf wars
and keep the campaign moving forward?
Best Practices
- From the onset, communicate—consistently
and frequently—your understanding of the
campaign's goal, strategy and theme, as well
as who the targets of your work will be.
- Grow your coalition only as necessary to
accomplish your work. Involve members early
on to avoid re-opening settled discussions
with the introduction of new members.
- Assign responsibilities based on the strengths
of your coalition members, and maintain clear
and frequent lines of communication inside
the coalition. Consider investing in some
labor-saving tools to keep members connected
and on track.
- Collaboratively create coalition principles for
the members to ratify. These principles should
cover important coalition "sticking points"
like majority rule versus rule by consensus,
how new members are added, how any
shared funds are handled and how leaders
inside the coalition are identified.
- Consider building an internal set of benchmarks
that shows the way to success. Assign
progress reporting on these interim goals to a
member of the coalition.
Pitfalls
- Despite how attractive a 100-member coalition
may look on paper or to some funders, it
is more helpful to manage your coalition's size
relative to the tasks at hand and the different
actors needed to accomplish those tasks.
- Push groups to endorse your goal and strategy
from the beginning. Coalitions without a
strong sense of shared purpose will often
limp along and then splinter when the hard
work starts. With strong shared goals from the
beginning, you're ready for the heavy lifting
when the time comes.
- Check in with your coalition members to
make sure they feel they're getting adequate
information—not too much and not too
little—about the campaign's progress.
Consider doing an anonymous survey of your
coalition partners.
- Coalitions often lose vital time responding to
crises, unplanned events or new developments
around their issue. Determine an action plan
for rapid response, and make sure everyone
is aware of what will happen if they don't
respond in a timely fashion.
More Resources
Advocacy for Impact
http://www.gii-exchange.org/web/
This site gives insights from six bold advocacy campaigns
that structured and used coalitions to get results for their
work in global poverty reduction and health promotion.
Continuous Progress
http://www.continuousprogress.org
Continuous Progress provides evaluation tools for advocacy,
including guidance on coalition management and health
for funders and advocates.
Institute for Sustainable Communities: Coalition Resources
http://tools.iscvt.org/advocacy/empower_the_coalition/start
The institute offers a variety of tools for empowering,
managing and making the most of your coalition.