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Tips on Working With Partners To Conduct Outreach
- Seek out these partners early in the process and stay in touch. Try to identify a long-term liaison on both sides of the relationship.
- Treat the staff with respect. Their response to you will determine how they portray you to their constituents.
- Provide key staff, community leaders, or volunteers with a basic orientation to your project to make sure they convey your message accurately and to the right people.
- Answer their questions and address their concerns as fully as possible. You may find that some staff are very surprised by the content of your report. For example, a hospital they thought was excellent may be in the bottom quarter of the distribution. You need to engage on this issue, not ignore it. You want your outreach partners to reinforce the accuracy and relevance of your report, not undermine it. They may not be completely convinced about your rating of a given facility, but they will at least believe that you are not trying to undermine the facility in your report.
- Ask the staff for advice on the best ways to promote your report to their constituency; let them know when and how you use it.
- Once you have your partners' input, develop promotional text and specific materials they can adapt for their constituency. Don't put the burden on them to figure out what to say about your report. (Refer to example below.)
- Ask them for feedback about how people they touch are responding to your report and to your promotional efforts.
- Remember that many of these groups have little in the way of financial resources, although they have priceless assets for your efforts. Find out how you can help them, either in ways related to comparative quality reporting or in other ways.
- Offer to reciprocate by sharing information they want to get out, especially with the more powerful members of your core partnership with whom they may not have existing relationships.
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