Continuous communication with your partners will help you leverage their collective power to share your message in diverse sectors. At the center of your circles of stakeholders are your core leadership team and partnership members. These are the people with whom you will communicate most regularly. When striving to keep your partners informed and engaged, you’ll want to consider what you will share and how you will share it.
What you share should include:
- Regular operations of your partnership including meetings and activities
- What are the expectations for communicating meeting decisions, action, and assignments to partners who miss meetings?
- Will you have a formal recording process such as minutes?
- Procedures for recruiting new members and strategies to keep current members excited and engaged
- Updates on progress toward goals and objectives
- Procedures for following up on action items
- Reporting outcomes and developing next steps
How to best share information among your partners requires setting clear communication expectations. The following how questions are good places to begin:
- How do they want to stay informed about the partnership’s work?
- How will they communicate information between the partnership and their organization?
- How can you facilitate your partners’ sharing information with others?
A few tips:
- There are many strategies and tools you can use to communicate with your closest partners. You can use web-based tools, such as Google Groups, to keep communication flowing among and within your networks. Social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may also be a useful way to keep people connected and informed.
- Providing talking points or template language that your partners can share can help them share your messages.
- You can also use newsletters and websites to communicate with both your coalition members and other key stakeholders.