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Section Four
Growing the Coalition

"Please remove my name from your membership list.
I refuse to belong to any club that would have me as a member."
Groucho Marx

Overview of Section

For the coalition to grow and develop, a number of things need to happen. Initially, it must begin to show itself to the community as a force that is to be taken seriously. It must begin a marketing campaign that establishes its presence and its importance. In addition, it needs to identify potential members and recruit them as an essential resource for coalition growth and success. Finally, it must develop an ability to build additional capacity in both its members and in the coalition as a whole.

D. Survey and Interview Results

Some Notes From A Descriptive Study of Asthma Coalitions, Spring 2000.

Coalitions do most of their recruitment by word of mouth and through networking.
Most coalitions do not believe that conducting recruitment just to add more members is a useful activity.
There is a strong relationship between retaining members and having something useful for them to do.
Coalitions have learned to make the cost of membership commensurate with the advantage to the member. Once it exceeds the value of membership, members are lost.

Some Comments From Coalitions on Marketing

Not many comments were made about marketing. Here one coalition discussed the use of a marketing firm.

All of our materials and things are approved by the coalition. Our marketing campaign—we had a marketing campaign last year. And that was approved as much as it could be. We had a rather aggressive marketing firm that let us get out the exact message that we wanted to.

Another coalition had funds for a marketing campaign.

For the wider community, last year, the hospital put up $150,000 in a marketing campaign for the community. The basic message was that asthma can be controlled, if your child is having symptoms two times a week. That was for the wider community. We also perform health fairs. Some members of our coalition are more active than others, of course, in health fairs and local schools.

Some Comments From Coalitions on Recruiting

One coalition commented on recruitment and the time members put into the work of the coalition.

One of the lessons I learned from other organizations especially in coalition building, if you can some how hang in there, that the need is so great, and you welcome new people that you keep finding out about people you wished you had known about from day one. They keep emerging and that happens at least every month or two. The bad news is that we are held together by a shoestring and we don’t have any paid staff to speak of. That has been an enormous problem. Part of what we are applying for now is to get paid staff. Nobody has stepped up to the plate. In effect, from these different organizations, they have donated their peoples’ time, but mostly they are not working as secretarial or managerial staff, they are working as planners of particular components and donating their time that way. We don’t have that infrastructure as yet and we need it desperately.

Another coalition used a summit meeting to increase its recruitment activities.

We saw asthma as a major problem in the state. We looked around and didn’t see that much going on in relationship to dealing with the problems. We basically put a call out to all the people throughout the state, which we either knew of or through referrals, which were either experts in the field of asthma or have a significant interest in asthma and improving the situation. We got that group together to do a series of conference calls to identify what we thought needed to be done. What came out of that was a year long process of creating an asthma summit-- where we would not only have this group of 30 or so people but would go out deeper into the community to try to interest and rustle up a lot of people who are connected to asthma care management, education, etc. That was the impatience to get things going and we just had our summit not that long ago. We were pleasantly surprised at the numbers; for the most part, I was hoping that we were lucky if we got 100 people. The committee, of course, continued to tell me that I was wrong and that a lot more would show up. We had over 200 people show up.

Survey Comment Snapshots

"Our recruitment has suffered because of lack of sufficient funding. Not having sufficient dollars to do things keeps people from getting fully involved."

"Our policy is to recruit as many as possible. We have decided that we would deal with the problem if we end up with too many people, rather than having too few. So far it has worked."

"We get enough people but not always with the skills we need. Recruiting is necessary but we have specific jobs to be done and open-ended recruitment does not get that done."

"We need to provide leadership training for the members of the coalition who are going to lead committees."

"We do a good job with what we have but doing any kind of education or training is a real challenge."

The Essential Points

From its inception, a coalition must present itself to its public as an organization that has something of value to offer the community.
The recruitment of organizations and individuals into the coalition is an ongoing function determined by the varying needs of the coalition at the different phases of its development.
Not every organization or every individual makes a desirable candidate for coalition membership. The traits that make an individual or organization effective operating separately are not always the traits that are useful for a coalition.
Capacity building in a coalition implies a willingness to explore all its current capacities and to determine what is lacking so that it can achieve all its goals.
The capability of the partners and members to contribute special resources and skills to the total enterprise is the type of capacity building that makes a coalition an efficient instrument for achieving worthwhile goals.