Goals, Action, and Leadership for Coalition Success

Coalitions can be a force to be reckoned with – raising the profile of an issue agenda, expanding the reach of messaging and mobilization, and lending gravitas to a set of policy asks. They can also be unwieldy and difficult to manage toward anything more than regular meetings.

Over the years, much of our work has been helping coalitions work more effectively. We’ve developed some tools and best practices to help them function more productively, and deliver on their potential for impact beyond taking up time on members’ calendars. See links at the bottom of this week’s Three Things for more resources, including a two-pager on coalition building blocks, a worksheet for coalition leaders to use to guide discussion and planning, and links for further reading.

In our experience, the three most important elements of effective coalition campaigns for political or policy change can be summarized into these three things:

1) Clear, well-understood, and focused goals.
Ideally, coalitions form to maximize efforts, amplify successes and leverage resources so organizations can become stronger together around shared goals. Successful coalitions stay focused on shared goals and the best ways to work together to reach them.

We’re aware that we’ve been a tad repetitive on the need for clarity about goals (i.e. here, here, and  here). In our experience with coalitions smart decision-making, coordinated action, and productive evaluation is frequently hampered by insufficient attention to articulating and winning consensus on specific goals. The challenge is particularly acute for goal-setting below the highest level of abstraction. There’s consensus and understanding that you’ve come together to influence policy on infrastructure spending, feed the hungry, increase access to health care, direct philanthropy to local charities that need it most, etc. But what are the goals between here and there? Is your first next step building a constituency of local leaders, or is it establishing a stronger toe-hold on the Hill? Is your immediate set of goals to influence the process particular bill or set of bills, or to focus on building a grassroots constituency in preparation for legislation you’ll hope to influence down the road?

Since resources are finite, articulating out loud what we already know – getting from where we are to where we want to be requires a bunch of steps, and we can’t take them all at once – and setting out clear goals for the journey can make all the difference.

A recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article on models for “collective impact” named the need for clarity on goals “common agenda,” noting:

Take a close look at any group of funders and nonprofits that believe they are working on the same social issue, and you quickly find that it is often not the same issue at all. Each organization often has a slightly different definition of the problem and the ultimate goal. These differences are easily ignored when organizations work independently on isolated initiatives, yet these differences splinter the efforts and undermine the impact of the field as a whole. Collective impact requires that these differences be discussed and resolved. Every participant need not agree with every other participant on all dimensions of the problem. In fact, disagreements continue to divide participants in all of our examples of collective impact. All participants must agree, however, on the primary goals for the collective impact initiative as a whole.

2) Structure that facilitates action.
Research has demonstrated that smaller groups are better at solving problems and completing tasks, while larger groups might be better at brainstorming. Put the research to work in your coalition: structure so that you have smaller groups of individuals working together to resolve conflicts or taking responsibility for specific action items, and reserve large group communications for brainstorming and reporting.

Structuring to take advantage of organizational strengths not only allows your coalition to organize more effectively, but it helps include everyone and surface the real rock stars – those individuals and organizations who always deliver.

Again quoting from the Stanfard Social Innovation Review article (a favorite of ours right now), in which the authors discuss this point as “mutually reinforcing activities”:

The power of collective action comes not from the sheer number of participants or the uniformity of their efforts, but from the coordination of their differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action. Each stakeholder’s efforts must fit into an overarching plan if their combined efforts are to succeed. The multiple causes of social problems, and the components of their solutions, are interdependent. They cannot be addressed by uncoordinated actions among isolated organizations.

3) Clear leadership roles and rules for decision-making.

Does the coalition fund a staff that makes decisions with board guidance, or does the coalition operate on the time and energy devoted from partners? How will short-term and longer-term decisions about resources, messaging, and strategies be made. Too often in our experience, lack of clarity on leadership and decision-making functions in coalitions of all sizes and forms has led to a focus on form over function, and on meetings over coordinated action.

More Resources:
Coalitions Two-Pager
Coalitions Worksheet
Stanford Social Innovation Review article – Collective Impact