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Strategic Planning - Strategic planning will help you create a bold vision for the future, strengthen new partnerships, forge creative and innovative linkages between stakeholders, and ultimately better address the needs of older adults in your community. A community-wide strategic planning process will benefit from the wisdom of a diverse array of participants and ensure greater likelihood of success.
Inclusion & Diversity - Including older adults and caregivers is crucial to growing and sustaining successful community partnerships. It is especially important to seek participation from traditionally excluded groups such as those defined by race and ethnicity, low income, lack of English language proficiency, and sexual orientation. While many factors can challenge a partnership’s efforts to embrace diversity and build productive relationships, receiving input from a broad array of community members helps to ensure equality in decision making and leads to long term care and supportive services that are more responsive to a community’s diverse needs.
Fiscal Strategies - Developing a fiscal strategy is an important and challenging part of improving the system of long term care and supportive services for older adults in your community. The array of funding options requires that community partnerships be strategic in their aims. This area of the Resource Center reviews relevant funding sources and provides resources to help you make the most of them.
Communications - Have you ever thought about how many times a day someone tries to influence you to think a certain way, to buy a certain product, to support a cause or to change your behavior? These days there are so many ways to reach you—from cell phones and Palm Pilots to instant messaging, cable TV and customized publications—that a reasonable reaction is to simply tune everything out. It’s a world of sound and fury.
Getting Organized
Your Audiences
Crafting Messages
Developing Products
Finding Resources
Are You Succeeding?
Evaluation - While the success of a community partnership may seem self-evident, a systematic evaluation holds members to a higher standard, revealing more than what we see with the naked eye. This section offers an introduction to evaluation. It covers the basic principles of evaluation design and implementation, as well as some topics likely to be important for community partnerships working to improve long term care and supportive services.
Partnership Evolution - A partnership generally consists of multiple organizations and individuals working together under a common vision. Who will be in the partnership varies from community to community, yet the purpose is universal: to create a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to sustain results that are not possible alone.
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Communications

Welcome to Strategic Communications!

Have you ever thought about how many times a day someone tries to influence you to think a certain way, to buy a certain product, to support a cause or to change your behavior? These days there are so many ways to reach you—from cell phones and handheld computers to instant messaging, cable TV and customized publications—that a reasonable reaction is to simply tune everything out. It’s a world of sound and fury.

As your partnership works to change the way people approachThe very best communications efforts involve the following: objectivesmeasuring the effectivenessresourcesdeveloping productscrafting messagesyour audienceobjectiveslong term care for older adults, you’re entering this same world. You know your goals are worthwhile. And yet it can be daunting to get the people who matter most to pay attention to what you have to say. Take heart. By employing some strategic communications strategies and planning processes, you can cut through this information overload to achieve your goals.

Learning to use communications strategically will be the foundation for your success. It is the method by which you will persuade people to embrace your partnership’s vision of long term care. It is the tool for bringing together diverse parts of the community and holding them to a common goal.

Strategic communications is not for the faint-hearted. You must be willing to abandon your reliance on traditional forms of media and vehicles. Embrace the concept of audience-focused communications, and have fun as you develop new ways of motivating those audiences that are critical to your success.

Without Communications, Your Partnership is Merely a Good Idea.

Partnerships offer a unique set of communications opportunities and challenges. A partnership operates as its own orga Visit the Glossary for helpful definitions.nization—an entity separate from, yet part of, its member organizations. Communications can provide a framework for addressing divergent views on goals and strategies, as well as putting into words the shared values that bring—and keep—a partnership together.

We often think of communications mainly as a way to accomplish goals by reaching out to external audiences. Equally important are the internal audiences, where communications can help to claHow To Beginrify where you are, where you are headed—and why—and whether you are on the right track. Because partnerships involve a number of member organizations, your internal audiences are multiplied greatly.

The communications resources presented here are designed to bring success to your partnership. The tips and techniques apply equally well to your partnership’s member organizations, each of which can benefit from adopting strategic communications practices.

Good communications involves a two-way exchange. You are working to persuade someone, but you are also listening and adjusting your messages based on what you are hearing. And all effective communications begin with the audience, not you.






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