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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 Tools



Communications

Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organizations: Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Plan
This perennial favorite is a how-to primer for nonprofit communications. It provides a seven-step program for developing a communications plan, including proven techniques for fund-raising, advocacy, public education and public relations. It comes with a disk containing various worksheets, forms, surveys and self-assessment tools.
1 users
Reading Effectiveness Tool
This tool helps you identify the reading level of your intended audience and determine whether your material matches that level. Users fill out an online worksheet and then receive a reading-level score. This can be especially useful in making sure your material is appropriate for a target audience whose first language is not English, or for people with fewer than eight years of formal education.
1 users
Tools of Change
This Web site offers community-based social marketing tools, case studies, and a planning guide with a focus on health and the environment. Tools provide suggestions for motivating your audience to become involved with your cause and take personal action. To view tools on this site, scroll to the bottom of the page and choose an area of interest.
2 users
A Guide to Placing Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor
This Web site contains handy media tips and resources for nonprofits and government agencies.
1 users
Ready...Set...Create Messages!
What does our audience need to hear? What are they ready to hear? Are we assuming too much knowledge on their part? Are we using words or acronyms or concepts that are unfamiliar to them? Ready...Set...Create Messages! will help you think about your audiences and improve the messages you are crafting.
2 users


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Getting Organized

Example of a Communications Objective
Objectives are small, specific tasks that, step by step, lead to realizing a goal. Using an example objective, this tool shows how to identify the task at hand; your target audience; how to reach this audience; who’s responsible for following through; the deadline for completion; and how success will be measured.
15 users


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Your Audiences

Your (Short!) Organizational Description
How do you describe your partnership? Can you do it in less than 20 words? While many organizations use their mission statements to describe their work, it is important to develop a special 20-word description of your partnership that all the members use uniformly. This tool contains tips and ideas to generate an organizational description that is both memorable and accurate.
3 users
One-page Introduction to Your Partnership
A one-pager is like a business card that’s big enough to convey all the most important information about your partnership. It presents a unified, cohesive description of who you are and what you do. This tool covers the key elements of a one-pager and how to share it with your audiences.
2 users
How to Get a Reporter’s Attention
If you intend to use the media to reach your target audiences, it is well worth the time it takes to build relationships with reporters, editors and producers. This resource provides several easy, practical suggestions to cultivate your local media, including specific vehicles to use and a checklist to help you prepare news releases.
2 users
What Makes News
While decisions about what makes it onto the evening news may seem entirely random, there are formulas used by TV news producers and newspaper editors. This tool reveals the type of stories the media is looking for and tips to make your issue newsworthy.
0 users


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Crafting Messages

Reading Effectiveness Tool
This tool helps you identify the reading level of your intended audience and determine whether your material matches that level. Users fill out an online worksheet and then receive a reading-level score. This can be especially useful in making sure your material is appropriate for a target audience whose first language is not English, or for people with fewer than eight years of formal education.
1 users
Ready...Set...Create Messages!
What does our audience need to hear? What are they ready to hear? Are we assuming too much knowledge on their part? Are we using words or acronyms or concepts that are unfamiliar to them? Ready...Set...Create Messages! will help you think about your audiences and improve the messages you are crafting.
2 users


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Developing Products

A Guide to Placing Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor
This Web site contains handy media tips and resources for nonprofits and government agencies.
1 users


back to top

Finding Resources

   There are no resources for this section

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Are You Succeeding?

Tools of Change
This Web site offers community-based social marketing tools, case studies, and a planning guide with a focus on health and the environment. Tools provide suggestions for motivating your audience to become involved with your cause and take personal action. To view tools on this site, scroll to the bottom of the page and choose an area of interest.
2 users


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Stories

   There are no resources for this section

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General Resources

Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organizations: Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Plan
This perennial favorite is a how-to primer for nonprofit communications. It provides a seven-step program for developing a communications plan, including proven techniques for fund-raising, advocacy, public education and public relations. It comes with a disk containing various worksheets, forms, surveys and self-assessment tools.
1 users


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© 2007 Community Partnerships for Older Adults