What is Community Organizing

Recipe For Success: Reaching Decision Makers with the Right People

May 2004

One of the most important ingredients to a successful policy initiative is to be well organized and that requires a group to know the community in which they live! This may seem obvious to some of you, but often persons involved in health promotion are apolitical and know little or nothing about their local decision makers. Of course, it is not necessary to know decision makers to win a campaign, but it is necessary to have allies who do know decision makers. Otherwise, your policy initiative is doomed to go nowhere fast!

The key to success in a campaign is having allies, people on your side who may not be an active part of your core group, but who have connections to local decision makers. These allies are called Key Opinion Leaders. In other words, they are the people who have access to and influence with the people you need for a policy victory. Key opinion leaders can be business leaders, teachers, farmers, reporters, union leaders, clergy, personal friends of elected officials, academics and social service or non-profit directors. Actually, the list could go on and after reading this it might be helpful to try to write your own list of key opinion leaders in your community.

Once you have a list of key opinion leaders and a specific policy objective in mind (what you want to ask for), then it's time to begin approaching them. How? Well, first you write out beside each name of a key opinion leader the name of a person who may know that person. You also find out who on your coalition knows the key opinion leader and then you set up face-to-face meetings and ask them for help. If you don't have personal access to the key opinion leader, it may be necessary to take additional time to cultivate a relationship so that they begin to respond more readily to your requests for meetings. It will also be necessary to be prepared for these meetings by knowing something about the key opinion leader before you meet (their background, affiliations, interests, personal style, etc.).

After you've made a connection and know a little about them, then you seek to make connections between their interests and yours. You do this by briefly introducing yourself and your concern and then asking open-ended questions. Most importantly, you listen! You listen to their concerns and then adjust your requests based on the information you're gathering in the meeting. Talk, Listen and Adjust, this is a handy tool to keep in mind for every meeting with someone you need to help you get what you want.

Finally, you must not expect an immediate “conversion” to your perspective. Don't try to force people to get involved in your campaign! You are looking for allies who are motivated, not unenthusiastic draftees. Have a range of things you ask them for, find as much common ground as possible and then try to establish a relationship that will bare fruit eventually, if not immediately. Again, Talk, Listen and Adjust! This is the key to becoming connected to influential people in your community and ultimately to policy victories.