HOW to tell a powerful story + tips to transport and activate your audience

I’ve been leaning on beach reads this summer (to be honest, I lean on them year-round) and have always loved being transported to new places through stories.

But let’s be real, it’s easy to transport a reader to a beautiful beach on vacation. It’s a lot harder to transport them into, say, the lives of families in rural America.

But even stories about the same place and same community can be quite different from one another.

As J.D. Vance hits the news cycle as the Republican vice presidential nominee, I’ve been thinking a lot about an alternative to his Hillbilly Elegy (a memoir about life in rural America, which I did not read) - namely, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (a novel about life in rural Appalachia, which I read and found deeply moving).

Hillbilly Elegy (although it received critical acclaim from many upon release) has been described as condescending and inauthentic. I suspect the reason for this is the nature of the stories the book tells. As one Appalachian Studies expert put it, “One of the most troubling things to me about the book is that it talks a lot about unemployment and poverty, domestic violence, the opioid crisis, but it never gives you context for why those things exist the way they do in Appalachia.”

In contrast, one journalist notes, “Kingsolver slyly weaves the history of her home into Demon’s harrowing tale. From the Whiskey Rebellion to the boom and bust of the tobacco and coal industries, she describes a community preyed on for decades as governments and companies extracted their resources. And then came the opioid crisis.”

If you haven’t read Demon Copperhead yet, pick it up now - it’ll show you the power of story in transporting us much better than I can. But you know me, I’m going to try anyway! Here are some tips, strategies, and resources for transporting and activating your audience via powerful storytelling.

Can you share some tips for effective storytelling?

Storyboard. I have loved Echo Rivera’s trainings around presentations (which are, after all, simply a story you’re telling!) and one thing she emphasizes is that Step 1 is storyboarding. You have to map out the flow of the story you’re telling from the get-go and make sure it’s going to leave the audience with the right takeaways. So don’t jump to writing, slide creation, or anything else until you’ve taken the time to storyboard.

Get personal. Here at PoP Health, we’ve been working on a project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on how to improve public health cancer prevention messaging and one of our key takeaways has been the need to get more personal. What does this look like? It’s not about dry facts or abstract concepts. Instead, think personal true stories from “people like me” that are accompanied by the faces of those people, embedding health information in TV shows, appealing to one’s identity (tapping into a shared identity of being a mom, encouraging kids to “be a helper” instead of “help others”).

Be relatable. Use words your audience would use. Use metaphors to help boil down complex concepts into something your audience can wrap their arms around. Keep it local.

Get visual. Drawings, photos, videos, GIFs, all can be helpful, especially when they feature real people, make your audience laugh, or convey a powerful message. Infographics and data visualization - when done well - are also great tools.

What are some specific strategies for effective storytelling?

Co-create stories and messages: You know who already knows the real stories that will resonate with your audience? The people who’ve lived those stories. Also known as your audience. Co-create stories and messages with them.

Interpret your data for your audience: Use a storytelling sentence. Don’t leave it to chance or someone else’s interpretation. Don't assume the numbers speak for themselves. It's your story - so, tell it! Along the same lines, take this great advice from Stephanie Evergreen and make your data dashboard a webpage. Why? Because then, you’ll be telling an actual story! And as Stephanie says, “That narrative is where you get nuance. Expansion. Explanation. Clarification.”

Tailor content: First, you need to tailor content to your audience (based on a wide range of factors that are too much to get into here - more to come on that in the future), to the channel you’re using (please don’t post your static flier content to Tik Tok or vice versa!), and to the current and local contexts. Also tailor content to the type of deliverable (Website? Report? Social media post? Podcast?) and tailor the deliverable you’re choosing to work for your particular goals and audience. Even within a single deliverable, try to make it modular, so you can easily toggle in and out “modules” for different audiences based on who needs X background information or who cares about Y data.

What are some resources to help me tell powerful stories?

Echo Rivera’s free 6 Gears of Creating Engaging Presentations training

Stephanie Evergreen’s “delightful, strategy shifting, and totally free ideas for your next data viz”

Potential Energy Coalition’s Talk Like a Human guide (I think their lessons on how to communicate climate change apply much, much more broadly!)

Here’s the thing, effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to transforming health in our communities. And there is no better way to do that than to tell stories. So embrace your identity as a storyteller and get REALLY good at it - the results will surprise you.

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Why people forget facts but remember stories - an intro to Effective Storytelling

Is your summer off to as hot and joyful a start as mine, Reader?

Our family spent the last week at an all-family violin camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, and it was a joy on so many levels (our girls did not want to come home!).

Being surrounded by music all week had me forgetting the heat (despite the lack of AC at camp) and remembering just how powerful art is and how every piece of art tells a story.

Have you heard the quote about how people forget facts but remember stories? That's definitely true but misses a key piece of the puzzle. People remember stories because they make them FEEL.

Which brings me to another quote, this from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I have always been moved by stories in all their forms - as an avid reader of novels, as a dancer, as a journalist through middle/high school and college, as a mom (and chief bedtime book reader).

I’ve written about the power of narrative and why we need to tell more stories before, so today I’m especially excited today to dive into the final phase of PoP Health’s CAPE process - Effective storytelling.

What do you mean by effective storytelling?

Coalitions and collaboratives working to transform health in their communities need to tell their stories - stories of their communities, their work, their process, their successes, their impact, and also their struggles and the barriers that prevent them from having more impact.

They need to tell their stories with and to community members; they need to recount their stories to policymakers and funders; they need to share their stories with partner organizations and agencies.

Effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to community health improvement. Elevating the voices of community and coalition members through these stories and synthesizing your experiences and learnings in ways that resonate with community members, policymakers, funders, and other key audiences are not easy tasks - but they are vital.

What are some ways to think about effective storytelling?

There are many storytelling frameworks to choose from, from the Hero’s Journey to the Freytag Pyramid to the Pixar Story Framework.

They all have helpful components and are worth exploring. What might be even more helpful as a starting point, though, are these two highly simplified models of storytelling:

Hook / Story / Close: This is pretty much just what it sounds like. You start with a powerful hook that captures your audience’s attention, tell a compelling story, and close with a call to action or an offer. Each component might be quite different based on your audience (what hooks a policymaker won’t hook a community member and what you want a funder to do is likely quite different than what you want a partner organization to do).

The Golden Circle: Simon Sinek’s idea of a Golden Circle, popularized via his 2009 TED Talk, captures how inspiring organizations and individuals think, act, and communicate: They start with explaining why (what’s the purpose, cause, or belief?), then how (how is the why brought to life?), and only then the what.

While we’ve been focusing on storytelling, it’s not just about the story! Who’s telling it, who’s hearing it, the channel through which they’re hearing it, how they respond, the broader context, misinformation - all of these things matter, and they can matter quite a lot. In a current project focused on strengthening cancer prevention communications, we’ve been using this communications framework to organize our findings, and I find it quite helpful:

Eight Essential Components of Communication:

1. Source: Who’s creating and sharing the message?

2. Message: What are they saying?

3. Channel: How is the message traveling between source and receiver?

4. Receiver: Who’s receiving the message from the source?

5. Feedback: What messages does the receiver send back to the source?

6. Environment: What’s the surrounding physical and psychological context where messages are being sent and received?

7. Context: What’s the broader setting and scene, and what supports/barriers does the receiver face in acting on the message?

8. Interference: What blocks or changes the source’s intended meaning of messages, including misinformation and disinformation?

What are some questions I should be asking myself about effective storytelling?

• How can we elevate and center the voices of community and coalition members in our stories, and who among them will our audiences most deeply connect with?

• How can we transport our audiences through story (given that narrative transportation reduces psychological barriers, serving as a powerful tool for persuasion) and tap into their self-concept/self-identity - their sense of who they are as a person (given that people engage with communications that deepen their sense of self and reject communications that counter their sense of self)?

• Where and how can we best reach our audiences?

• What supports or hinders our audience from acting on what we tell them, and how can we address these factors?

Sometimes, we’re so tired doing the work that we don’t take the time to tell our story - much less tell it well. But it’s a vital part of the process of transforming health in our communities.

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A Participatory Evaluation HOW TO: tips and tools for sensemaking, storytelling, and more

It was college reunion weekend at my alma mater (wahoowa!), and in addition to taking a few (literal) walks down memory lane, I thought a lot about feeling a sense of community and what magic combination of ingredients is needed to create that.

Shared experiences - especially those where you gain something of value and even more so those where you create something of value - are part of that secret sauce.

And participatory evaluation, when done well, checks all those boxes.

If you missed the last issue of Community Threads, be sure to check it out first, as it provides an overview of PoP Health’s participatory evaluation approach. With that approach in mind, today’s issue is diving into HOW we actually do participatory evaluation. Let's jump right in.

Can you share some tips for participatory evaluation?

Begin with the end goal in mind, and design your evaluation and learning process accordingly. What do community members, coalition members, and the evaluation and learning team most want to learn and why?

Consider how community members can co-own - and meaningfully benefit - from every stage of the evaluation and learning process, from initial brainstorming and planning through data collection and analysis through sensemaking and storytelling. How is each stage of the process structured to allow community members to drive or co-lead the process? How is each stage of the process designed to ensure community members walk away with new capacity, connections, resources, and supports?

Develop infrastructure for responsive feedback and continuous quality improvement. You’ve heard this tip before from me and I'm repeating it here because it can't be overstated and hardly anyone truly does it! Yes, a key goal of evaluation is to understand impact but an equally if not more important goal is to improve the work. It's vital to set up infrastructure (time, resources, systems) from the outset so you are flexible and nimble enough to implement course corrections and improvements in real time based on analysis of monitoring data.

Diversify and tailor your evaluation deliverables, and make them modular where possible. Here is a slide from PoP Health’s Evaluation 101 workshop that includes a range of possible deliverables through which to share evaluation results and stories (and there are many more beyond what's listed here).

Don’t limit yourself here, get creative! Data dashboards are all the rage these days, but I love Stephanie Evergreen’s take on them, especially for something community facing - make it a webpage instead. You can also tailor content to different audiences - we often do this via briefs/two-pagers, one for community members, one for policymakers, one for funders, and so on. They each care about different things. We have also had success with making our briefs modular - having “modules” (short sections of the brief) that can be toggled in or out of a brief depending on who needs X background information or who cares about Y data.

What are some specific strategies for participatory evaluation?

There are many, but here are a few I especially appreciate for the meaningful role community and coalition members play:

Community based system dynamics modeling: A key part of evaluation and learning in public health is understanding dynamic, complex, messy systems. In the case of our work on school mental health in DC, students, family members, teachers, school administrators, policymakers, and others may have completely different understandings of the school mental health system. So we engaged in what’s called Community Based System Dynamics, in partnership with the Social System Dynamics Lab – this process uses participatory group model building approaches to explore the system in question. We held modeling workshops with students, with caregivers, with teachers, and with our multisector Stakeholder Learning Community. During the workshops, groups huddled around large sheets of paper, discussing, writing things down, crossing things out, drawing arrows, and so on. They produced a series of causal loop diagrams, which I then synthesized and integrated into this version of our systems map. Much more on this in a prior PoP Health newsletter here.

Data placemats for collective sensemaking: Community members and coalition members have experiences, expertise, and perspectives that lead them to insights your evaluation team, program team, and funders are apt to miss entirely. So don't make the mistake of leaving them out of the conversation. I love using highly visual data placemats and data posters to bring coalition members and community members into the process of making sense of data and drawing insights - about what we've learned so far, how to continually improve the initiatives we work on, and what other information we need to gather moving forward. We’ve recently used data placemats (during a coalition-wide data sensemaking session) and data posters (during a community-wide symposium) to share initial data from evaluation of the BIRTH Plan with our community and coalition partners in Pittsburgh, pairing the visuals with discussion questions that help elicit their thoughts on what they take away from the data, their insights about how to improve the work, and what additional information they’d most like to see in the future.

Sharing personal narratives: Nothing is quite as powerful as a story in someone’s own voice. Capturing personal narratives of community members/program participants/those influenced by a policy is a vital participatory evaluation strategy. In addition to focus groups and interviews, there are many creative ways to do this, including video journals, audio diaries, photo voice, and more. I especially love this idea of a participatory video process focused on stories of significant change. Participants are given the chance to take part in a Participatory Video process at baseline; stories of Most Significant Change are collected via structured story circles at midline; each circle selects one story to record on video. A participatory analysis identifies themes and recommendations. Given consent, videos can be shared so stakeholders learn directly from participants’ stories.

Community collaboration strategies: The community collaboration strategies we have featured previously (i.e., focus groups in a box, data walks, and street stalls) can also all be used in the context of evaluation and learning.

What are some resources to help me engage in participatory evaluation?

I’d like to leave you with a few resources I’ve found especially practical and useful in terms of participatory evaluation. As always, drop me a note to share other helpful resources or tools you’ve come across!

• ​Participatory Evaluation: Theories + Methods for Remote Work(a guide I refer to regularly for meeting facilitation ideas, whether virtual or in-person!) from Evaluation + Learning Consulting

• ​Community-Driven Data and Evaluation Strategies to Transform Power and Place (hot off the presses from Build Healthy Places)

• ​Participatory Evaluation Toolkit from Health Nexus (which provides a great overview of 7+ specific techniques)

As always, we share these tips, strategies, and resources in the hopes that they help you understand HOW to engage in participatory evaluation.

Participatory evaluation is likely going to be messier, slower, and more expensive than more traditional evaluation approaches. But on the flip side… You’ll be driven by community. You’ll learn more. You’ll create greater and more sustained change in your community.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons in my book - what about for you?

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The 'P' in our CAPE: Participatory Evaluation - by the community + for the community

A recent book club discussion about the challenge of adult friendships in the present day has had me thinking a lot about the importance of a sense of community.

On that note, a portion of a recent conversation between two of my favorite thinkers, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and writer Anand Giridharadas, really struck me. Surgeon General Murthy shared that statistics show that people now are working more - “and parents are parenting more, even though they’re also working more.” He asks, “Where is that time coming from, that extra time? You put all this together and that time that is eroding is a time that we spend in person with family and friends, the time we spend for ourselves, and the time we spend for our communities.”

On the heels of a community event I helped plan, I’ve also specifically been thinking a lot about what it means to do something “by the community, for the community” (our event tagline).

What does all this have to do with the focus of today’s newsletter, participatory evaluation (aka the ‘P’ in PoP Health’s CAPE)? Let’s get into it!

What do you mean by participatory evaluation?

Simply put, participatory evaluation is monitoring, evaluation, and learning - by the community, for the community.

As more formally defined in this guide, “Participatory evaluation is not top-down or expert-led. It is a bottom-up framework that stimulates and utilizes the wealth of experiences and wisdom that participants have to create more meaningful, productive, and engaging discussions and debates.”

When it comes to the work of community coalitions and collaboratives, we want coalition members as well as community members integrally involved in every stage of monitoring, evaluation, and learning (or MEL, as it’s often called), to the point where they co-own the process, alongside their MEL team.

The idea that participatory evaluation encompasses monitoring, evaluation, and learning is key. Monitoring gets at the idea of continually examining whether things are implemented as planned, and applying what is learned to make improvements along the way. Evaluation gets at the ultimate question of “did it work”. And Learning underscores that the point of all of this is to learn together, and apply what we learn to make things better moving forward.

What are some ways to think about participatory evaluation?

As with action planning, there are hundreds of evaluation frameworks out there.

So instead of sharing or dissecting all of those, I’m going to share PoP Health’s approach to participatory evaluation + one evaluation framework specific to participatory evaluation that we have found helpful.

PoP Health’s Approach to Participatory Evaluation

Community-Driven and Co-Creative: Ensure participants share ownership of the evaluation process. Involve coalition and community members, centering and amplifying their voices in every stage of the process, from developing the plan, evaluation questions, and data collection approaches through interpretation and dissemination of results.

• Equity-Focused and Inclusive: Engage voices that have been historically excluded, emphasizing collective strengths, and maintaining a focus on upstream, root causes of health inequities. Build belonging and civic muscle through an evaluation process that helps participants develop their power to shape their world.

• Taking a Systems-Level Lens: Recognize the powerful role of policy, systems, and environmental change, and make every effort to capture and learn from the impact of changes at those levels. Ensure your evaluation process is also reflective of the dynamic behavior, complexity, and interconnectedness of systems.

• Value-Adding: Build upon ongoing activities and utilize the wealth of existing data and efforts, taking care not to waste time or resources reinventing the wheel. Identify where there is unique value to be added and focus evaluation efforts accordingly.

• Actionable: Generate relevant evidence and translate that evidence into key takeaways and concrete steps that can be taken to continually improve. Build upon assets and facilitators, address challenges, and proactively pursue transformative change that is guided by the experiences, stories, and voices of participants.

CoAct's Principles of Co-Evaluation

CoAct is focused on Citizen Social Science, which they define as follows:

Citizen Social Science combines equal collaboration between citizen groups (co-researchers) that are sharing a social concern and academic researchers. Such an approach enables [us] to address pressing social issues from the bottom up, embedded in their social contexts, with robust research methods. We aim to co-create socially robust knowledge.

They offer six principles of co-evaluation, each of which is further defined and paired with practical recommendations here.

What questions should I be asking myself about how we engage in participatory evaluation?

• What will coalition members and community members gain through the process? What new understanding, capacity, connections, resources, supports, etc. might they walk away with? ​

• How can we meaningfully co-own each stage of the monitoring, evaluation, and learning process with community members, while also being respectful of their time and other constraints?

• How can we make sure our continuous monitoring is part of a feedback loop that feeds directly into making concrete improvements?

• How do we best capture the impact that matters most to each of our audiences - community members, coalition members, policymakers, funders, and so on?

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HOW to get to action with your collaborative: tips and tools for brainstorming, prioritizing, and more

Is it just me, or are you feeling the Maycember vibes too?

In addition to counting down to the end of the school year and to summer, I know many nonprofits and coalitions are also nearing the end of their fiscal year, which means new grants and projects might be on the horizon - so it’s a great time to think about what effective action planning looks like.

If you missed the last issue of Community Threads, be sure to check it out first, as it provides an overview of PoP Health’s action planning framework. With that framework in mind, today’s issue is diving into HOW we can implement that framework to get our collaboratives to action. Without further ado, let’s dive in, Q&A style.
​

Can you share some tips for action planning?

Move towards the middle. It might be tempting to start with the question of “What should we do?” But this is exactly the wrong place to start. Begin by grounding yourself, with a particular focus on 1) orienting towards root causes and systems (otherwise, it’s easy to end up with a plan that attempts to place bandaids on the most visible/urgent problems, without diving into the underlying structures and root causes that created those problems) and 2) defining your coalition’s unique value-add (what do you collectively bring to the table that other organizations/agencies/actors in your community don’t?). Then, jump straight to the end - what impact do you wish to have? What are you seeking to change? Get as specific as possible. With the beginning and the end clearly defined, then work towards the middle to define your specific action steps in a way that addresses root causes, aligns with your value-add, and helps achieve your desired impact.

Brainstorm with abandon. Think small and think big at the same time with 15% and 15x solutions. Consider what is your 15% where you have the discretion and freedom to act without more resources and authority and what actions you can take immediately. Also consider what big idea you would recommend if you were to be 15 times bolder, and what the first step towards that idea would be. We can both be empowered by the things we can do fully within our circle of influence and inspired by the things that are more aspirational and transformational. Also consider unique brainstorming questions - I saw a great thread on this recently on LinkedIn, here are some of the ones that stood out to me:

• Your goal is to get fired: What ideas are you proposing?

• What’s one thing you see others do, and you’re thinking it’s crazy we’re not doing it?

• Pick a problem the organization needs to solve. Tell me how you'd solve it with an unlimited budget. Tell me how you'd solve it with no budget. (This is similar to the 15%/15x solution approach!)

Niche down. As we often hear in the consulting world, there are “riches in the niches.” When you “niche down” and narrow your audience and services, you can speak to that very specific audience in a way that resonates deeply and makes people recognize that you understand and can address their specific needs. It’s the same for any work or communication we undertake, whether as a coalition or an organization - we can’t be everything to everyone, but if we “niche down,” we might be surprised at just how effective we can be.

Develop infrastructure for responsive feedback and continuous quality improvement. Making sure you are flexible and nimble enough to be responsive to feedback and continually improve is the linchpin of the entire action planning framework we’ve laid out. And you can’t leave that to chance (believe me, I’ve been there…everyone has the best of intentions, but then, life happens, and there’s simply no time/bandwidth/buy-in to take stock of things regularly and make changes accordingly). Instead, build the infrastructure at the outset so time, resources, and systems are already in place to ensure regular monitoring and the careful analysis of monitoring information and the implementation of course corrections and improvements based on that analysis. Hold yourselves accountable - it will boost your impact by leaps and bounds.

What are some specific strategies for action planning?

Action planning is such a rich, multi-step process that I can’t pick just a few specific strategies as I’ve done for other elements of our C.A.P.E. process. Instead, I’m going to identify some key sets of approaches.

Brainstorming approaches: Here at PoP health, we love using post-its during in-person brainstorms and virtual equivalents on Zoom (Jamboard (which is sunsetting soon) or Mural are what we usually use; you can also have people throw ideas into the chat). For more detailed, in-depth, and asynchronous brainstorming, we love using Google Sheets - we try to structure the sheets in a very clear way and then let folks add their ideas in the appropriate sheets/rows/columns in response to particular categories, questions, types of information, etc.

Prioritization approaches: For in-person prioritization, sticker dots are our favorite (they even sell glittery ones, which can add some pizazz to your meetings). Mentimeter can also be great for in-person or virtual settings where you want to share results in real-time. For asynchronous prioritization, a virtual survey can be a great tool.

Action plan writing approaches: We’ve had success drawing a timeline on flipchart paper and having people place their action steps (each one written on a post note) on the literal timeline, and even taking an extra step to match each action step with a particular organization/person. We also love a good action plan template - the timeline idea can help with identifying the action, who’s responsible, and timing, but often we also want to identify the resources required, the collaborators required, potential barriers and how to address them, and who needs to be informed about the action.

What are some resources to help me action plan with our collaborative?

Here are just a few examples of resources we here at PoP Health have found helpful. This is by no means a comprehensive list - please email us to share other resources and tools you’ve found helpful in action planning with your collaborative!

• ​Liberating Structures (sidenote: I’ve seen these used poorly/thoughtlessly, but when used intentionally and judiciously, they can fulfill their intended potential and “foster lively participation in groups of any size” in a way that moves you further along your action planning process).

• ​The Best Brainstorming Tools of 2024 (+ Tips and Techniques)​

• ​7 Essential Project Management Techniques In 2024​

I hope these tips, strategies, and resources help plant some helpful seeds in terms of action planning with your collaborative. It can be an overwhelming, “one step forward, two steps back” kind of journey. But hopefully it is also a meaningful and productive journey towards an actionable plan that can create real change in your community.

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Get to ACTION to transform health in your community with PoP Health's action planning framework

I have an extra hop in my step and a desperate desire to GET. THINGS. DONE. (Currently at the top of my home list is tackling a round of Spring cleaning, beginning with our completely out-of-control basement…but I digress).

How about you?

In our work with community coalitions, getting to ACTION is often a major pain point. So let’s dive right in.

What do you mean by action planning?

Sometimes it’s easier to start with what I don’t mean, and this is one of those times.

Action planning is not information sharing. It’s not learning. It’s not defining your strategy. It’s not writing a plan or a report.

These can all be important components of action planning, but only as a means to an end. And that end is intentional, purposeful action. What are you doing and what tangible change in your community is it associated with?

We’ll get more into specific strategies for action planning in our next newsletter, but for now, let’s wrap our minds around what action planning is.

What are some ways to think about action planning?

There are a bazillion action planning frameworks and templates out there (and so many acronyms! SWOT, PDSA, SMART, the list goes on).

How I feel about them is best captured by the quote “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Here at PoP Health, we’ve waded through the action planning acronym soup on many an occasion, and where we’ve landed is here: our own action planning framework (hot off the presses!) - uniquely tailored to collaboratives and coalitions seeking to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change. As with any other model, there are ways in which it will be “wrong” - but we also believe (and can vouch for from experience!) that it is useful.

And while I always hesitate to throw yet another framework out into the world, this one has arisen naturally from our work over the years, and represents our best effort to synthesize many hard-learned lessons as we’ve navigated this space side-by-side with community coalitions and collaboratives.

Introducing PoP Health’s Action Planning Framework

• Grounding Phase: First and foremost, root your action planning in a deep and shared understanding of: the community and key actors; your collaborative’s unique value add and mission; and the nature of the problem(s) and root causes(s) on one end and desired outcomes and vision on the other end.

• Brainstorming Phase: Once you are grounded, brainstorm with abandon. Get the most outlandish, impractical ideas out there. Get the most exciting, transformational ideas out there. Get the most narrow, incremental ideas out there. Get the most bizarre, eyebrow-raising ideas out there. And everything in between.

• Prioritizing Phase: After you have brainstormed with abandon, niche down. You simply cannot be everything to everyone or do everything. Be ruthless in prioritizing - you must make hard choices to do some things and not do others. Make those hard choices based on all that you’ve grounded yourself in in the grounding phase, plus other key criteria your collaborative defines collectively.

• Planning Phase: Only once you have prioritized can you truly plan. This is where you define the exact what/when/how/where/who of it all. Get specific. Where you are exploring, start small - consider pilots and minimum value products. Where you are confident in what works, focus on scaling up.

• Acting + Iterating Phase: Now you are ready: Just do it. Then iterate. Don’t get stuck in the prior phases or spend too long in them. Ultimately, we won’t learn nearly enough until we take action. So just do it - but know that you will need to iterate. Be prepared with the structures/systems needed for continuous quality improvement/responsive feedback, and know the basis on which you’ll decide whether something is working or not (more on evaluation and learning to come in future newsletters!).

What questions should I be asking myself about how we action plan?

• Is your action planning grounded in your collaborative’s UNIQUE value add? What can you do that others are not doing and cannot do? What gap can you fill?

• Who are the targets and agents of change who hold the power/authority/influence to make the changes you are seeking? Are they around your collaborative table during the action planning process? If not, should they be? If not, how will you influence them?

• Have you created a safe space for action planning to occur? Have you unearthed and addressed power dynamics, political constraints, and other conditions that might impact the level of honesty and engagement collaborative members and community members bring to the action planning table?

• Is your action planning process taking into account the realities on-the-ground? When the rubber meets the road, all kinds of roadblocks arise - have you anticipated them and do you have a plan for addressing them? Are there some roadblocks that are - at least for now - insurmountable, and thus require rethinking what actions make sense to undertake?
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These are tough questions, and getting to action is no easy task. But if your collaborative can move through these phases in a thoughtful way, you can chart a path to inspiring and mobilizing concrete, meaningful action and transforming health in your community. Here’s to taking the first steps down that path - remember, just do it, then iterate. More on HOW to move through these phases in our next newsletter!

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HOW to collaborate across your collaborative: What we can learn from Underpants Gnomes and other tips, strategies, and resources

Are you tried of hearing the word "collaborate", Reader?

I know the word can sometimes seem…empty. Something everyone pays lip service to but that we don’t often explore HOW to do well.

That’s our goal here at PoP Health - not just to talk about collaboration a lot (which, admittedly, we are guilty of!) but to also dive deeply into HOW we can do this well.

Earlier this month, we introduced the “collaborating with your collaborative” aspect of our C.A.P.E. process (see issue here) and today, we’re going to dive into the “Yes, but HOW?” question with some tips, strategies, and resources.

Can you share some tips for collaborating across your collaborative?

Move beyond information sharing. Far too often, we see collaborative meetings that are nothing more than surface-level information sharing about what each member organization is doing. This could just as easily - if not more easily - be done offline. When you convene your collaborative, make it about something that couldn’t be done offline or asynchronously - a space for creativity and generating new ideas, a space for collective sensemaking and achieving new understanding, a space for unearthing complexities and conflicts.

Make sure your members each have a clear role. Collaboration does not mean everyone does everything. Both recruitment and retention are difficult if an individual member of your collaborative doesn’t see a clear role for themselves. People’s time is limited and valuable, and collaborative membership is often on a volunteer basis, something taken on in addition to a person’s day-to-day job responsibilities. If they feel that their absence from the collaborative isn’t going to have an impact, they will not care to join or stay. When you ask someone to join the collaborative, make sure you describe their exact role and responsibilities, and why they are uniquely suited for it. And make sure one or more of those roles includes leadership of the collaborative!

Establish a system where the collaborative - collectively and also each individual member - earns their success and sees and feels the value they create. This is a lesson from happiness researcher Arthur C. Brooks. He says, “The number one thing that you can do for recruitment, for retention, the ultimate rewards that go far beyond money are making sure that you have a system where people are earning their success through their merit and personal accomplishment. They know it, they see it, and so do their friends. And they actually feel like they’re serving other people and they can see the faces of the people for whom they’re creating value.” Make sure the accomplishments the collaborative is striving for - and that individual members are pursuing - are 1) clearly defined, 2) celebrated once achieved, and 3) connected directly to the value that’s created in the community, ideally by fostering meaningful connections between collaborative members and community members so the value that’s created in the community can be truly seen and felt by collaborative members.

Unearth underlying power dynamics. As Collaborate CIC puts it, “For collaboration to be effective, we need to be able to talk about where power lies, how it plays out, and how power dynamics (and behaviors, governance, and so on) need to change to make space for everyone to genuinely contribute in ways that make sense for them.” There are various types of power (financial, political, social and other types of power) and assessing them - at individual and organizational levels - and making them explicit can help set your collaborative on a path towards consciously identifying ways to shift or share power in ways that make the work more community-driven and effective.

What are some specific strategies for collaborating across your collaborative?

Conduct a partnership survey. I know, I know, surveys get a bad rap, and justifiably so. But this is an idea for a non-cringey survey, a survey your collaborative uses to reflect on themselves. These surveys are solely for members of the collaborative, and the results help collaborative members understand who they are and what they bring to the table, where they already have a lot of energy and expertise to move things forward, and where they may have gaps that need to be filled.

We used this kind of survey in advance of our kick-off meeting with the Perry County Health Coalition in Pennsylvania. We asked about top action planning priorities; what members hope to accomplish via participation in the coalition; current coalition composition, sectors and topics represented, populations touched by coalition member organizations, and suggestions around who else to engage; alignment between member organization focus areas and focus areas identified in the most recent health assessment the coalition completed; current and desired levels of engagement in the coalition; activities and tasks members are most interested in supporting; and desired meeting format, frequency, and scheduling.

By gathering this information ahead of the meeting and then sharing the synthesized responses and drawing out the key takeaways, we were able to facilitate a much more meaningful, nuanced discussion about where to go from here.

Collectively develop a joint Theory of Change. Have you heard of the Underpants Gnomes, Reader? I feel in love with this clip when a friend introduced it to me:

In this episode of South Park, the boys encounter a group of gnomes who’ve been very busy stealing underpants as part of a big plan. Phase 1 is collect underpants. Phase 3 is profit. But in between? A giant question mark.

In the “collect underpants” context, this seems a little wild. But you’d be surprised how very often this happens in our work with public health focused coalitions and collaboratives. We have an end goal in mind and a set of activities we’re going to launch, but we haven’t actually mapped out exactly why and how we believe these activities are going to get us to that end goal.

Enter a theory of change. We are especially strong advocates for bringing your collaborative together and jointly developing a theory of change that everyone contributes to and - by the end, after rounds of revision - agrees with and endorses.

This is something we did to launch our work co-leading evaluation and learning for a whole-child development initiative in DC public schools. We got everyone together in person and had them react to an initial theory of change our team developed based on our understanding of the work. We tore it apart during this meeting, revised it, conducted follow up interviews with each partner to get their reactions to the revised version, revised it further, and finally landed upon a version that everyone “stamped” with their approval.

This was over two years ago and we STILL root all our work and evaluation in that theory of change. It has been an incredibly helpful grounding and guiding force.

Have collaborative partners lead Ignite Talks. In that same DC project, once we were a little further along into implementation, partner organizations expressed a desire to know more about the activities other partners were leading. Because as useful as our Theory of Change has proven, words on paper are no substitute for a true understanding of how the work looks, sounds, and feels on the ground where it’s happening.

One of my colleagues on the project suggested using the Ignite Talks format - “20 slides, 15 seconds a slide, 5 minutes on stage, just you and the audience”. The emphasis in this format is on highly visual slides with interesting imagery. It’s similar to the PechaKucha format, which originated in Japan, and involves 20 slides, each for 20 seconds.

We used these talks to open an in-person convening and it was lively, engaging, interesting, and everyone learned a lot about the different elements of this joint effort we were engaging in.

By emphasizing visuals, we got to see what the work looked like in action. By forcing everyone into a new presentation format, we escaped the boilerplate slides and explanations we otherwise would have gotten. Perhaps most surprisingly, by providing a tiny bit of extra structure (“20 slides, 15 seconds each” - instead of just saying “no more than 5 minutes, please”), we actually had everyone stay within the time limit - every single person. (Who else has tried the “no more than X minutes, please” route before, only to find that no one listened to you? Turns out, a little extra structure is the answer!)

What are some resources to help me collaborate with community members?

Here are just a few examples of resources we here at PoP Health have found helpful - some related to the specific tips and strategies noted above, and others more general. This is by no means a comprehensive list - please email us to share other resources and tools you’ve found helpful in collaborating across your collaborative!

• Collaborate CIC’s Common Misconceptions About Collaboration​

• The National Association of City and County Health Officials’ (NACCHO’s) Mobilizing for Action Through Planning and Partnership 2.0 resources, especially the Community Partner Assessment survey tool

• Collective Impact Forum’s Resource Library

• The various other collaboration frameworks highlighted in the previous issue of this newsletter

These tips, strategies, and resources begin to paint a picture of HOW to collaborate across your collaborative. It’s a messy, slow, challenging process - but it can also be a creative, illuminating, and rewarding one. We hope what we’ve shared helps you navigate the challenges and reap the rewards!

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Collaborating across your collaborative: helpful frameworks and questions to ask yourself

Here at PoP Health, as we spring forward, we are also springing into part two of the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration - focused specifically on collaborating across your collaborative.

What do you mean by collaborating across our collaborative?

As I read in a recent post from Collaborate CIC, a UK-based social consultancy, “Calling something collaborative doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

Having multi-sector partners around the same table doesn’t necessarily equal collaboration.

Convening partners on a regular basis doesn’t necessarily equal collaboration.

Having a shared vision and mission doesn’t necessarily equal collaboration.

True collaboration requires moving beyond sharing information and learning from one another - to taking intentional, strategic, collective ACTION.

We’ll get more into specific strategies for collaboration and action planning in future newsletters, but for now, let’s get oriented to the idea of collaborating across a collaborative.

What are some ways to think about how we collaborate across our collaborative?

There are so many frameworks for collaboration and collective action, and I don’t think any one of them are “THE” answer. I do, however, think that some of them are particularly useful in thinking through how your collaborative currently collaborates and whether you’d like to move further along the collaborative spectrum and how. These include:

• The collaboration spectrum by Tamarack Institute (see p8 of their report for a table that outlines not only the definitions below, but also the collaborative types, convening leadership, authority, shared ownership, key governance documents, and outcomes for each level of collaboration).

• ​Forms and features of collaboration, by Collaborate CIC and Dartington Service Design Lab and commissioned by The Health Foundation (check out their report for definitions and examples of each of these forms of collaboration as well as key features, including make-up of the collaboration, governance, communications, evaluation and learning, and resources).

• The community system solutions framework, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (the article includes key features of each of the types outlined in the diagram below, along with examples).

• The five conditions of collective impact and five equity strategies by the The Collective Impact Forum (their getting started page includes a robust set of associated tools and resources).

• The six foundations for effective collaboration, as outlined in Collaborate CIC’s Guide to Collaboration (the guide covers what collaboration is, why and when it matters, a description for these six foundations for effective collaboration, and additional resources).

• The Intersector Project’s stages of intersector collaboration and associated tools.

What questions should I be asking myself about how we collaborate with community members?

• Who do we have at the table? Who do we not have at the table? What level of engagement/involvement in the coalition should various actors have, and how can we foster strong engagement/involvement?

• What are the various power dynamics at play in our coalition (in terms of financial, political, social and other types of power)? Can we assess individual, team, and organizational power; make underlying power structures more explicit; and consciously identify ways to shift or share power in ways that make our work more community-driven and effective?

• How are we working together, and is our approach efficient and effective? Is our strategic approach designed to add unique value to the community? What infrastructure have we built for information sharing and aligning work across organizations? Are we using our meeting time to accomplish what cannot be done via email or other communication?

• How are we financing the work of our coalition and what implications does that have for what we can and cannot do, how resources are distributed, and how sustainable or not our work will be?

Are you feeling energized or overwhelmed by all this? Collaboration sounds (and is!) vital and valuable but it is also messy and difficult. It's more than worth the trouble though, so stay tuned for more strategies and ideas on how to do this well (or at least better!).

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HOW to put community voices in the driver’s seat

Are you ever told to do something and find yourself wondering, “Yes, but HOW?”

With PoP Health’s 2024 newsletter series, we want to be sure to at least begin to answer that question. For each phase of our C.A.P.E. process that we introduce, we’ll have an initial post orienting us to the topic and a second post that answers the “Yes, but HOW?” question.

So earlier this month, we introduced the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process, Community Collaboration, with a focus specifically on collaboration with community members (see issue here). Today, we’re here to share a set of FAQs that dive into tips, strategies, and resources about how to do this work and put community voices in the driver’s seat.

Can you share some tips for collaborating with community members?

Community voice isn’t enough if we merely hear it, but don’t listen to and act on it: Have a plan in place and hold yourself accountable to what you will DO based on what community members have to say.

Community members’ time is precious - treat it that way:

• Don’t make community members repeat themselves - gather all the community input that’s already been collected in the community, including by other organizations and groups, and make sure you 1) learn from what’s already collected and 2) avoid duplicating what’s already collected.

• Don’t make community members come to yet another meeting if it’s not necessary - there are likely dozens of community groups already gathering regularly that talk about the topics you’re exploring, so reach out to them, see if you can attend their meetings, listen, take notes, and let that information drive your planning process.

• Don’t make community members share their time and expertise for free - compensate them. But remember that financial compensation is only one piece of the puzzle - to treat community members’ time as precious, you need to actually act on what you hear from them.

Build lasting, trusting, mutual relationships with community members:

• Don’t be a fair weather friend - have a sustained presence in the community and continue to get to know and work together with community members, don’t reach out just when you need something from them.

• Build collective capacity of the community - consider how to build on existing strengths and assets of the community and help community members build their own capacity and power - financial, political, and otherwise.

What are some specific strategies for collaborating with community members?

Focus the conversation through Focus Groups in a Box. Those best equipped to gather input from community members are the leaders and organizations that community members already trust and go to for support. If you want your work to be driven by the perspectives and experiences of community members, and the specific information you're seeking hasn’t already been collected in the community, consider awarding small research grants to community partners that are already gathering places for community members, so they can lead their own focus groups. Develop a standard focus group guide and reporting template to share with them, so they can lead conversations using the guide and report back what they hear using the reporting template.

In PoP Health’s work with the Allegheny County Infant Health Equity Coalition, our client Healthy Start Pittsburgh awarded these research grants, and PoP Health developed the standardized focus group guide and reporting template that was shared with grantees. The information we gathered through this process is directly reflected in the resulting action plan. This approach checked a bunch of boxes: we put the power in the hands of community members (they led the groups and were compensated for their time), we met community members where they already were, we heard from dozens of additional marginalized community members that we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, and we got meaningful feedback that could be incorporated directly into the plan. So many wins.

Share data and drive prioritization via Data Walks. We are huge advocates of taking a data-driven approach to community health improvement. But data does not live in a vacuum - it is only in interpreting data that we can inform efforts to transform health in our communities. And the question becomes - who is interpreting the data? It is vital that community members have an opportunity to review, understand, interpret, and utilize data about their own community. One way to do this is via data walks.

In PoP Health’s work with the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax and the Fairfax County Health Department, we will be helping synthesize insights from a series of data walks the health department is conducting with community groups across the County. During the data walks, community data will be shared directly with community members in a visual, easily digestible form. Their reflections and thoughts on what's most in important will directly feed into the prioritization process used to identify priorities for the county's community health improvement plan.

Widen your reach with Street Stalls. Community led focus groups and data walks are great, but here's the thing - only a certain type of community member is already active in existing organizations or likely to come to an event like a data walk. There’s another type - actually many types - of community members that won’t. And sometimes - scratch that, most of the time - those are the folks we most need to hear from. Knocking door to door isn’t typically an option, but what we can do is gather community input on-site at community locations and events (think community centers, recreation centers, festivals, farmer’s markets).

PoP Health used this approach to gather input to inform the Children’s Behavioral Health Blueprint led by Healthy Minds Fairfax. With a simple tri-fold poster board (don’t underestimate the low-tech options!), a list of resources to vote on (using sticky dots) to indicate what they found most helpful, and an open-ended question to respond to (with post-it-notes and markers), we got helpful input from a wider range of community members and not just those that would self-select into completing a survey or participating in a focus group.

What are some resources to help me collaborate with community members?

Here are just a few examples of resources we here at PoP Health have personally found helpful in our work. This is by no means a comprehensive list - please email us to share other resources and tools you’ve found helpful in collaborating with community members!

• Facilitating Power’s The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership

• The National Association of City and County Health Officials’ (NACCHO’s) Mobilizing for Action Through Planning and Partnership 2.0 resources, especially the Power Primer supplement

• ​Asset Based Community Development Institute

• Human Impact Partners’ (HIP’s) Resources for Collaboration and Power Sharing and Activities to Deepen Your Power-Building Analysis

We hope these tips, strategies, and resources help begin to paint a picture of HOW to collaborate with community members and place more power in their hands.

It’s not a straightforward process, and if you’re anything like me, Reader, you’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way. But it’s absolutely vital and unquestionably worth it - we can’t transform health in our community without community members in the driver’s seat.

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Putting community voices in the driver’s seat

In this post, we’ll dive into the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration.

This month, we’re going to focus specifically on collaboration with community members - today, we’ll get oriented to what we mean by that and in a couple weeks, we’ll walk through some specific strategies in this arena.

Without further ado, let’s get into it - FAQ style.

What do you mean by collaborating with community members?

I like the idea of collaborating with community members instead of “engaging” them or “empowering” them.

Community engagement sometimes gets misinterpreted to include any superficial/half-hearted effort - what I call the “We talked to that one community member once and asked them leading questions so they could confirm what we already decided to do” approach. As my three year old has recently taken to saying (in response to just about everything) - no, thank you.

Community empowerment suggests we are giving power to community members. But we do not empower communities, they empower themselves.

Instead, we use the term community collaboration to capture a meaningful effort to listen deeply, put community voices in the driver’s seat, and actually take what we learn from listening to community members and work with them to act on it and make changes.

Listening is vital, but we can’t stop there.

What are some ways to think about how we collaborate with community members?

I love a good framework, and in the arena of collaborating with community members, “The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership” (hat tip to Facilitating Power) is one of my go-tos. Community ownership moves beyond merely engaging the community to “foster[ing] democratic participation and equity through community-driven decision making”, helping bridge the gap between community and governance. We can’t get there in one fell swoop, but a step taken to move along this spectrum is a step in the right direction.

Source: Modified version of figure in The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership by Facilitating Power

What questions should I be asking myself about how we collaborate with community members?

How long have we been a presence in the community? Have we built lasting, trusting, mutual relationships with community members? If not, how can we begin to take steps towards that?

Have we shown our respect for the voices and expertise of community members - by way of compensation, building from their existing strengths and assets, and ensuring they are driving the agenda and we are supporting them as opposed to vice versa?

What specific changes - to processes, decisions, investments, programs, policies, or systems - were made based on what community members had to say? What specific changes did we see in beliefs, behaviors, and health or other outcomes as a result?

What have we done to build collective capacity of the community, whether via training/capacity building activities, building political power, supporting mutual aid efforts, sharing financial ownership, or other means?

When you do this work well, you’ll feel the results. Have you had a community member tell you they feel heard and seen in your work? I can tell you from experience, it’s the best feeling. And more importantly, it’s the key to unlocking the kind of transformation we want to see in our communities.

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