Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, grassroots solutions partnered with Tom Novick of M+R Strategic Services to conduct a comprehensive qualitative evaluation of the Health Care for America NOW! (HCAN) advocacy campaign. The evaluation was conducted on behalf of The Atlantic Philanthropies and included an extensive materials review and a broad set of personal interviews with participants, observers, and targets of the campaign. HCAN functioned as a coalition of leading progressive organizations interested in health care reform, and the evaluation explored many of the lessons that can be taken from this campaign.

The final evaluation report contained a checklist on effective coalition work in a campaign context. The checklist was developed by the evaluation team and was based on lessons learned from the HCAN interviews and materials review. While some of the lessons reflected in the checklist are particular to HCAN, many of them can inform future coalition efforts.

We appreciate The Atlantic Philanthropies allowing us to share this checklist, the insightful observations of those who participated in the evaluation process, and the development process we conducted with Tom Novick. The full executive summary of the report can be found here.

Lessons for Future Coalition Work

HCAN’s coalition efforts offer a number of specific lessons for future campaigns.

• Begin building the coalition well in advance of the campaign to allow time for relationship and trust-building.
• Work with initial partners to create a clear set of coalition principles that can be used to attract additional partners and to clarify who should not join the coalition.
• Involve lead coalition partners in establishing goals and developing strategies to create a sense of ownership over direction, but do not expect partners to do this planning on their own – recognize the importance of staff direction and involvement.
• Establish an action orientation among lead coalition partners, and make it clear that signing-on is not sufficient – work and resources – both financial and human – are expected from all partners. Organizations on the HCAN Steering Committee contributed to the campaign financially by paying dues.
• Invest time, staff and resources in coalition management.
• Listen closely to partners to identify what they need out of the coalition – their own enlightened self-interests – in addition to determining what they bring to it.
• Sustain regular and consistent communication and dialogue (not just one-way information sharing) throughout the campaign, especially during times of high pressure or low morale.
• Involve partners not only in developing the initial plans to help maintain coalition ownership over the campaign, but also in ongoing strategic decisions.
• Create spaces for ongoing discussion about difficult issues, and use the principles to help navigate these discussions.
• Have up-front discussions about how to best handle situations when a coalition partner disagrees with more dominant partners.
• Clearly articulate goals for coalition diversity develop plans to meet those goals, and make sure that coalition materials and messages match diversity objectives.
• Work to ensure clear communication between national coalition partners and state affiliates that are participating in parallel state coalitions.