National Coalition for Literacy

Marsha Tait shares strategies and tools for collaborating with other agencies to get media attention for your program. To post your comments or questions,  click on the above title, then scroll down.

At a recent event in a mid-sized community, a very frustrated  adult literacy program manager bemoaned the lack of press coverage at a recent student recognition event.  “I don’t know what more we can do to get them there!” she said.  “We did press releases, had a special graduation ceremony,  even had the Mayor cut and serve cake!  I just don’t know what more to do to make them interested!”

David Harvey’s posting this week  has a lot of useful tips and techniques for cultivating the media in your community.  But if you live in a place where a lot of events take place, especially if they tend to be similar kinds of events, you may find yourself frustrated because of competition for media space.  So, what can you do differently in order to generate some media interest in Adult Education and Family Literacy Week if having an event isn’t going to get attention paid to your program?  Perhaps one of the challenges is that you are trying to go it alone.

You might consider negotiating a collaboration with another agency to get the media’s attention.  This might take the form of a short-term partnership to stage an event (e.g. collaborating with the local school district to have the Mayor proclaim Adult Education and Family Literacy Week on the steps of City Hall), or launching a long-term project that will capture the media’s attention when it comes to fruition (an example follows below).  Either way, negotiating partnerships and collaborations is hard work, takes time, and requires recognizing and dealing effectively with conflict.   In order to negotiate an effective partnership or collaboration, we first have to be comfortable dealing with conflict  — and let’s face it, most of us are not!

Dr. Neil Katz, a widely recognized expert in conflict resolution and Professor and Chair of the Department of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Nova-Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, defines conflict as “an expressed struggle between two or more parties that are interdependent, involving strong emotion and a perceived blockage to needs and/or values.”  In other words, we only find ourselves in conflict with others when the issues really matter to us.  Conflict can sometimes be intractable, but it can also sometimes be an opportunity for positive change.

In a negotiation with the goal of forming a programmatic partnership or collaboration, how we approach conflict — the conflict resolution model underlying our strategy  — can predetermine the outcome of the process.  For example, suppose you use the Adult Education and Family Literacy Week Resolution to bring attention about the impact of low literacy skills on health outcomes to the attention of medical providers in your community.  “But,” you may be thinking, “I’ll never get anywhere with that — all they care about is health care reform and I’ll be lucky if adult education and family literacy even gets a footnote!”  This is an example of thinking of negotiation using a win-lose model: one party has to get all the available rewards to feel successful—and the other party has to get nothing.

But if you give some thought to what you might be able to bring  to the  medical community that they have trouble getting on their own, you can use this as a negotiation tactic.  Medical practitioners today are faced with tremendous pressures to increase productivity and profitability.   Serving the needs of patients with low literacy skills or limited English proficiency can increase costs and often results in poor care and poor health outcomes.   But you have access to information about some things that a medical provider can do to improve patient care and outcomes; for example, helping them to simplify signage or consent forms.  Perhaps you can join forces to address the needs of patients with poor literacy in your community — you have the expertise and they have the resources to promote the partnership.

This idea is an example of several possible public relations strategies: it has a built-in a “media hook” as David describes it (what media outlet isn’t talking about health care costs and reform efforts today?)  You might even be able to engage your local policy makers in announcing the partnership, which will attract the media.  It is also an example of identifying a potential new negotiation partner and finding a way to get something you both want or need, whether in the short or long term.  Last, it illustrates a win-win negotiation strategy— joining forces with your new partner to fight a problem in your community.  Instead of competing for media space, you have come together to generate new coverage with a new twist and a different angle.

The Harvard Program on Negotiation recommends a seven-step process for successful “interest-based” negotiations: identify positions (yours and theirs); understand underlying interests (before, during, after); develop a problem statement (together); brainstorm options (together); evaluate and select options (together); and define how you will evaluate the outcomes of your efforts (together).  The key is to think beyond just getting what you want (“win/lose”), and to craft a partnership that addresses the needs of your collaborators as well (“win/win”).  Attached is a Getting To Yes Preparation Worksheet to help you plan and prepare your negotiation strategy.

There is one more step to using effective negotiation strategy, and that is to identify your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (a “BATNA”).  What happens if you walk away from negotiations?  What happens if your partner does?  In the example we’ve been discussing above, perhaps not more than the investment of a little bit of time and energy.  You can use these principles to improve the success of your negotiations next time, too.  The Harvard Program on Negotiation has some practical and useful tools for learning to negotiate effectively.

Last, if you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you read Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Second Edition by Roger Fischer, William Ury and Bruce Patton, and Getting Past No, Negotiating in Difficult Situations, by William Ury.  Both books came out of the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and both are loaded with simple and practical advice on everything from getting your teenager to clean her room to closing the deal that will change your organization’s future.