Building Support at All Levels

This toolkit explains the importance of child support, and of reaching out to the Hispanic community. We hope that it will encourage you to develop your own outreach program, and assist you in doing so.

An important piece of your outreach program is the assistance that you have from those who will help put your plan into action—your staff, partners, and funders.

Their buy-in—and wholesale, enthusiastic support—can have a dramatic effect on the success of your outreach program.

Buy-in means that people…

• Understand the reason for the project.
• Commit to furthering the project’s goals.

To gain support for a project, you must convince others that participating will serve their own interests as well as the community’s—and persuade them to adopt new ways of working.

Here are some ways you can cultivate support:

Choose a Strong Leader.

A dedicated, credible, enthusiastic leader will afford your program the most momentum. Staff will buy in to the program more readily if they have faith in the leader.

Communicate Your Vision.

Write a vision statement for your Hispanic outreach program. Your staff then can rally around it. A shared vision can unify and motivate everyone who works on the project.

Create a Sense of Urgency.

Ensure that people know how strongly child support can influence a child’s life—reducing the child’s risk of poverty, criminal activity, truancy, and more. These facts highlight that time is of the essence; the sooner a family receives child support, the sooner the child can move toward better opportunities in life.

Focus on the Families.

Emphasize the benefits to families in the Hispanic community. Encourage your staff to concentrate on your clients’ needs, rather than on changes in job duties or workflow.

Form a Team.

To set your Hispanic outreach program into motion, you can form a cross-departmental team to steer the project. Its first task can be to whip up an action plan.

This team can…

• Lay out the priorities.
• Make some changes immediately.
• Schedule additional changes.
• Create a blueprint with tasks and timelines.
• Communicate progress to the staff, on a regular basis.

 

 

Involve Staff at All Levels.

Involve staff at all levels of your organization. One approach is to begin by involving your senior management. Meet with them first to brainstorm ways in which your organization can best reach out to the Hispanic community. Elicit substantial feedback. Listen to them, and incorporate their ideas into the master plan.

For the next meeting, invite a broader circle of staff. Include the senior team, plus some middle managers. Request and listen to feedback, but less than you did at the first meeting. Make fewer changes to your plan.

Repeat this process until you have involved the entire staff in at least one meeting. By then, your senior team will have heard the reasons for undertaking a Hispanic outreach program several times. Your leaders then will have the most-complete understanding of the issues, which is good—because their enthusiasm for the outreach program will sift down throughout the staff.

In addition, staff members who are encouraged to share opinions and make decisions during a project’s creation are much more likely to support the project in its final form. These all-level meetings can foster a team spirit and give everyone ownership of the project.

Make It Personal.

Which is more likely to interest people—a dry recitation of child support statistics, or a poignant story about a sweet little boy who had no medical care until his mother began receiving child support?

When talking about your project, tell stories. Use plain language, not jargon, to describe how the project will help others. Share your passion for the cause, and urge all project leaders to do the same. Encourage your staff to reflect on how they personally can make life better for children in their own community.

When staff members feel personally involved, they become more excited about the project and more willing to work hard to achieve its goals.

Measure Performance.

Another way to encourage participation is to tie employees’ performance reviews to project tasks. This shift would empower staff to spend time on outreach that might otherwise take a back seat to more time-sensitive tasks.

Measure Results.

Play up the end result. Make the outcomes clear. List the positive, measurable results you hope the program will achieve. Choose assessment tools, mark your progress, and share the results with staff. “Sell” the outreach project to staff by highlighting its intended outcomes.

Then you can shift the organization’s focus to a broad vision of what you will accomplish, rather than the narrow view of how you will do the work.

Seek Top-Down Support.

Many effective projects follow this model. The director makes the project a priority, and reinforces its importance to staff on a regular basis.

Spin Stories.

Craft a story that illustrates a positive future—a future brought about, of course, by your project. Weave in the ways in which this positive future benefits your staff.

For example, demonstrate the new opportunities that children will have when their families receive child support. Your employees will want to be a part of brightening a child’s life. Or, on a more pragmatic level, explain how new ways of conducting outreach will enable staff to take on new, career-building job duties.

Start Small.

Set some small, attainable goals at the outset. Accomplishing those first goals quickly and easily will make the staff feel successful—and will engage and energize them.

Market the Toolkit’s Availability.

Spread the word by sharing information about the toolkit. An easy way to market the toolkit is to distribute The Hispanic Child Support Resource Center brochure at conferences and meetings or send it by mail or e-mail. See our Hispanic Outreach Toolkit.

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