Tips for Leveraging Partnerships to Improve Recruitment for Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs

The partnership tips in this brief are drawn from work conducted with Anthem Strong Families, Family Service Agency-Santa Barbara (FSA-SB), and Gateway Community Action in the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) study. These are HMRE grant recipients funded by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and based in Dallas, Texas; Santa Barbara, California; and West Liberty, Kentucky - respectively. These organizations participated in rapid cycle learning to strengthening their recruitment partnerships. The SIMR project has two related goals: (1) to improve the service delivery of grant recipients in the study and (2) to develop lessons from the broader HMRE field about promising practices for addressing common implementation challenges, including challenges related to recruitment, retention, and content engagement.

This brief shares six tips to support grant recipients interested in strengthening their recruitment partnerships:

1. Identify and prioritize a roster of potential partners: Programs should first identify and prioritize potential referral partners in the community. To create this initial list, consider using the following three steps: (1) brainstorm a list of potential partners, (2) build profiles of those potential partners, and (3) rank and prioritize them for initial outreach.
2. Find your connection: HMRE staff can use their existing social or professional ties to help establish a connection with potential partners. If program staff do not have a connection, they can explore the partner’s website to identify potential points of contact. Prioritize contacting a staff member who has decision-making authority or access to someone who does.
3. Prepare partner-specific material: After establishing contact with someone at the potential partner organization, staff should set up a meeting to describe the purpose and mutual benefits of the partnership. Before this meeting, programs should prepare brief pitch and a flyer describing their program tailored for potential recruitment partners.  
4. Seal the deal: If an organization is interested in partnering, staff should clearly establish shared expectations and the benefits of the partnership. Steps in sealing the deal with recruitment partners include: (1) developing reasonable expectations, (2) defining referral targets and procedures, and (3) considering formalizing the partnership through a written agreement.
5. Equip partners with the right tools: After solidifying the partnership, HMRE program staff should ensure that staff at the partner organization have the knowledge and resources to provide appropriate referrals. This could take the form of a brief training session that describes the HMRE program services, who is eligible for them, and their potential benefits. The training session should also review the referral process and answer any questions from partner staff.
6. Maintain partnerships: Partners need to demonstrate commitment to one another over time to ensure the relationship stays strong. The experience of the HMRE programs that participated in SIMR reveal three important priorities for maintaining partnerships: (1) communicate regularly, (2) build trust and show appreciation, and (3) be proactive about maintenance through ongoing assessment.

Anthem Strong Families, Family Service Agency-Santa Barbara, and Gateway Community Action worked with the SIMR team to test and refine strategies to enhance recruitment using rapid cycle learning. Rapid cycle learning is a method for quickly and iteratively testing strategies to strengthen implementation of programming. It often involves successive cycles to pilot strategies, collect feedback from staff and program participants on how these strategies are working, and gather data to demonstrate whether the strategies are supporting improvement. Based on what grant recipients learn, staff can refine and test strategies again in a subsequent learning cycle.

HMRE and similar programs are encouraged to implement the strategies and tools in this brief and refine them to work in their own services and contexts. It is worth noting that these strategies are promising but not proven. To fit these strategies to their contexts, the strategies and tools may need further testing and refinement. Through further testing and evaluation, grant recipients can continue to contribute to insights that benefit the HMRE field.

Daniel Friend, Camila Fernandez, Rebecca Dunn, Armando Yañez, Hannah McInerney, Sheila Cavallo, Scott Baumgartner, Lauren Mattox and Adilia McManus. SIMR Practice Brief: Tips for Leveraging Partnerships to Improve Recruitment for Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs. OPRE Report #2023-053, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.