Communication Strategies

The external key stakeholders of the Institute for Family Health are listed below in approximate order of decreasing saliency. Our Brysons and Knoxs analyses indicate the potential to engage new external stakeholders. In the sections below, we have highlighted the roles and relative importance of our external stakeholders and how to enhance their contributions to the organizations success. We have also mentioned where relevant, the opportunities to engage new stakeholders and the criteria our stakeholders use to judge us.

The Government
The government is our most influential external stakeholder because we depend heavily on federal and state funds to run our programs. However, our SWOTC analysis indicated that Federal and State Agencies and Elected Public Officials are less aware of our charitable programs in underserved communities. We need to increase publicity for our charitable programs in order to justify the need for additional funds from the government.

Private Donors
Private donors are the second largest financiers of the Institute for Family Health. Our SWOTC showed that our private funds have only been in the form of cash donations from individual philanthropists and corporate bodies, mainly the Care for the Homeless and the Ryan White. The organization needs to also look out for non-monetary donations such as free equipment and advertisement sponsorships from other interested organizations.

Patients
The level satisfactions our patients get indicate the quality the service we provide. Unfortunately, the feedbacks we get from our patients hardly go outside the organization. We need to get our patients to share their success stories to the general public with the media and potential donors in order to gain more advertisement time and financial support.

Training Partners
Family physicians complement our work by running our Beth Israel and Mid-Hudson Family Practice Residency Programs, through which we train family physicians to serve as leaders in their communities. Our Public health educators also sensitize and link teens from local schools in the South Bronx with community health centers to increase their use of reproductive health services and to subsequently reduce the rate of teen pregnancy. Unfortunately, our trainees are very few so we need to recruit more in order to meet the increasing demands for our training programs.

Universities
The Institute for Family Health operates two free clinics for the uninsured in partnership with students from two of New Yorks premiere medical schools. At the NYC Free Clinic in Manhattan we work with students from New York University at the ECHOWalton Free Clinic in the Bronx we work with students from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. However, many other medical schools are unaware of us, so we need to engage them to expand our free clinics.

Paid Interns
Institute for Family Health engages AmeriCorps in a variety of projects that promote access to health care and health information in medically underserved communities. The organization also runs the Area Health Education Center (AHEC) internships for African Americans and Latinos in order to increase the number of health professionals from under-represented groups. We have realized that we can expand our internship base by creating voluntary internship opportunities for interested community groups to understand our work and support our fundraising activities.