NAMI North Carolina Affiliate Tool Kit | How Affiliates Get Things Done

Most of the work of our affiliates gets planned, organized and accomplished by committees. Your board decides how many committees your affiliate needs and their leaders, sizes, names and areas of responsibility, based on available personnel and service priorities.

How your affiliate organizes and assigns jobs is up to your board. The important thing is to get the jobs done. To help your members do their jobs better, please share with them the appropriate lists of tasks, notes and tips which follow.

Notes for Committee Heads: Making Committee Assignments

• As committee chairperson, your job is to plan programs and projects and see that tasks get done on schedule.
• You are not expected to do all the tasks yourself. Instead, give members a chance to get involved by taking on specific task assignments.
• Recruit enough committee members to handle tasks comfortably.
• Assign tasks so that all committee members get to make a meaningful, manageable contribution to the program or project.
• Assign tasks based on members’ experience, skills, interests and available time.
• Prepare written lists of responsibilities, guidelines and goals for committee members.
• Check with members regularly to see that work is proceeding on schedule.

Committees Providing Support Services

The committee or committees in charge of your affiliate’s various support services are responsible for functions including—

• Appointing one or more members to serve as the affiliate contact.
• Appointing additional referral contacts within your affiliate to support young families and consumers.
• Seeing that interested affiliate members participate in family support training to prepare affiliate members to lead support groups.
• Organizing ongoing family support groups led by trained facilitators.
• Organizing ongoing support groups run by and for mental health care consumers.

What the Affiliate Contact Does

• Answers all calls to the affiliate’s contact number within 24 hours.
• Understands support services offered by the affiliate and promotes them to callers by inviting them to attend an upcoming support group meeting.
• Knows about the affiliate’s upcoming educational programs and, when appropriate, invites the caller to attend.
• Researches and develops relationships with local and area mental health care providers and agencies for referrals.
• Provides basic information to the caller about available resources.
• Refers the caller to other individuals and organizations as needed.
• Consults with the state and national help lines as needed to solve callers’ problems.
• Mails the affiliate’s brochure to callers.
• Records callers’ names and contact information to be added to the affiliate’s mailing list.

How you handle your response to the first contact determines the caller’s first and lasting impression of our entire organization. In a crisis, your ability to respond quickly and effectively to a caller who needs immediate help can even save lives.

Besides helping callers solve problems, the affiliate contact is critical to the long-term health and vitality of the affiliate. The vast majority of NAMI members initially contact our organization for support. Whether the caller ultimately becomes a productive affiliate member often depends on the quality of your affiliate’s telephone support services. If your provide excellent support services at this early stage, you’ll be laying the groundwork for your affiliate’s future growth and success.

Notes for Affiliate Contacts: About Getting the Job Done

If you agree to be the affiliate contact—

• You must be willing to receive telephone calls.
• You must be knowledgeable about community services and referral procedures.
• You must be accessible most of the time.
• You must be willing to see that callers receive appropriate support materials, such as brochures and newsletters.
• If you are away from your telephone often or for hours at a time, you need an answering machine or voice mail service.
• Return calls as promptly as possible.
• Some affiliates have two or three contact persons who share responsibility for responding to inquiries.
• A natural division of labor could be between a telephone contact, a U.S. mail contact and an email contact.
• You may prefer to allocate responsibilities based on the contact person’s knowledge or experiences with a particular disorder.
• You may assign one contact person to handle questions concerning adults with mental illness and another to handle questions from parents of children and adolescents with severe emotional disorders and mental illnesses.

Notes for Affiliate Contacts: About Those Questions You’re Supposed to Answer

Your first message to callers should be, “You are not alone.” Listen patiently and sympathetically to callers’ problems and concerns. For some callers, simply talking to another person who understands is their reason for contacting you.

Besides listening to and comforting callers, you have a job to do for your affiliate as well. Before hanging up, you need to have—

• Written down the caller’s name, telephone number and mailing address.
• Offered to mail a brochure.
• Offered to add the caller to the newsletter mailing list.
• Described all affiliate services that might be helpful to the caller.
• Invited the caller to attend an upcoming meeting.
• You’re not expected to know the answers to all the callers’ questions. You just have to know which people and organizations do have the answers. Your job is to refer the callers to the best sources of help.
• Many callers have first contacted the state office. Our staff has suggested they call you for help with accessing local services, including those of your affiliate. That’s why it’s especially important for you to learn as much as you can about local resources.
• Keep a list of local referral contacts and affiliate members willing to provide telephone support in their areas of experience or expertise
• You can always call the help line yourself on behalf of callers to your local contact number for suggestions on how to answer more difficult questions.
• After you conclude the call, get any materials you said you’d send into the mail and on their way to the caller.
• Pass the caller’s name and address along to the member who maintains your mailing list.
• Follow up with the caller as needed.

What Family Support Group Coordinators Do

• Organize and conduct support group meetings.
• Make sure a trained facilitator is available to lead all meetings.
• Encourage experienced affiliate members to attend and share their insights at support group meetings.

Committees Providing Education Services

Here are some of the responsibilities and tasks for the committee or committees your board appoints to help provide education services—

• Recognizes and responds to members’ varying needs by planning both basic educational programs for newer members and more advanced programs for established members.
• Plans special events to educate the general public about mental illness.
• Recruits affiliate members to teach family and community education courses.
• Identifies and plans educational programs for people, groups and agencies in the community who often deal with mentally ill people and their families.
• Recruits members to receive training to present the NAMI Campaign to End Discrimination’s Science & Treatment Program to area church, business and civic groups. (Contact the NAMI national office for more information on the campaign.)
• Tracks news and researches current information on mental illnesses and their treatment.
• Collects books, brochures, fact sheets and copies of relevant news and feature stories and makes them available to members and prospective members through the affiliate’s lending library.
• Provides the affiliate contact with a current list of library resources and sends them to callers as requested by the affiliate contact.
• Provides members of the Advocacy Committee with a current list of library resources and sends them to legislators as needed.
• Recommends and/or supplies resources to the local public library.

Advocacy at the Affiliate Level

Your board appoints a legislative contact for your affiliate to receive and pass along information from the state and national offices concerning political issues, key legislative events and votes.

Among the legislative contact’s suggested tasks—

• Passes along information and recommendations to members from the state and national offices for appropriate actions.
• Cultivates direct, personal relationships with their representatives and senators from both parties in the state legislature and the United States Congress. Ideally, you should be able to call a legislator’s office and have the staff and the legislator recognize your name and recall your association with NAMI.
• Follows actions by city and county governments and local agencies and alerts the state office staff to events and situations of concern within the community.

Notes for Legislative Contacts: Helping Affiliate Members Understand the Issues

• While the state office is responsible for helping you understand critical issues, you are responsible for helping your affiliate members understand them.
• Most important issues of statewide interest are covered in the state newsletter.
• If you have questions or don’t understand an issue, call the state office staff and ask for an explanation.

Affiliate Fund Raising

One or more of your affiliate committees handles these fund-raising tasks—

• Plans and organizes fund-raising events
• Researches business and community foundations
• Prepares and submits grant proposals

Notes for Affiliate Fund Raisers: About Those Special Events

• Fund-raising events can be strictly for raising money, or they can combine fund-raising with education.
• Types of special events and fund raising projects your affiliate might sponsor include—
• Campaigns to sell greeting cards, gift-wrapping paper, art, plants and bulbs, concessions at special events, doughnuts, candy or other merchandise
• Raffles
• Dinner dances
• Golf or tennis tournaments

Committees Providing Member Services

Your board may create committees and task forces or appoint individual members to handle these member services tasks—

• Recruit new members for the affiliate and help them get involved in affiliate activities.
• Encourage current members to renew their memberships.
• Publish the affiliate newsletter.
• Organize a telephone tree to get urgent messages to members quickly.
• Find suitable locations for meetings.
• Welcome visitors to meetings.
• Provide refreshments for meetings.
• Prepare, distribute and report to the board on the annual member survey.
• Organize a nominating committee or task force to develop a slate of officers each year.

Member Services Notes: About Recruiting New Members & Retaining Current Ones

• Work with the affiliate contact to see that everyone who approaches your affiliate receives a brochure containing descriptions of affiliate services and a membership application.
• Work with the treasurer to encourage current members to send in their dues.
• Talk informally to members about their levels of satisfaction with the services they are receiving and pass along any noteworthy comments to the appropriate committee head.
• Contact members who drop out of groups or stop attending meetings to determine if they need the affiliate’s help. Try to determine if they dropped out for a particular reason and if possible, try to help resolve any misunderstandings and encourage them to return.

Member Services Notes: About Your Meeting Facility

• Having support meetings and general meetings in the same place simplifies things.
• Ideally, the facility you choose will accommodate small support groups as well as large educational programs.
• Libraries and churches are often willing to provide meeting space for nonprofit groups.
• Once you’ve found a good meeting place, stick with it. Changing meeting locations can be confusing to participants and may result in loss of members.

Notes for New Member Contacts: Integrating New Members into the Affiliate

• Most affiliates function somewhat as a family unit. The bond that develops among affiliate members of long-standing is closer than friendship.
• Members of your affiliate “family” may unintentionally slight newcomers who sense the close ties and feel left out.
• Assign a member to greet and introduce visitors and new members at meetings.
• Remind members to help make newcomers’ experiences with the affiliate positive and helpful.
• Determine the newcomer’s needs, interests and skills and encourage the appropriate committee head to invite him or her to join a committee.
• Consider assigning a mentor to help the newcomer get involved.
• Remember some newcomers take longer to become part of the group than others. Don’t pressure newcomers into joining committees before they’re ready.

Notes for Member Services: Issuing Alerts to Affiliate Members

• From time to time, the affiliate’s legislative contact will need to issue a Legislative Alert to all affiliate members.
• Alerts from the state office to the legislative contact are bare-bones directives for action. They assume the legislative contact fully understands the issues involved.
• The legislative contact is responsible for educating affiliate members about the issues.
• With help from the legislative contact, make sure the telephone tree volunteers who help get the word out to your members understand the issues well enough to answer basic questions about the call to action.

Community Relations for Your Affiliate

Sometimes referred to as a public relations or public affairs function, the community relations tasks your affiliate undertakes may include—

• Establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with selected individuals and organizations in the community.
• Drafting letters to editors of area newspapers to address key issues.
• Drafting news releases about affiliate programs, services and special events.
• Coordinating the affiliate’s participation in community special events.
• Organizing and operating a Speakers Bureau for the affiliate.
• Encouraging interested members to receive training to present the NAMI Campaign to End Discrimination Science & Treatment Kit program for business and civic groups.
• Encouraging interested members to teach educators about working with students who have severe emotional disorders and mental illnesses.

Community Relations Notes: About Your Affiliate’s Relationship with Your State Mental Health Agency

• The best measure of the effectiveness of your affiliate’s community relations effort is your relationship with your State Mental Health Agency.
• In dealing with agency staff members, remember they are usually overworked and underpaid.
• Unless you have clear, unquestionable evidence to the contrary, give agency staff members the benefit of the doubt and assume they have consumers’ and families’ best interests at heart.
• Remember it is to your benefit and in the best interests of the mental health care consumers you represent to maintain good, productive relationships with staff members.
• Encourage staff members to refer prospective members to your affiliate.
• Take a positive, problem-solving approach when you have questions or are lodging complaints.
• Try to find ways you can work together to resolve problems to everyone’s satisfaction.
• Don’t limit your contact with agency staff members to complaints. Be sure to pass along compliments and thank them when you hear they’ve been especially helpful to an affiliate member.
• Identify common goals, such as better funding for mental health care services in your community, and work cooperatively to achieve them.
• Ask staff members to suggest projects your affiliate could undertake to help them provide better care for consumers.

Community Relations Notes: About Your Affiliate’s Contacts with Advocacy Groups

As a NAMI affiliate, you have much in common with local chapters of other groups, such as the Mental Health Association, the Psychiatric Association, the Psychological Association, and the Mental Health Consumers’ Organization. While NAMI shares many goals with these organizations, there are definite, sometimes subtle differences in philosophies, mission and opinions about the best approaches to achieving those goals.

Here are a few examples of differences—

• The Alzheimer’s Disease Association does not refer to Alzheimer’s as a mental illness, even though Alzheimer’s is a biologically-based disease of the brain.
• The Epilepsy Association does not refer to epilepsy as a mental illness, although epilepsy can cause symptoms of mental illness.
• The Mental Health Association, the Psychiatric Association, and the Psychological Association are committed to addressing all sorts of emotional disturbances, as well as illnesses designated as severe and persistent. They advocate for talk therapy for those suffering personal difficulties (whose crises may indeed be debilitating) with the same zeal as they advocate for services for those individuals who have severe and persistent mental illness.
• The Head Injury Foundation does not refer to their clients as having mental illness, although they might have the same symptoms as persons with mental illness. They do not offer services to individuals who suffered brain damage before birth who may also have mental illness resulting from that brain damage.

To work most effectively with other groups, your affiliate must understand and acknowledge key differences between those groups and NAMI.

Community Relations Notes: About Those Other Community Contacts

• Identify people in your community who come in frequent contact with mental health care consumers and their families and establish relationships with them.
• Before you approach potential community contacts, think through the benefits of a relationship with your affiliate from the prospective contact’s perspective.
• Emphasize the benefits your affiliate can provide to the individual or organization when you approach a potential contact.
• Provide community contacts with clear, concise information about your affiliate’s services.
• Ask your newsletter editor to put the community contact on the mailing list and ask to be placed on the contact’s mailing list.
• Follow up with contacts periodically.

Community Relations Notes: About Those Media Contacts

• Contact area newspapers and television news departments to compile a list of health and medical reporters, features editors and community calendar editors by name.
• Develop some basic fact sheets listing officers’ names, contact information, services provided, a brief description of your mission and purpose, highlights of your history, etc. Providing this information in writing helps cut down on errors, misspelled names and misleading or incomplete program descriptions.
• Bring major news concerning mental illness to media contacts’ attention with a brief call or letter.
• Offer to provide more information if they’re interested, and if you say you’ll send information, do so promptly.
• Refer reporters to the state or national NAMI office when appropriate, or get the information the reporter needs from the state or national office yourself and forward it to the reporter.
• Be prepared to respond immediately to requests from editors and reporters working on deadline.
• After publication or broadcast, send a thank you note to editors and reporters who cover your events or use your story ideas.