1208: How Public Health Agencies Can Build Better Partner Relationships

JOHN SHEEHAN: 

This is Public Health Review Morning Edition for Friday, September 18, 2026. I'm John Sheehan with news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

 

Public health agencies rely on strong relationships with community organizations and partners, but fragmented outreach can leave those partners overwhelmed by repeated surveys, meetings, and requests from different parts of the same agency. Today, Anna Bradley, senior analyst for Public Health Infrastructure and Performance Improvement at ASTHO, discusses how customer relationship management, or CRM, approaches can help agencies coordinate engagement and reduce burden to strengthen partnerships.

 

ANNA BRADLEY: 

Public health runs on relationships. CRM gives us a way to manage those relationships intentionally. So it's not so much in public health about using CRM to manage customers, although public health agencies obviously do have customers. But it's also about being an intentional steward of relationships with our customers, but also with our partners, and really the thing that kind of got us started on this path to make this product, you know, we got a lot of requests around a similar challenge in a similar time frame last summer. We try to be responsive to the technical assistance needs we hear from health agencies, and a lot of people contacted us in a short amount of time asking, how do we coordinate engagement with our partners better? You know, how do we avoid overwhelming the same partners with communications and meetings? We always have surveys going out, right? Public health loves our surveys. We want to get our feedback. It's an important part of our work, and so it was an opportunity to investigate more about how can we use some of these tools from this more, like sales- and business-world perspective, to help support the work of a public health agency because it is so community-focused and partnership-driven.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Gotcha, and that makes a lot of sense because in business you've got to handle your relationships with stakeholders and partners and customers, and you know the same same issues arise in public health.

 

BRADLEY: 

Absolutely.

 

SHEEHAN: 

And so, how does it work functionally for a public health agency engaging one of these CRMs?

 

BRADLEY: 

Well, there are certainly a lot of out-of-the-box CRM software tools that a public health agency could pursue. The toolkit does mention some of those as options. However, there are also a lot of no- or low-cost options that a person could use, for example, in an Excel or Google spreadsheet, just to manage their partnerships in a different way, to track those partnerships in a different way, and to also evaluate those partnerships. So it's more than just the software and implementing software or even enterprise software across an agency; even at the individual, you know, person-level at a program, a person certainly doesn't need to pursue an agency-wide CRM software solution. They can also be doing work at their own level to think about how to improve the way that they are tracking their communication and thinking about the partners that they're engaging with, thinking about their partnership experience. That won't involve actually putting a CRM software tool into practice.

 

SHEEHAN: 

And a theme of the toolkit and of your work has been to reduce the burden on those partners that have to interface with, you know, different parts of the agency, maybe multiple pieces of the agency. So, what are some common frustrations that you hear from partners who have had to sort of navigate a fractured public health environment?

 

BRADLEY: 

You know, it's really common that, especially when we're talking about specific public health topics, you know, you end up getting the same people at the table at a time, right? You pull together a group of people to talk about, let's say, roadway safety and injury prevention, and the people at that meeting have inevitably recently come from a meeting also talking about that topic from all of their different organizations hosted by a different entity, maybe, but also maybe from the public health agency itself. So you frequently are moving basically an entire group of people from one coalition meeting to the next, and it tends to be a lot of the same people doing that type of work. So if you are in a community organization, a community-based organization, one program at the health department sends you a survey, and then another program asks you to show up to participate in a listening session, and then another program asks you to come to a coalition meeting, and they are looking for new partners to be on, let's say, a steering committee to support a new grant that they just received, and so from inside the agency that. Feels like three completely separate projects, three completely separate asks, and from the partner's perspective, it might be that they're all coming from the same health department, and you also want to be able to say yes to those things, right? Public health is more than just the governmental agency and community partners, community organizations. Lots of different types of sectors are also participating in public health and often have the same perspective: we want to participate, right? We see this need in our community, so those partners continue to step up and step up and step up. And so, you know, how can you help respect their time, respect their investment in the process, and also have the needs of the agency met, because those are real needs as well, to get that partner feedback. So you want someone to not feel like they're they've just answered that survey or why are they asking again or I just showed up to a meeting now what meeting is this you know don't you guys ever talk to each other so there's opportunity there for improvement and sometimes even within one program right so again it doesn't have to be agency wide, but I think even within a smaller sub-unit of the agency, being able to really think through what is it that we're asking people, who are we asking, and how can we be doing this better, so so that it's an intentional relationship management approach and not reactive, or something that feels to a partner like a lot of different agencies are contacting them when it's really just one health department.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Yeah, and it also provides an opportunity: if your agency is maybe unintentionally making a lot of duplicative efforts to one shareholder or one partner, you know, it's an opportunity to identify. You know, maybe it's time to get some new voices or find different community members or community voices to engage with, rather than hitting the same people over and over and over again.

 

BRADLEY: 

Absolutely, I think that having an intentional approach at whatever scale is appropriate, if it's just like one program, if it's agency wide, whatever it is, having an intentional approach creates opportunities to have those conversations. Like, who are we missing in the conversation? Who haven't we spoken to in a while? I think that it can also create opportunities for programs sharing relationships with each other. So let's say that there's a program that really needs to get work done in a clinical setting, but doesn't have any strong clinical partnerships. And meanwhile, there's another program across the health agency that is working really strongly with the clinical setting, right? And so, how can we leverage those partnerships to help amplify work and get more good work done in the community to improve the community's health, without making it feel like that existing partnership is in some way at risk of being overburdened or over-tasked. Right? I think sometimes we can feel really protective of our partners, the people that we work with outside of our agency. We want to protect their time. Right? If they have really been showing up for us, we don't want them to start to feel like they're getting asked a lot of questions. And so, how can we do that work well and intentionally and continue to support the work as a whole, as opposed to feeling like there's something at risk? I think an intentional approach just helps surface those conversations and make a plan.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Sure, and you know, maybe ultimately, ideally, you know if every if your relationship management is is really humming along, that creates opportunities to you know not just reduce administrative burden, but to just you know strengthen the overall system.

 

BRADLEY: 

That's so true. You know, I think it's important that you know again it's a it's called the CRM toolkit, but it's less about picking a specific CRM. Although that is kind of questions you can ask and conversations you can have to get to that place are included in the toolkit. But we hope that the intention that comes across is really that the goal isn't more engagement; it's better, more coordinated, more respectful engagement that really supports that idea of connection before collaboration, and also, like, sustainability of contacts. Right, when one person leaves an agency, then the information about the relationship that the agency was building is easy is more easily transferred to a new person for them to take responsibility of, right? So it's it's the system of of how the agency and how the program is interacting, and less so about like creating more, just doing it in a more intentional way that is more sustainable and more coordinated, I think, is a really good way of putting it.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Yeah, are there any practices or technologies on the horizon that you can see like really contributing to that that relationship management?

 

BRADLEY: 

There's always this impulse, you know, me, in my own personal life, even with my own friends and coworkers, I'm always looking for maybe there's a system or solution or a tool. Is there an app that will make this better? And yes, there might be. Certainly, there's a lot of CRM technology options out there. I think it's getting easier and easier to use tools internally that are no-cost or low-cost. A lot of agencies already use Microsoft programs; for example, they can access Microsoft like SharePoint lists, make a way to connect all those lists with each other. They make a relational database in SharePoint. It's getting easier and easier for people without experience in those processes to access information to help them make their own tools. So certainly the technology is evolving. There's also something that's really kind of basic and human about connecting with other people, right? And I think one of the main takeaways is we have to be intentional and thoughtful about the way that we're connecting with our partners. We're connecting with other humans in our community, working to improve our communities. One of the ways to do that is by being intentional, being thoughtful about their time. You know, we need to be thoughtful about, how can we maintain relationships in between needs? How can we maintain relationships in between emergencies, before emergencies? I think we need to be thoughtful about what our partners are doing, that's how is this a two-way street, right? What are our partners doing that the agency can also be supporting, so it's not constantly asking out, but also responding in kind to asks made of us, and having intentional strategies and intentional conversations about partnerships help with those types of needs to make sure that all of a sudden you're not thinking, oh my goodness, we haven't done anything collaborative with this organization in years. We've just been asking and asking and asking, and now they're not willing to show up at the table anymore, right? So I think it's there's something that's about the intentionality and the human level of connection that sometimes we need systems to help support, and there are systems and examples in this toolkit to help think that through, less so than a specific technology.

 

SHEEHAN: 

And so, related to that big takeaway for the toolkit, what would be one practical step that an agency or an official could take towards improving their internal system?

 

BRADLEY: 

You know, I think that one of the biggest takeaways for me is just remembering that getting more done with less, as we're all being asked to do, as we all have been asked to do for a long time, does not need to translate into asking more and more of the same partners. I think that starting small and picking just pick just one relationship management problem that you can solve, and maybe it's just like a sticky thing for you personally and how you're managing your program, and all of the networks that you're coordinating to try to get your work done, and build from there. I think always the best advice is to just start small. Take what you need from the toolkit. Take what is serving you in this moment to solve that one relationship problem, and leave the rest for now. You know, it doesn't need to be a big agency-wide quality improvement project right now, right? It can just be what's what's one thing that I can do to make this feel less sticky and complicated for me and the people that I'm interacting with on a daily basis, and then letting it build from there. I think is a perfectly reasonable place to start.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Anna Bradley, thanks so much.

 

BRADLEY: 

Thank you.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Anna Bradley is a senior analyst for Public Health Infrastructure and Performance Improvement at ASTHO. You can read more about this ASTHO toolkit titled, "Leveraging Customer Relationship Management to Advance Public Health," by clicking on the link in the show notes.

 

Check out the ASTHO brief titled, "Harder for Us, Easier for Them: Key Strategies to Improve Administrative Burden," it's a companion to the blog, "Harder for Us, Easier for Them: How Wisconsin is Reducing Administrative Burden on Local Health Departments," summarizing the key strategies and considerations that states can replicate to improve the administrative burden of grant management on local and tribal health departments, the link is in the show notes.

 

Public Good Projects (PGP) is hosting a webinar on the communications challenges shaping the fall's respiratory virus season, featuring insights from ASTHO member and Chief Medical Executive for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Natasha Bagdasarian, as well as new research from PGP's Epidemiology Initiative. The event will examine emerging public narratives, common communication pitfalls, and practical strategies to help public health professionals communicate more effectively this season. Register at the link in the show notes.

 

This has been Public Health Review Morning Edition. I'm John Sheehan for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.