Everyone has collaboration horror stories — organizations with competing objectives that can’t agree on common goals, turf battles where everyone is so busy protecting their ground that nothing gets done, or projects that undergo a slow death by committee. These experiences feel like you’re trudging down a long and winding road to nowhere, and end up wasting everyone’s time.

But some things can only happen through the coordinated commitment of many people toward a goal. In the health communication and marketing field, we’re all working toward helping people live healthy lives. Because many of the issues we are trying to affect are so complex, one organization usually cannot do it alone. An ongoing, sustained effort on many fronts is necessary to keep people’s attention and ultimately motivate them to adopt healthy behaviors.

The health and social marketing field offers many issues and opportunities for us to come together, which will benefit us all:

• Sharing information and resources with each other to avoid reinventing the wheel – Learning from each other about what works to create a successful campaign (and what doesn’t work) allows us to benefit from others’ experiences and build on them. Disseminating links to news articles, how-tos, worksheets and other useful content spreads the wealth and helps everyone do their job more effectively.

• Promoting the effectiveness of marketing tools in tackling health issues – The more organizations, funders, and policymakers who understand the role that social marketing can play in bringing about widespread change on health indicators, the better it will be for all of us. We can’t use these effective tools unless we have the funding to support this type of intervention.

• Supporting the professional institutions that advance the field – Whether it’s making a commitment to be part of a professional network like the fledgling Global Social Marketing Association or rallying around the CDC’s National Center for Health Marketing as it’s slated to be eliminated, the field is fortified through our participation. Our strength in numbers can translate to greater influence and effectiveness in public health and health care issues.

• Defending the field from threats to its integrity – When people misuse terms like social marketing to mean something substantially different, it devalues and dilutes the work we do. When others create shoddy communications and call it a health or social marketing program, it affects how people think about our own work. We need to be able to come together to ensure that others understand what we do and why we use this approach, or they will dismiss our efforts as something they are not.

To achieve these high-minded objectives, we need something to bring us together and facilitate our collaboration. The online network being created as part of the Path of the Blue Eye will connect health marketing and communications professionals directly to each other so we can talk, plan and share. Thus the long and winding road of collaboration is being transformed into the shortest distance between two points. Walk the path with us!

Photo Credit: hebedesign

Read More from Walking the Path:

1. Sarah Ragsdale on Collaboration
2. Collaboration – The Time is Now
3. How Ángel González is Leveraging Community and Collaboration to Push Europe into the Social Age