AccessMatters (formerly Family Planning Council)

CHALLENGES: Founded to distribute family planning funds, over decades Family Planning Council (FPC) had greatly expanded its health care services and target audiences. Misunderstood, undervalued, and siloed, it needed to identify a differentiating purpose and a meaningful link between services to raise awareness, launch private fundraising and increase internal cohesion.

Insights: Supplying services to a vast network of health care providers (from major hospitals to faith-based clinics) gave Family Planning Council a unique and highly valued vantage point enabling it to identify and address barriers to care- geographic, cultural, social and economic. Also, FPC had realized that some of its services are business-to-consumer providing direct outreach, testing, and information to consumers.  However, it had not recognized that many of its services are business-to-business capacity building, with impact stretching far beyond its home region.  In addition, it became apparent that employees felt that health care providers were “king”.  They did not understand the critical role that FPC played in providing access to care.

 Solution: “Reorganized” around the mindset of providing  greater access to sexual and reproductive care for adults and teens in need.  Renamed it AccessMatters. After working with data from the CFO, we substantiated and demonstrated “access” by calculating its enormous impact quantitatively and developed a complete communications program, including shifts in language and expressions.

Results: Greater clarity raised the external profile and positioned the agency for expanded capacity building work to strengthen its field of public health.   The work enabled silos to break down and united various program teams by focusing on the common threads and themes of their work, so that employees gained a new perspective, and it set the stage for private fundraising.