Guidelines for effective networking

Effective networking requires making contacts with many people over an extended period of time. It is a continuing process of seeking and building relationships.

Here are some guidelines to follow when you network:

• Take a nonpartisan approach.

  • Look for contacts with every person and agency who might have some common interest.
  • Do not restrict yourself to those who initially seem to be the most sympathetic, the closest ideologically, or the easiest to contact.

• Make broad connections.

  • Make contact with anyone who might possibly have some interest in the language program, not just those whose interest seems obvious.
  • Watch the press closely to find out which national and regional agencies are seeking to communicate at the local level.

• Overdevelop connections.

  • Make initial contacts, even though you think they may turn out later to be less than worthwhile. Do not make these judgments before wide-ranging contacts have been made.
  • Err on the side of overdeveloping contacts. In that way, the fruitful contacts will begin to appear.

• Allow time and make repeated contact.

  • Do not give up on contacts too early. It generally takes longer than you think for others to understand the significance and benefits of a language program.

• Principle module: Guidelines for effective networking
• In overview module: Networking issues, by Clinton D. W. Robinson (compiler) and Trudy K. Stewart (compiler)
• In modular book: Prepare for a literacy program, by Stephen L. Walter, Mary Morgan, and Leah B. Walter
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 16 February 1999

© 1999 SIL International