Protecting Others by Investing in Themselves

When an organization focused on improving our national immunization and vaccine systems wants to improve itself, where does it turn?

“To support healthy communities, the American Immunization Registry Association started with self-diagnosis.”

The Challenge

The American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) is a membership organization that promotes immunization information systems to prevent and control vaccine-preventable diseases. After expanding rapidly to meet the demands of the healthcare system, AIRA’s growth accelerated further during the vaccine-driven response to COVID-19 pandemic. Despite adding programs and staff, the organization didn’t have time to appropriately scale its internal structures. AIRA turned to The Collective Good for help evolving their organizational design to sustain their growth.

AIRA’s dedication and readiness to pitch in was inspiring. Still, before planning for the future, we had to better understand what working there looked and felt like in the moment.

Future Caucus has an audacious mission to activate young leaders, bridge the partisan divide, and transform American politics. Entering the pandemic, they welcomed a new leader and new team members. With this in mind and the increasing polarization of policymaking, Future Caucus had an opportunity to engage and grow its membership.

The Approach

Our team embarked on an in-depth review of AIRA’s current operations, designed to surface the relationships between four key elements of any organization: work, culture, people, and structure. This approach is grounded in the Tushman-Nadler Congruence Model, which finds that the stronger the alignment between these four elements, the higher the performance. Using the congruence framework also helps locate any tensions that need to be resolved, so that we can work with organizations to prioritize and design solutions more strategically.

We know that we have to go deep to learn what’s really going on. The Collective Good team kicked off the diagnostic process by familiarizing ourselves with the structure and current processes at AIRA, from their strategic plan to compensation to organizational charts. We interviewed team members across divisions and surveyed the entire staff about their experiences and what they saw as opportunities for change.

As with all of our projects, hearing from the people closest to the work is a critical step to truly understand the strengths, pain points, and opportunities to improve systems. In doing so, we captured a range of perspectives about how work is prioritized, delegated, and completed across the organization. This helped us identify areas of greatest alignment and misalignment across AIRA and among the team. We used a congruence framework to analyze our findings through a lens of alignment (or misalignment) between strategy, structure, work and people/culture. We then held deep dive conversations with leaders across the organization, digging into challenges and co-developing ideas for solutions and next steps.

Co-creating a strategy that centered the voices and needs of the Future Caucus community of young legislators. Our analysis provided an understanding of:

  • Future Caucus’ North Star to remove the barriers young legislators face in order to build a more inclusive and effective democracy
  • Systemic challenges that legislators face including minimal leadership training, absence of mentors, insufficient time and opportunity to focus on innovative policy solutions, and difficulty connecting with the voters who’d most likely be energized by collaborative, productive leadership
  • Future Caucus’ unique positioning in the space to tailor support and position young policymakers to engage across the aisle

From this process, Future Caucus gained a clearer focus on building a constituency for inclusive governing and amplifying new narratives.

The Results

The Collective Good synthesized the congruence findings and discussions, and delivered a detailed set of recommendations to guide AIRA in its ongoing growth. Our plan included actionable next steps and a toolkit for achieving the infrastructure and culture shifts that AIRA’s staff had collectively prioritized. It also reflected the themes that emerged during our work together:

1) Accepting meaningful challenges by promoting DEI and shifting leadership practices

2) Trusting in existing strengths by exploring new revenue options and strategy

3) Valuing its talent by engaging and listening to staff

By following this roadmap, we are confident that AIRA can position themselves for success and mature into their next phase as a larger organization.

Our Partnership:

  • Renewed Future Caucus’ vision of restored public trust in democracy, improved public leadership, and more representative public policy
  • Crafted an ambitious 5-year strategy with key performance indicators to ensure accountability and track progress
  • Strengthened collaboration between staff and the Board around key strategies, including:
    - Amplifying models of bipartisan public service
    - Activating and connecting their network
    - Building a high-performing organization that exudes their values and ethos

From this process, Future Caucus gained a clearer focus on building a constituency for inclusive governing and amplifying new narratives.

“When we engage all parts of the organization, we can generate collective insight.”

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