Talking About Collective Impact

Conversation Topic: Transition Strategies/Models

What are some effective strategies or approaches for causing the sort of “mind shift” amongst partners; from isolated impact to collective impact?
Mark Kramer: Creating “urgency for change” or, in other words, a need for a collective impact approach to solving the complex problem at hand is one effective strategy. In some cases, a crisis might have broken out that convinces people of the need of an entirely need approach. There might be the potential for substantial funding that might entice people to work together. Conducting research and publicizing a report that captures media attention and highlights the severity of the problem is another way to create the necessary sense of urgency to persuade people to come together.

Another strategy includes bringing examples of successful examples that have used collective impact to address similar issues. A strategy we use at FSG is a collective impact role play exercise where participants are split into groups of 7, each given a specific role in “education” within a community. For example, one participant might represent a community college president, another participant might represent a student parent, another participant might represent a superintendent, etc. All participants “have their own agenda” and goals but must work together to find common understanding on how to fix the education system in their community. Through these exercise participants are able to see how inter-related each of their problems are, and how a cross sector collaborative approach to addressing failing education across the community is needed.

Talking About Collective Impact

Conversation Topic: Collective Impact ROI

Nonprofits are being held accountable for developing and meeting specific, measurable outcomes, including (and especially) measuring return on investment for their individual programs. There is also a growing movement amongst public and even private funders towards a “pay for performance” model. What implications will this have on developing a collective set of metrics against which success of the collective effort will be measured? How might communities, particularly funders, reconcile conflicting interests?
Mark Kramer: I’m very enthusiastic about the pay for performance model – there are some serious challenges to financing services in advance of getting paid – especially when payment is contingent on results – but it certainly aligns the incentives in the right way if the financing can be managed. One of the interesting side-effects of pay for performance is that the ultimate result often depends on multiple organizations’ efforts, and so it naturally leads to a shared measurement system among multiple organizations that work toward a common definition of success. This again helps align everyone’s incentives behind the ultimate social outcome, rather than their individual organizational agendas.

It is quite true that different funders have different definitions of success – just as different grantees do – and so it is not easy to get agreement on a shared measurement system and single vision of success. But this is just a matter of patient and persistent facilitation. Ultimately, we have seen, time and again, that different funders and grantees can come to agreement on a set of shared measures that are perceived as fair by all participants. Often, it is a pretty basic set of measures: For example, we might argue at length about what a good education looks like, but we can usually agree that basic reading competence by third grade, and math competence in eighth grade, high school graduation, and similar milestones are key indicators of success. Often there is solid academic research to back up what key success factors are on a range of social problems and that can serve as a starting point. Each organization may still have other specific goals it strives to achieve above the common measures, but getting agreement on the basic measures is a huge step forward.

Talking About Collective Impact

Conversation Topic: Identifying Resources

Are there resources to help organizations do a collective impact process to address an issue?
Jeff Edmondson: Communities can find local assets to leverage from a variety of sources. As an example, the backbone organization has three key roles that need to be played and these could come from existing resources:

• Chief “Cat Herder”: Someone who wakes up thinking about this every day. There may be an existing non-profit well positioned to lead such work or a community leader in the Chamber or District recognized for building consensus. Having partners who would be willing to loan or donate such talent is ideal.
• Data Analyst: Universities are ripe to play this role, but corporations often have experts in this area as well who could provide critical support.
• Facilitators: If a funder is interested in a particular outcome, such as kindergarten readiness, they could consider funding an expert facilitator to guide practitioners through the process with the expectation a collaborative action plan will emerge.

Talking About Collective Impact

Conversation Topic: Data Collection

To what extent is the Harlem Children’s Zone an example of collective impact?
Mark Kramer: The Harlem Children’s Zone is a terrific organization, and it certainly embodies the idea that a comprehensive approach – much like Strive’s cradle to career approach – is needed to ensure that children succeed in school and in life. HCZ provides many different services that would typically be provided by different organizations, and it is therefore able to better align its different activities in mutually reinforcing ways just like a collective impact initiative.

But HCZ is still just one organization – however remarkable it may be. It does not engage other nonprofits, corporations and school districts as full participants in designing the solution. It operates in a relatively small geographical area, much smaller than many of the collective impact initiatives we have studied – which include global examples like GAIN in our newest article — and it depends on the remarkable leadership of Geoffrey Canada rather than a dispersed model of leadership in which all the organizations involved share accountability. So, we see it as capturing some of the benefits of collective impact but it isn’t really a full example of it.