Section 5. Collective Impact

 

Many funders and health and human service organizations aim to make progress on large and complex social problems – such as improving educational outcomes for all children, reducing homelessness, or improving community health outcomes. This has proved challenging for all of us.

This community-level work goes by different names and associated models – including collaborative action, community mobilization, and comprehensive initiatives. One version of this approach is known as “collective impact.” Collective impact refers to the commitment of participants and organizations from different sectors to a common agenda for addressing a specific social problem at scale. Like other models in Chapter 2 of the Community Tool Box, this section aims to provide an overview of this approach and links to resources for its implementation.

 

WHY USE A COLLECTIVE IMPACT APPROACH?

A premise of the collective impact approach is that not all problems are created equal – some are simple, some are more complicated, and some are truly complex. Each type requires a somewhat different approach to solving it.

• An example of a simple problem is baking a cake – the right “recipe” is essential, but once you’ve discovered it, replication will get you almost the same result every time.
• An example of a complicated problem is sending a rocket to the moon – the right “protocols and formulas” are needed, as are high levels of expertise and training. Experience is built over time to get to the right result, which can be repeated with the expectation of success.
• An example of a complex problem is raising a child – there are no “right” recipes or protocols that work in every situation. There are many outside factors that influence the situation, and every situation is unique. Experience helps, but in no way guarantees success.

A single service program may be quite appropriate for addressing problems that are simple or only somewhat complicated. Collective impact, however, is an approach to addressing complex social problems.

Taking a collective impact approach requires moving away from more isolated ways that service organizations may attempt to address problems. Isolated approaches to making an impact on outcomes often look like this:

• Funders select individual grantees.
• Organizations seeking to implement change work separately and often compete with one another for funding.
• Evaluation is structured to isolate a particular organization’s impact to show progress.
• Large-scale change is assumed to depend upon scaling individual organizations or interventions.
• Business and public sectors are not heavily involved in the process.

Like other approaches to collaborative action, the collective impact approach engages multiple participants in working together to address complex social problems:

• Funders and implementers understand that social problems – and their solutions – arise from the interaction of many organizations and community forces within a larger system.
• Organizations actively coordinate their actions and share lessons learned.
• Progress depends on working toward the same goal and measuring the same things.
• Large-scale change depends on increasing cross-sector alignment and learning among many organizations.
• Business and public sectors are essential partners.

​What Is Collective Impact?

As noted above, collective impact is the commitment of participants and organizations from different sectors to a common agenda for addressing a specific social problem at scale.

Organizations and communities have used collective impact approaches for years. Collective impact initiatives generally incorporate five conditions associated with their success:

• Common Agenda
  • All participants share a vision for change that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to addressing it through agreed-upon actions.
• Shared Measurement
  • All participating organizations agree on the ways success will be measured and reported, with a short list of common indicators identified and used for learning and improvement.
• Mutually Reinforcing Activities
  • A diverse set of stakeholders, typically across sectors, coordinate differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action.
• Continuous Communication
  • All participants engage in frequent and structured open communication to build trust, maintain shared objectives, and create common motivation.
• Backbone Support
  • Dedicated, funded staff provide ongoing support to the initiative by helping guide its vision and strategy, supporting aligned activities, establishing shared measurement practices, building public will, advancing policy, and mobilizing resources.

Below is a selected list of Community Tool Box resources that support implementation of a collective impact approach.

Common Agenda

• Toolkit 3: Analyzing Problems and Goals
• Toolkit 7: Developing an Intervention
• Chapter 2, Section 9: Community Readiness
• Chapter 2, Section 13: MAPP: Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships
• Toolkit 5: Developing Strategic and Action Plans
• Chapter 8, Section 1: An Overview of Strategic Planning or “VMOSA” (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Action Plans)
• Chapter 8, Section 2: Proclaiming Your Dream: Developing Vision and Mission Statements

Shared Measurement

• Chapter 3, Section 9: Developing Baseline Measures of Behavior
• Chapter 3, Section 18: Creating and Using Community Report Cards
• Chapter 3, Section 19: Using Public Records and Archival Data
• Chapter 8, Section 3: Creating Objectives

Mutually Reinforcing Activities

• Chapter 1, Section 7: Working Together for Healthier Communities: A Framework for Collaboration Among Community Partnerships, Support Organizations, and Funders
• Chapter 1, Section 8: Some Lessons Learned on Community Organization and Change

Continuous Communication

• Chapter 6, Section 1: Developing a Plan for Communication
• Chapter 6, Section 2: Using Principles of Persuasion
• Chapter 6, Section 3: Preparing Press Releases
• Chapter 6, Section 4: Arranging News and Feature Stories
• Chapter 6, Section 6: Preparing Guest Columns and Editorials
• Chapter 6, Section 7: Preparing Public Service Announcements
• Chapter 6, Section 8: Arranging a Press Conference
• Chapter 6, Section 9: Using Paid Advertising
• Chapter 6, Section 10: Creating Newsletters
• Chapter 6, Section 11: Creating Posters and Flyers
• Chapter 6, Section 12: Developing Creative Promotions
• Chapter 6, Section 13: Creating Brochures
• Chapter 6, Section 15: Creating Fact Sheets on Local Issues
• Chapter 6, Section 16: Creating a Website
• Chapter 6, Section 17: Using Email Lists
• Chapter 6, Section 18: Using Direct Mail
• Chapter 6, Section 19: Handling Crises in Communication
• Chapter 4, Section 5: Making Community Presentations
• Toolkit 13: Implementing a Social Marketing Effort
• Chapter 4, Section 2: Communicating Information about Community Health and Development Issues

Backbone Support

• Toolkit 1: Creating and Maintaining Partnerships

The term “collective impact” was introduced in a 2011 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Collective impact has been applied to social change efforts in a variety of fields and domains. Examples identified in this section include:

In education

• Strive
• CCER

In public health

• Shape Up Somerville
• LiveWell Colorado
• Global Alliance to Improve Nutrition (GAIN)
• Tackling Youth Substance Abuse

In addressing homelessness

• Calgary
• Home Again

In youth development

• NYJJ
• Project U-Turn
• Communities That Care

In economic/urban development

• Fund for our Economic Future
• Memphis Fast Forward
• Living Cities Integration Initiative

In community development

• Magnolia Place

In addressing environmental issues

• Elizabeth River Project

When Is a Collective Impact Approach Appropriate?

You can use the following readiness assessment to determine whether a collective impact approach is appropriate for your situation. This assessment is most valuable when completed by a group of stakeholders committed to addressing a specific social or environmental issue, with the results and implications discussed together.

• Is a collective impact approach appropriate for pursuing your goals?
  • There are many forms of collaboration, each suited to different types of social and environmental issues. Consider whether you are addressing a complex, large-scale social or environmental issue. Do you have the time and resources required?
• Do the preconditions exist for the potential success of a collective impact approach?
  • Are there influential champions, sufficient resources to support the planning process and infrastructure, and enough urgency to address the issue in new and different ways?
• Are the nuts and bolts for a collective impact approach already in place?
  • If your group has determined that this collaborative approach is appropriate and the preconditions are in place, an in-depth readiness assessment can help you take stock of the extent to which the necessary structures are in place to begin your work.

Collective impact is not right for every problem. The process can take a long time and requires significant resources to sustain – resources from partners making new investments and changing their practices, as well as support for the underlying backbone infrastructure.

How Do You Implement a Collective Impact Approach?

Before implementation of this approach can begin, the organizations and individuals involved must embrace the logic of collaborative, adaptive, and servant leadership.

• Pay attention to adaptive work, not just technical solutions: The group has to move beyond thinking only about technical solutions, which are best suited for simple and complicated problems, and begin to think about adaptive solutions to problems that require continuous learning.
• Look for silver buckshot instead of the silver bullet: Achieving population-level change, the ultimate goal for collective impact initiatives, requires stakeholders to abandon the search for a single silver-bullet solution. Instead, they must recognize that progress comes from the combination of many interventions.
• Sharing credit is as important as taking credit: Seeking to take direct credit is extremely difficult in large-scale collaborations where change is being created by many participants simultaneously. Organizations should think about their decisions in the context of others and share credit with the group to encourage greater collaboration and cohesion.

PHASES OF A COLLECTIVE IMPACT APPROACH

Collaborative action of this type can generally be categorized by levels of maturity, or phases. Every initiative is unique, however, and should be rooted in the local context and the readiness of stakeholders. Some generalizations about phases:

• Phase 1: Assess Readiness
  • Conduct a readiness and landscape assessment – assess the complexity and urgency of the problem, the history of collaboration, existing local collaborations, potential champions, and available resources.
• Phase 2: Initiate Action
  • Launch a steering committee.
  • Begin community engagement.
  • Create baseline landscape and data mapping.
  • Review research and lessons from other collaborative efforts.
• Phase 3: Organize for Impact
  • Create a common agenda: a clear problem definition, common vision, population-level goal, and basic theory of change.
  • Develop a high-level population goal.
  • Seek and incorporate community perspectives and input.
• Phase 4: Begin Implementation
  • Determine shared measurement and aligned strategies to create mutually reinforcing activities.
  • Develop working groups to implement strategies. We’ll talk more about who is on working groups in the next section.
  • Select backbone support.
  • Introduce the initiative to the broader community and share what you are trying to accomplish.
  • Establish the backbone structure that will help sustain the work moving forward.
• Phase 5: Sustain Action and Impact
  • Begin implementing strategies and measuring indicators.
  • Collect and use data to learn and refine strategies, and identify quick wins.
  • Evolve steering committee and working group composition to match adaptive strategies.
  • Continue sharing initiative progress and seeking community input.

Who Should Be Engaged By Your Collective Impact Effort?

As we noted earlier in this chapter, one of the common features of collective impact is that it is cross-sector. Complex problems generally require cross-sector coalitions that engage people and organizations beyond the nonprofit sector – or any other single sector.

However, it isn’t just who you bring together, but how you bring them together. The structures that collaborative efforts create enable people to come together regularly to look at data and learn from one another, and to understand what is working and what is not. The main structural components described here are the steering committee, working groups, backbone support, and community engagement.

Steering Committee

Collaborative action often begins with the establishment of an oversight group, usually called a steering committee or executive committee. The key responsibilities of the steering committee are to:

• Provide long-term strategic direction to the initiative.
• Oversee the work of the backbone.
• Determine staff and resource needs to support sustainability, in coordination with the executive team.
• Monitor progress against common-agenda goals and indicators to ensure continued advancement and uncover obstacles.
• Review data and use it to inform changes in stakeholder engagement, working group composition, or strategies.
• Provide guidance to working groups’ efforts.
• Champion the effort broadly in the community.

The composition of the steering committee is vital to the success of the initiative, because its members help set the initiative’s strategic direction. Some important characteristics to consider when selecting steering committee members include:

• Decision-making authority: Members should include people able to influence systems and decisions relevant to the effort.
• Representation: Membership should reflect the geographic area of the effort as well as relevant sectors.
• Influential champions: Members should include people who are trusted or influential among broader groups of stakeholders, who can bring people to the table, help keep them engaged, and champion the strategy with the broader community.
• Content expertise and practitioners: Members should include people familiar with the subject matter who can contribute substantively.
• Passion and urgency: Members should care about the issue and recognize the need for change.
• Focused on the greater interest: Members may represent the needs of their own organizations, but should also be able to think and act in the broader interest of the community.
• Commitment: Members should be willing and able to commit time and energy to attend meetings and get work done.
• Lived experience: Residents and community members with lived experience of the issue being addressed should be included.

Effective steering committees often have two co-chairs from different agencies or organizations; meet at least quarterly, and often monthly at first; have diverse, cross-sector membership and opportunities for shared or rotating leadership; coordinate activity with working groups and other coalitions through backbone leadership and working group chairs; communicate regularly according to agreed-upon schedules and methods; and report processes, findings, and concerns to stakeholders.

Working Groups

Once the strategic action framework is agreed upon, different working groups – also known as action committees – are formed around each of its primary leverage points or strategies. The key responsibilities of the working groups are to:

• Identify effective strategies to support achievement of goals:
  • Collect research on effective, evidence-informed strategies.
  • Use data to inform identification of strategies.
  • Suggest refinement of indicators based on strategy development, as needed.
  • Identify funding sources and local agencies to support strategies.
• Community engagement:
  • Convene relevant stakeholder dialogues and other forms of community engagement.
  • Coordinate communication messages and strategy with other working groups.
• Implementation:
  • Coordinate activities among working group member organizations and others in the community to implement strategies.
  • Dedicate time to practical tasks such as planning events, identifying volunteers, and carrying out other necessary work.

Effective working groups often have at least two co-chairs from different organizations; meet at least monthly, and sometimes more often at first; include diverse, cross-sector membership and opportunities for shared or rotating leadership; coordinate activity with other working groups through backbone leadership and working group chairs; communicate regularly according to agreed-upon schedules and methods; and report processes, findings, and concerns to the steering committee.

Backbone Support

Backbone support is provided by dedicated, funded staff supporting the collective impact initiative. Backbone support includes six major areas:

• Guide Vision and Strategy:
  • Build a common understanding of the problem that needs to be addressed.
  • Provide strategic guidance to develop a common agenda and serve as a thought leader and standard bearer for the initiative.
• Support Aligned Activities:
  • Help ensure mutually reinforcing activities take place by:
    • Coordinating and facilitating partners’ continuous communication and collaboration, and convening partners and key external stakeholders.
    • Catalyzing or incubating new initiatives or collaborations.
    • Providing technical assistance to build management and administrative capacity, such as coaching, mentoring, training, and fundraising support.
    • Creating pathways for new partners to become involved and actively recruiting them.
    • Seeking opportunities for alignment with other efforts.
• Establish Shared Measurement Practices:
  • Collect, analyze, interpret, and report data.
  • Catalyze or develop shared measurement systems.
  • Provide technical assistance for building partners’ data capacity.
• Build Public Will:
  • Build public will, consensus, and commitment by:
    • Framing the problem to create a sense of urgency and articulating a call to action.
    • Supporting community-member engagement activities.
    • Producing and managing communications, such as news releases and reports.
• Advance Policy:
  • Advocate for an aligned policy agenda.
• Mobilize Resources:
  • Mobilize and align public and private resources to support the initiative’s goals.

It is vitally important that backbone support be viewed as fair and trustworthy by stakeholders on the steering committee and in the wider community. It is just as important, however, to understand what backbone support is not. Backbone staff do not set the agenda for the group, do not drive all the solutions, do not receive all the funding, should not be self-appointed rather than selected through the initiative’s process, and are not simply “business as usual” in terms of staffing, time, and resources. They are a facilitative support team that can help plan, manage, and support the initiative through ongoing facilitation, technology and communications support, data collection and reporting, and the many logistical and administrative details needed for the initiative to function smoothly.

There is no one model of backbone support. The models identified in this section include:

• Funder-Based: One funder initiates a collective impact strategy as planner, financier, and convener.
• New Nonprofit: A new entity is created, often with private funding, to serve as the backbone.
• Existing Nonprofit: An established nonprofit takes the lead in coordinating the strategy.
• Government: A government entity, at the local or state level, helps coordinate the effort.
• Shared Across Multiple Organizations: Multiple organizations share responsibility for supporting and coordinating the work.

Community Engagement

In collaborative action, it is vitally important to include multiple organizations and sectors – business, nonprofit, government, and philanthropy. However, it is equally important to engage the community. Effective community engagement is a critical factor in the long-term success of collective impact initiatives.

When considering community engagement, it is important to use both broad-based community engagement – which seeks to reach a large and varied set of stakeholders within a community, including community members broadly rather than only experts, leaders, or special-interest groups – and targeted community engagement, which seeks to involve a particular group that may otherwise be underrepresented or less likely to participate without a more focused effort.

How the community is engaged depends upon the goals of the initiative and how community members can best participate in achieving those goals. A few ways a community can be engaged, based on thinking from Tamarack Institute, are shown below:

• Understand pressing systemic community challenges
  • Begin a process of understanding the issue.
  • Clarify questions that arise during the process.
• Co-create solutions
  • Spark innovative problem-solving rooted in the lived experience of the community.
  • Identify and spread solutions that already exist within the community.
• Verify the direction
  • Get feedback on specific strategies and indicators from community members and groups.
• Expand the reach of involvement
  • Expand participation in and adoption of initiative strategies.
  • Build and sustain the will to take aligned action.
• Build community capacity to lead and sustain change
  • Support stakeholders in developing skills for effective collaboration and strategy execution, such as shared measurement.
  • Share resources and learning across the community to support the spread of effective practices.

Shared Measurement

Creating and using shared measures is a key component of a rigorous collaborative effort. Shared measurement means identifying a targeted set of indicators that participants agree to pursue, and then using those data both to track progress and to improve efforts over time. This differs from more traditional approaches to evaluation that focus on isolating the impact of a single organization or grant, rather than examining multiple organizations working together to address a common problem.

There are several common challenges to shared measurement:

• Competing priorities among organizations when establishing common measures.
• Differences in organizations’ capacity for data collection and analysis.
• Willingness to invest the time, and sometimes money, needed to develop a shared measurement system.
• The ability to shift from using data primarily to prove performance toward using data to improve the work, which may require overcoming concerns that organizations will be compared negatively.

There are some basic practices that can help address these challenges and support successful shared measurement:

• Effective relationships with funders – Successful implementation of shared measurement requires commitment not only from collaborators, but also from funders. Funding requirements may need to align with the initiative’s shared measures. This calls for leadership, adequate resources, and enough independence for participants to develop appropriate indicators and manage the system.
• Broad and open engagement – The shared measurement design process should include broad engagement, with clear expectations about participation, confidentiality, and transparency.
• Infrastructure for deployment – Infrastructure includes both technological and human capacity. Effective digital tools may be needed, along with ongoing staffing to train people to use the measures, facilitate the shared measurement process, and help ensure data quality.
• Pathways for learning and improvement – The power of shared measurement comes from testing and continuously improving through ongoing feedback. This requires a facilitated process in which participants can share data and results, learn from them, and better coordinate their efforts.

For organizations that choose to embrace shared measurement, potential benefits include:

• Improved data quality.
• Greater alignment across organizations.
• The ability to track progress toward a shared goal.
• More collaborative problem-solving.
• Learning that benefits organizations working on a common problem and supports course corrections that can lead to better results.

Evaluating Collective Impact

Evaluating the overall impact of an initiative is an important part of the process for all parties. Practitioners need timely, high-quality data that support reflection and inform strategic and tactical decision-making. Funders and other supporters need approaches to performance measurement and evaluation that can provide evidence of progress toward the initiative’s goals at different points along the collective impact journey.

The change process typically involves three stages of development, each of which requires a somewhat different approach to performance measurement and evaluation:

The initiative’s early years are typically focused on understanding context and designing and implementing the initiative. This includes establishing the five core conditions of collective impact, as well as coordinating multiple programs, activities, and campaigns according to the initiative’s overarching strategy or theory of change.

• Recommended approach to performance measurement: Partners should agree on a set of early performance indicators to track their progress in establishing key elements of the initiative’s infrastructure.
• Recommended approach to evaluation: Developmental evaluation, aimed at helping partners understand their initiative’s context and learn more about how the initiative is developing.

Evaluating a comprehensive initiative’s context and carefully assessing the quality of its design and implementation in its early years is critically important and should not be dismissed as merely a focus on process. The successful reorganization and alignment of the system of people and organizations addressing a problem can itself be an important outcome of the change process.

The initiative’s middle years are when partners may expect to see meaningful changes in patterns of behavior – such as changes in professional practice or individual behavior – and in the way systems operate, such as changes in cultural norms, funding flows, or public policy. These changes can serve as a gateway to the initiative’s ultimate population-level outcomes and are therefore an important area of focus for both performance measurement and evaluation.

• Recommended approach to performance measurement: Partners should use data from the initiative’s shared measurement system to determine whether, where, and for whom the initiative is making progress.
• Recommended approach to evaluation: Formative evaluation to help partners refine, improve, and fine-tune the work, along with developmental evaluation to explore newer aspects of the initiative.

The initiative’s later years are when collective impact partners may expect to see meaningful, measurable change related to the initiative’s ultimate goals. At this point, the initiative may be ready for a summative evaluation to assess its impact, merit, value, or significance.

In Summary

Collective impact – like other models in Chapter 2 of the Community Tool Box – offers a promising approach to addressing complex social problems at scale.

Contributor

This section was contributed by Jennifer Splansky Juster, Director of the Collective Impact Forum, FSG. Visit the CI Forum.