How do we make a collective impact? | By Amy Delamaide

For our staff meeting next week, CCSR personnel are reading an article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review by John Kania and Mark Kramer on “Collective Impact” (PDF, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011). We hope to have a productive discussion about what it means related to our philosophy and strategies for our work with organizations and coalitions.

Kania and Kramer define collective impact as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” (p. 36). These actors include funders, government officials, representatives from key agencies, individuals, and others. While the regular gathering of such a mix of people could be referred to as a coalition or collaboration, collective impact initiatives go beyond this by including “a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants” (p. 38). What the authors argue is that, for some issues--including what the Kansas Leadership Center refers to as deep, daunting challenges--it’s not enough for one nonprofit organization to try to intervene for the better. Some issues require the engagement of nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public to create real and lasting change.

Five-level social ecological model

Scott Wituk, our Director, often refers to the social ecological model, where four embedded circles indicate the scope of potential intervention from the individual in the center to the relationship to the community to the society at large. This comes out of the Centers for Disease Control’s work to prevent intimate partner violence, which is work Scott has partnered with the CDC on.
When CCSR considers this model, we see that our work in leadership development and certified peer counselor training impacts individuals. Our work with organizations affects the institutional level of the five circle version of the model. Often when we work with coalitions or collaborative efforts we engage with many different agencies within a sector, hoping to impact society at large.

What Kania and Kramer suggest is that there is a role for an organization—perhaps one like ours? or like yours?—to become a “Backbone Support Organization.” This would be an organization that consists of at least a project manager, data manager, and a facilitator. The people in these roles manage the overall change effort.

Some questions related to this article for CCSR--and your organization!--to consider:

• What is our past experience? Have any of the big projects we’ve been a part of met the key features of a collective impact initiative?
• What are the issue areas we want to see progress on? For which issues are we willing to be significantly involved in managing a collective impact initiative?
• How could we increase our impact at the society level of the social ecological model?

Has your organization discussed these questions? What conclusions did you come to? Let us know in the comments below.

Our organization plans to discuss this article more next week. Look for a follow up blog post with some details on our conversation.