A recent New York Times blog describes the success of a Cincinnati-based collaborative organization that aims to have an impact on public education. By using an approach called “collective impact” many organizations from public schools to local non-profits agreed to work together to solve the greater problem of improving the outcomes for children from the region from “cradle to career”. In a Stanford Social Innovation article John Kania and Mark Kramer describe the five conditions for effective “collective impact”:
- Common agenda: a shared vision for change, including a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it.
- Shared measurement: agreement on the ways success will be measured and reported.
- Mutually reinforcing activities: each participant to undertake the specific set of activities at which it excels in a way that supports and is coordinated with the actions of others.
- Continuous communication: Participants need face time to see that their own interests will be treated fairly, and that decisions will be made on the basis of objective evidence and the best possible solution to the problem, not to favor the priorities of one organization over another.
- Backbone support organization: Creating and managing collective impact requires a separate organization and staff with a very specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative.
In the Cincinnati example the organization creates and distributes an annual report that clearly reports on their progress. In no uncertain terms the public and the participating organizations can observe their progress and areas of continued opportunity. The report card is an annual report that is outcome focused, which is the most effective way to communicate to the public. When internal discussions are ongoing and decisions are being made using “objective data” it is absolute that the data used are more diverse and have direct connections to the work of all the organizations around the table and include inputs, not just outputs. The data cannot be just summary data, but must be data that are available intermittently throughout the year. For example, one of the partner organizations is Mentoring Works is described as collaborating to increase the number of volunteers to meet the need for mentors. In the Report Card it states (about Mentoring Works) “During the next year Mentoring Works will continue to focus on recruiting, training and retaining new volunteers. In addition, we will begin sharing impact data on how mentoring works in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.” The sharing of impact data is essential for the Report Card, but what the collaborative group needs to hear and see is monthly reports on their progress towards recruiting, training, and matching mentors. The collaborative group needs to have feedback loops about whether the mentors are meeting their obligations and whether the relationship is high quality. These data need to be available far more frequently than annually. By having more frequent leading indicators the collaborative can assess the potential impact of a partner and also find ways to work together to reach the benchmarks that are not being achieved.