Understanding Collective Impact: A Model for Change

Over the past few years, there has been a new kind of approach on the rise—want to create systematic change: the collective impact model.

Collective impact is a framework that calls upon different parts of the impact ecosystem, like government, nonprofits, business, philanthropy, etc., to create collaboration in a structured way aiming for shared impact outcomes.

We'll cover why this model has promising potential for the entire impact sector to achieve better outcomes and scale them. We'll also talk about some challenges in the collective impact model approach.

Defining a Collective Impact Model

Programs typically align by their area of focus or regional impact, and their common goals should always follow the five principles of collective impact:

A common agenda—all participants should have a shared vision, including a common understanding of problems and a plan to take a joint approach to solve them through agreed-upon actions.
Shared measurements—collective impact programs should collect and measure data and results consistently to ensure their efforts stay aligned and their participants hold each other accountable.
Mutually reinforced activities—programs should differentiate participant activities while remaining coordinated through a mutually reinforced plan of action.
Continuous communication—open and consistent communication is crucial across participants to assure mutual objectives, build trust, and create motivation.
Backbone support—creating and managing a collective impact program requires one or more organizations with staff that have specific skill sets to serve as the program's backbone and coordinate with participating agencies and organizations.

We'll cover these five principles in detail below.

The Importance of Collective Impact

It's no secret—there are various programs and organizations out there trying to solve similar social and environmental issues. This alignment is the starting point for a collective impact collaboration model.

Another thing to consider for your organization is that collective impact brings a social proof benefit. Working with a well-perceived and well-known government program or business can bring a credibility boost to your organization in the eyes of the general public, beneficiaries, donors, and investors you seek to impact positively.

For example, many nonprofit organizations don't have the capacity to demonstrate their own collective impact. For organizations like those, there are three excellent reasons to put together a collective impact initiative:

To gain leverage and increase their opportunities for public and government grants
To gain the power to lobby for legislation by demonstrating that the organization is working where other businesses cannot to create socio-economic improvements.
To demonstrate effective and meaningful measures of their vision and mission.

A collective impact model also benefits businesses or others who partner with those nonprofit organizations too—and not just for tax incentives. Nonprofit organizations often have the best insights into the needs and context of their beneficiaries and a long history of working with them, which can help define baseline data for a new program.

The 5 Principles for Collective Impact Success

Now, let's look at the five core principles we mentioned earlier in greater detail:

A Common Agenda

Look closely at any group of nonprofits or funders that say they are working on an identical social issue, and you'll quickly find that it's typically not the same issue at all. Every organization will have a slightly different definition of the issue and its goals. These differences get ignored when organizations work on isolated initiatives independently, yet they can undermine the collective impact as a whole.

Collective impact requires organizations to discuss and resolve these differences. Every participant doesn't need to agree on every dimension of the problem, but they must agree on the overall goals of the initiative.

A Shared Measurement System

Agreeing on an issue isn't enough without agreeing on how organizations will measure and report success. Collecting initiative data and consistently measuring results using a shortlist of indicators across every participating organization ensures that everyone's efforts remain aligned and enables participants to learn from their successes and failures.

With a shared measurement system, collective impact initiatives can collect higher-quality, more credible data, increase their performance, and better document the program's progress.

Mutually Reinforcing Activities

The power of a collective impact model comes from the coordination of each activity participants perform through a mutually reinforcing plan—not from the number of participants or their efforts' uniformity. All stakeholders' efforts should fit into an overarching plan, or else their efforts are unlikely to succeed. The different causes of social issues, and the different components of their solutions, depend on each other. Organizations cannot address these issues and solutions unless they coordinate their actions.

Collective impact initiatives need a diverse group of participants who work together, even if they aren't necessarily working on the same problem. Mutually reinforcing activities means encouraging every participant to undertake the activities they excel in in a way that is coordinated to support the actions of others.

Continuous Communication

Part of a collective impact model is developing trust among corporations, government agencies, and nonprofits, which is a challenge. It can take years of regular meetings to recognize and appreciate each participant's common motivation behind their collective efforts. They all need time to truly see that their own interests will get treated fairly by other participants, and that the decisions each organization makes will come from objective evidence and work towards the best solution to the problem—a solution that doesn't favor one organization's priorities over another.

The most successful collective impact initiatives hold bi-weekly or monthly meetings among the CEO-level leaders of the participating organizations.

Support Organizations

Coordinating a collective impact initiative takes time—time that the participating organizations don't have to spare. Successful collaboration cannot occur without an effective supporting infrastructure.

Having a backbone support organization requires dedicated staff that's separate from the organizations participating in the collective impact program. This staff will handle the planning, management, and support of the initiative through things like data collection and reporting, facilitation, handling logistical and administrative details, offering technology and communication support, etc.

These backbone organizations embody adaptive leadership; they can create a sense of urgency, gather public attention, and apply pressure to stakeholders in a way that encourages the program's success.