Are you facing a community issue that your organization cannot address on its own? Are you working to create collective impact by strengthening the talent pipeline, growing the population, developing the workforce, expanding childcare, addressing food deserts, reducing homelessness, or solving other social challenges?
In recent years, nonprofit organizations, donors, funders, and community leaders have collaborated in new ways to address these challenges. Many are adopting a collective impact framework to tackle significant issues.
Collective impact unites diverse partners from business, government, philanthropy, and nonprofits to pursue a shared agenda and solve specific social problems. While collaboration is common in the social sector, collective impact offers a more rigorous and comprehensive approach.
Five conditions together lead to meaningful results from collective impact. We introduced this framework several years ago on this blog and continue to use it to support coalition development.
Five Conditions of Collective Impact
- Common Agenda: All participants share a vision for change and a clear understanding of the problem. They have developed a joint approach with agreed-upon actions to address it.
- Shared Measurement: Establish a baseline understanding of the current situation and agree on key indicators. Collect and measure data consistently across all participants to ensure alignment and accountability.
- Mutually Reinforcing Activities: As part of the common agenda, participants lead activities aligned with their strengths while coordinating through a shared plan of action. The focus is on alignment and cohesion, not isolated efforts.
- Continuous Communication: Consistent, open communication is essential to building trust, aligning objectives, and tracking progress. This keeps the coalition connected, motivated, and focused on results.
- Backbone Organization: Effective collective impact requires a dedicated organization with skilled staff to coordinate all participating groups. This backbone ensures progress, collaboration, and resource management.
Here is an example of collective impact in action. Consider the significant challenge of limited high-quality child care in a community, an issue we have addressed in several locations. (Learn here about coalition building)
An individual early care program or school might expand a preschool classroom to increase child care supply. While this isolated intervention can help some families, it often fails to address underlying issues such as access, availability, affordability, and other related challenges.
A collective impact approach brings together multiple partners who are directly or indirectly affected by the lack of child care:
- Child care influences a company’s ability to recruit and retain employees.
- Government-supported child care helps communities attract businesses, increases tax revenue, and supports the development of productive citizens.
- K-12 Education: Child care supports school readiness and long-term student success.
- Health: Child care promotes healthy development and helps children reach key milestones.
- Child Care Providers: Access to quality child care supports business sustainability and growth.
- Higher Education: The sector supplies the skilled workforce needed for quality child care.
Additional partners continue to join these efforts.
Once partners are engaged, the next step is to understand the issue and its impact on the community. This shared understanding informs a common agenda that all partners support. As a result, the community gains more high-quality child care, expanded hours to meet employer needs, scholarships to improve affordability, and wraparound supports connecting families and providers to essential resources. The coalition tracks agreed-upon measures, including the number of spots by age group, the number of certified teachers, the cost of care, and the uptake rate. A communication plan ensures information is shared within the coalition and with the public and stakeholders. This approach positions the community for significant progress in addressing child care shortages.
Our Approach to Collective Impact
- Help people understand the landscape—after the key stakeholders are at the table, begin building trusting relationships. Next, we gather and study relevant data on the key community issue, including ongoing efforts to improve the situation.
- Co-create solutions – Determine what is already working well and could be scaled up. Identify and prioritize catalytic projects that deliver outcomes no single organization could achieve alone.
- Redesign the system: The cross-sector partners then conduct one or more projects with clear deliverables and metrics. Establish a shared method of measuring progress and adjusting strategies based on the outcome data.
