Aligning Multiple Partners in Collective Impact

This article first appeared in the July 2015 newsletter of Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Technical Assistance Coordinating Center.

Collective Impact is a collaborative approach that focuses on five core conditions: a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communications and a backbone infrastructure. It has emerged as a new way for communities to work together. The goal of collective impact is to focus on a complex social challenge and for the community to collectively work towards better outcomes. Collective impact efforts have emerged across many complex issues including improving maternal health and early childhood experiences.

Collective impact requires a variety of different partners to come together and work collaboratively. Successful efforts engage partners across a variety of different sectors to work together at a local level: community organizations, business, funders, government and citizens. Sometimes collective impact efforts also cross boundaries linking partners at the local, state/province or national levels. Looking for synergy and alignment can be a powerful strategy to maximize individual and collective resources and increase the impact and results for the communities.

While a collective impact approach requires coordination of efforts across different partners and different sectors, aligning multiple efforts collaborative and collective impact efforts together can pose additional challenges. The alignment of strategies between collective impact efforts at the local level, the state or national levels can be called the nested effect. To push the metaphor, the nest supports the local partners intentionally through their development phase and then the two partners become equal learners as the initiatives develop and begin to fly.

An important strategy when aligning multiple collective impact efforts is to maximize resources by determining who does what. In the collective impact model, there are six core functions or roles for the backbone: building vision and strategy, aligning activities, supporting shared measurement, building public will, advancing policy and securing resources. In this nested approach to collective impact, the partners at each level should identify which of the roles are best suited to which level.

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Learn More:

• Learn more about aligning efforts and building a common agenda at the Collective Impact Summit in Vancouver, September 28th ­- October 2nd, 2015!