This is different work, this work of Collective Impact. It requires us to deepen relationships with each other and to build new relationshipswith individuals we may not have worked with previously. It calls upon us to take a new leadership journey, not one that is focused on our own work but one that is focused on a collective, often aspirational, approach to understanding and changing our communities.
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In social innovation we are at risk of confusing our stories of success for real, genuine impact. Without theories, implementation science or evaluation we risk aspiring to travel to the moon, yet leaving our rockets stuck on the launchpad.
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There are so many cool technologies out there that enable us to do more…way more…in terms of how we engage the community. There are social media integrations, dynamic polling, geo-mapping, data visualization, crowdsourcing, online decision-making, and all of these technologies enable us to go both broader and deeper than we could before.
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I sit on the Mayor of Edmonton’s Task Force to End Poverty. It’s a diverse group including the expected mix of leaders from government, business, education and community services. At a recent gathering we were working together to increase common understanding about poverty as well as to move forward with identifying strategies.
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Pretend you run a business that sells widgets that are critical to a buyer. The price of each widget is $1000.00 and the buyer needs 100 of them. That’s $100,000. Now let’s pretend the cost of each widget (materials, labour, reasonable marketing costs, equipment maintenance, transportation costs, etc.) makes up 80% of the market price, leaving you with a gross profit of $20.00 per widget or in the case of this order of 100, a gross profit of $20,000 or 20% of the total price.
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The July issue of The Philanthropist profiles the theory and practice of collective impact. The issue contains articles from a variety of perspectives and provides a great overview from Canadian and international thought leaders on how collective impact is evolving.
I had the opportunity to contribute two articles to this publication. One of them looked at the promise and peril of collective impact and the second was an interview that I conducted with John Kania and Fay Hanleybrown of FSG Social Impact Consultants just before a Backbone Workshop in Vancouver earlier this spring.
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