Do you see a community issue or need that your organization alone cannot address? Are you striving to create collective impact by strengthening the talent pipeline, growing the population, upscaling the workforce, expanding childcare, addressing food deserts, reducing homelessness, or tackling other social challenges?

In the last few years, we’ve seen nonprofit organizations, donors, funders, and community leaders coming together in new and innovative ways to address these challenges in their communities. They want to use a “collective impact” framework to tackle significant issues.

Collective impact brings together diverse partners—business, government, philanthropy, and nonprofits—to work toward a common agenda to solve a specific social problem. The idea of collaboration and partnership is familiar in the social sector. Collective impact is more rigorous and thorough than collaboration among organizations.

There are five conditions that, together, lead to meaningful results from Collective Impact. We first introduced this framework several years ago in this blog, and it is what we use to support the development of coalitions.

Five Conditions of Collective Impact

1. Common Agenda: All participants share a vision for change, including a common understanding of the problem. The participants have developed a joint approach to solving it through agreed-upon actions.
2. Shared Measurement: Create a “baseline understanding” of where you are today regarding the issue and reach agreement on key indicators. Collect data and measure results consistently across all participants, ensuring efforts remain aligned and participants hold each other accountable.
3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities: When developing the common agenda, participants will take the lead on different activities—work they are most likely already doing—while remaining coordinated through a mutually reinforcing plan of action involving all participants. The goal is alignment and cohesion, not isolation.
4. Continuous Communication: Consistent, open communication among the many players is needed to build trust, align on shared objectives, and stay up to date on progress. This keeps the coalition connected, motivated, and on track to make progress. 
5. Backbone Organization: Creating and managing collective impact requires a dedicated resource with staff and a specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative and coordinate participating organizations and agencies. Someone needs to be responsible for moving the work forward, bringing everyone together, gathering the resources, etc.

Let me share an example of how collective impact works. Take, for instance, the compelling challenge of a lack of high-quality child care in a community. This is an issue that we have supported in several communities. (Learn here about coalition building)

An individual early care and education program or school could decide to expand a preschool classroom to increase the supply of child care in their community. This is an example of an isolated intervention of an individual organization. This response might help a few families in the community. Still, it may not address the underpinnings of the lack of child care access (the timing and availability of child care spots) and affordability (the cost of child care)—as well as many other issues.

A collective impact approach to addressing a lack of child care would bring together multiple partners who are directly and indirectly affected by the issue:

• Childcare affects a company’s ability to recruit and retain its workforce.
• Government child care supports the community’s ability to recruit companies, increases tax revenue through wages, and helps develop productive citizens.
• K-12 Education – child care affects students’ ability to be ready for kindergarten and beyond
• Health – child care impacts children’s development and helps them reach critical healthy milestones
• Child Care Providers – impacts their ability to have a thriving business and stay open.
• Higher Education – child care needs a high-quality workforce to staff its classrooms.

And the list of partners continues to grow…

After you have the partners, you begin by understanding the issue and its implications in the community. This will then help inform the development of a common agenda that all partners agree to support. The outcome of this work means that not only will there be more high-quality child care available in the community, but the hours will be expanded to meet local employer needs, scholarships will be provided to help families afford the cost, wraparound supports will be facilitated to connect families and providers with critical resources, and so on. The community coalition has identified agreed-upon measures they are tracking—number of spots by age group, number of certified teachers, cost of care, and uptake rate—and has a communication plan to share information internally with the coalition and externally with the public and other stakeholders. This community is well on its way to seeing tremendous progress in addressing the lack of childcare.

Our Approach to Collective Impact

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4.