Voices from the Field: 10 Places Where Collective Impact Gets It Wrong [NonProfitQuarterly.org]

In 2011, Kania and Kramer published a five-page article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled “Collective Impact” (2011). The article was a well-written summary of their views of large scale social change efforts in communities. They suggested five conditions of collective impact:

1. common agenda
2. shared measurement
3. mutually reinforcing activities
4. continuous communication
5. backbone support

In the original article, and those that followed, Kania and Kramer were explicitly and implicitly critical of much of what came before them. In one chart (Hanleybrown, Kania, & Kramer 2012), they compare Isolated Impact with Collective Impact as if those were the only two options, omitting the numerous examples of community-wide coalitions that moved beyond Isolated Impact but were not explicitly labeled Collective Impact (for one example see the exhaustive literature on Healthy Communities, Norris, 2013).

[For more of this story, written by Tom Wolf, go to http://nonprofitquarterly.org/...mpact-gets-it-wrong/]