What Factors Characterize Collective Impact?

Submitted by Gonzalo Duarte on October 8, 2014 - 7:05pm
Wednesday, Oct. 8/14

What factors characterize Collective Impact?

Learning Lab #22 wondered about the difference between partnership, cooperation, collaboration, and collective impact. What factors characterize and distinguish Collective Impact from other forms of working together?

In an effort to parse out the language this chart was devised. What do you think? Does this adequately and accurately distinguish Collective Impact? Is it helpful or too simplistic? Constructive comments or terminology suggestions welcome.

 

Factor

Not Collective Impact

Collective Impact

System

complicated

complex

   Relationships

independent

interdependent

Motivation

common concern

common commitment

Process

buy-in

ownership

Leadership

one leads many

many lead many

Questions

deductive, answers

inductive, inquiry

Goals

predetermined

undetermined

Solutions

known

unknown

Change by

scaling

cross-sector alignment

Knowledge

acquired, used

investigated, mobilized

Experts

content

context

Learning

best practices

promising practices

Activities

program delivery

mutually reinforcing

Communication

linear

circular

Evaluation

logic model

theory of change

Measurement

outcomes

impacts

Risk

concentrated

distributed

Reward

Responsibility

 

Thanks to Diane Cornman-Levy of the Federation of Neighborhood Centers of Philadelphia for her contributions to this topic www.federationnc.org

Gonzalo Duarte is the President of Compañeros Inc www.companeros.ca and a candidate in Canada’s inaugural Master’s of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership program www.carleton.ca/mpnl.

Links:
Tags:
Comments:
What a great model! Submitted by larry.gemmel on October 9, 2014 - 5:23am.

We hear about work that is underway that calls itself Collective Impact, but we know that CI works best when the 5 conditions are understood and integrated.  

This chart really helps us to understand the transformational shift that is needed to create real systems change.