Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination

Insightformation has the tools and expertise your community needs to adopt the Collective Impact framework:

1. Deploy dynamic strategy maps to develop a Common Agenda and manage details to support a shared strategy

2. Create consensus for a Shared Measurement System and provide the platform to monitor progress

3. Proactively engage community organizations to accomplish Mutually Reinforcing Activities

4. Facilitate Continuous Communication with online tools that promotes collaboration & community teamwork

5. Use the shared online strategy management system (InsightVision) to distribute Backbone Support among organizations while ensuring consistency of structure and informed information contributions from all stakeholders by using InsightVision's built in Objective tabset templates.

Insightformation President Bill Barberg is among the nation’s leading speakers, trainers, and consultants in Collective Impact techniques for community health improvement. Contact us for your training, facilitation, coaching, and technology needs.  

Watch Bill's recent keynote address, "Embracing & Improving Collective Impact: Strengthening Community Teamwork So Kids Can Thrive!" from the First 5 L.A. Collective Impact Conference, October, 2017. 

Achieving Collective Impact with InsightVision

 Common Agenda

InsightVision provides valuable information management capabilities at each stage of creating a common agenda and, even more importantly, a co-created strategy.

• The interactive strategy map clearly communicates the desired outcomes and the strategies to achieve those outcomes.

• The flexible set of “tabs” with customized templates enables teams to clarify the details of each strategic objective.

• The ability to “zoom in” on any part of the strategy map to show added details creates a robust framework for taming complexity and organizing coalitions to efficiently align their efforts to focus on strategy implementation.

• The dynamic, “presentation-ready” formats can be viewed in meetings and easily updated, keeping stakeholders current with the latest information on their strategy.

 Shared Measurement

Shared measurement is at the heart of Collective Impact, but a shared measurement system is far more valuable.

• InsightVision is a centralized online measurement system that allows the most current data on measures to be accessible by all appropriate people.

• Backbone organizations, collaborative members, and funders can streamline monitoring outcome measures, leading indicators, and progress on specific projects as part of the overall strategy.

• Measures can be calculated from other measures, aggregated, and viewed in presentation-ready formats that automatically show trend charts, measure definitions, and comments.

• Related reports can be uploaded and other websites with supporting data can be viewed with a single click.

• The website "Embed & Publish" module allows many different partners to embed dynamic scorecards into their websites—each of which shows current data from the centralized system.

 Mutually Reinforcing Activities

The real power of Collective Impact comes from having multiple organizations working together in differentiated, mutually reinforcing ways. This community teamwork enables greater success and higher efficiency than the efforts of individual organizations and programs—even if they’re working toward shared measures.

• By using InsightVision as a shared “Digital Backbone” platform, community organizations can easily see how they benefit from mutually-reinforcing efforts, and multiple funders can see how their grants can have a greater impact as part of a larger strategy.

• InsightVison’s “zoomability” makes it easy to see how the strategic objectives and projects of multiple partnering organizations contribute to doing more with less.

• Using InsightVision helps identify “assists” where specific needs can be identified and other community organizations can use their strengths to improve the overall results.

 Continuous Communication

Instead of relying on big static documents or time-consuming meetings to keep stakeholders informed, your coalition can use InsightVision to have 24×7 access to view or update the latest information, data, or even questions about your effort.

• Progress on projects can be updated and viewed prior to large meetings so that valuable in-person time is used to solve problems and accelerate collaboration—not just provide status updates.

• Work can be distributed to several small teams to meet, discuss issues, and update InsightVision between large group meetings. This leads to faster progress and less meeting burn-out.

• Time that would normally be spent creating presentations and reports can be re-allocated to priority issues because all necessary information is available in InsightVision.

• Personalized views of information on various measures, related reports, websites, and project statuses can easily viewed any time on a computer, tablet, or smart phone.

 Backbone Support

InsightVision is the pioneering platform for providing “Digital Backbone” support to streamline and simplify Collective Impact efforts. Rather than hire new staff to provide backbone support (which creates competitive dynamics between multiple Collective Impact efforts and the organizations striving to lead those efforts), you can equip existing staff to be much more productive in supporting high-performance collaboration.

• InsightVision becomes part of the civic infrastructure that can be used by multiple backbone organizations—even if they’re working on different issues, such as health, education, and jobs. This is far more efficient than the common practice of staffing up people for each grant and then laying them off when a grant ends.

• Coordinating work can be spread among many different organizations, and technology funding can come from multiple Collective Impact efforts or grants—since they can all share the same technology platform.

• Effective use of Digital Backbone technology enhances effectiveness of cross-sector coalitions and provides evidence of Collective Impact maturity to help win competitive grants.