Giving Compass' Take:

• The author lays out six principles that will help advance and drive impact within multi-stakeholder collaborations. 

• How do these practices relate to one another? Do they seem achievable for sustainable collaboration?

• Learn more about collective impact and understand it's implications in philanthropy. 

Multi-stakeholder collaborations (MSCs), however, face a host of different challenges because the people involved don’t work for each other and are under no obligation to cooperate. A gap opens between collective strategy formulation and collective strategy execution. To address this gap, other researchers have already articulated the need for a “backbone” organization to hold the center on collective strategy.

In this article, we present six key principles for backbone organizations to follow to maintain alignment, drive impact, and create continuous learning throughout the life of a collaboration.

  • Principle 1: Clarity of Purpose. Over time, the overarching vision and purpose of a collaboration can and will change. MSCs need someone to maintain a constant drumbeat, ensuring that all partners maintain a clear and consistent connection to the overarching purpose of the partnership.
  • Principle 2: Driving Long-Term Momentum and Growth. Human sustainability and financial sustainability are inextricably linked. MSCs that fail to provide adequate individual and collective growth and development—continuous opportunities to experiment, learn, grow, and innovate—run out of steam.
  • Principle 3:  Strong Partnership Identity. Give the MSC a name, design a logo, develop a unique culture and identity. A backbone organization should be the keeper and steward of the MSC’s identity.
  • Principle 4: Connected and Aligned People and Activities. In any endeavor, specialization drives productivity while coordination multiplies impact. In partnerships, a tension exists between specialization and coordination.
  • Principle 5: Involving the Target Population. The backbone organization should help an MSC adopt an iterative and agile approach, involving users from the very beginning.
  • Principle 6: Clear Measures of Success Connected to Learning. The backbone organization should help partners develop a balanced scorecard of the fewest, most critical metrics for self- and comparative-assessment and then turn those into active learning and intelligent action.

Read the full article about practices for collective impact by Richard Crespin & Helen Moser at Stanford Social Innovation Review