5 Ways to Align Community Partners Towards Community Impact
Aligning community partners towards driving community impact is a topic almost every community in the world is trying to grapple with. Every community wants to improve conditions of well-being for its residents. Every community wants a clean environment, healthy people, children succeeding in school, and families that are economically self-sufficient. Every community wants to know if these goals are happening.
My career has been dedicated, over the last twenty years, to helping to make that happen, and in that time, I learned that the best at it generally embraces a few simple but difficult to implement ways of doing it. They are all encapsulated in the Results-Based Accountability (RBA) framework outlined by Mark Friedman in the book, Trying Hard is Not Good Enough. They include:
1.) Separate measurement of community well-being (indicators) from the performance of partners (performance measures) and make achieving measurable improvement on the community indicators the primary goal of all efforts
2.) Have each community partner pick performance measures that speak to how much they do (quantity measures), how well they do it (efficiency measures) and is anyone better off (impact measures). Then use the impact measures of these programs to align with well-being indicators
3.) Ask four questions related to both well-being indicators and for each program’s impact measures on a regular basis
- What is the story behind the data trend?
- Who are the internal and external partners that have a role to play in improving the data trend?
- What works (evidence-based strategies) to improve the data trend?
- What is the action plan to improve the data trend?
4.) Get all partners co-creating the plan to improve all priority community indicators on an annual basis documented at least annually and all partners creating their own performance improvement plans on their impact performance measures documented at least quarterly in one unified data system
Continuously make decisions on resources and allocation of funding based on the performance of all partners involved and whether they are making a difference in improving the conditions of well-being in their community.
This all sounds easy enough, but the buy-in needed to implement these ideas can seem insurmountable without leaders who have the gravitas to make it happen. It takes leaders who have the trust of their community partners. It takes leaders who have savvy to find and organize all the population level indicators in a way that is compelling for others to understand the sense of urgency.
It also takes leaders that follow through on engaging with partners in meaningful dialogue about their performance, so that they know it is not just an exercise or just about compliance. It takes leaders that find the resources to train their partners in data collection and improvement planning and provide them with tools like a unified data system to make it easier to participate. It takes leaders who lead with love of their community and the people who join in that same love by turning a vision into a reality.
Leaders like that can be found all over the country.
Governor Wes Moore in the State of Maryland, with support from the Governor’s Office for Children, is leading an effort under the ENOUGH Act to have 17 local communities select between several determined priority indicators of child well-being and economic mobility and coordinate all local partners within those communities to take targeted action.
Kathy Dail, Director of Healthy North Carolina 2030 and Community Health Assessment & Improvement, has established an effort with 21 state indicators as the basis for the State Health Improvement Plan and has all 88 counties creating their own Community Health Improvement Plans based on moving the needle on the same indicators but at their local level.
Monty Robertson, Executive Director of the Alliance for a Healthier South Carolina, has gotten the resources to support community collaboratives across the state to embrace local planning for their Community Health Needs Assessments. This effort includes providing technical assistance and technology to make the effort scalable and replicable.
Do you have what it takes to be that next leader in your state or community?
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You can learn more about our Clear Impact software suite and book a demo at https://clearimpact.com/software/suite/.
About the Author
Adam Luecking is an author, speaker, and trainer who has spent over 20 years helping government and philanthropic funders improve their performance and achieve measurable impact.
As CEO of Clear Impact, he also manages consulting services and technology deployment to agencies that serve children, families, and communities with the growing Clear Impact team.
Adam has delivered Results-Based Accountability training and consulting to a variety of clients and partners in over ten countries. He is also the author of Social Sector Hero: How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact.
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