‘Collective Impact’ Hits The Streets

A few years ago, the discussion of how to get more “value” from charitable dollars donated to health and human service organizations was stirred by an article, The Five Conditions Of Collective Success: How To Move Non-Profits From An Isolated To A Collective Impact, in the Winter 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review. The issues were certainly complex (see Who Is Responsible for Collective Impact?). But, since then, the concept of “collective impact” has gained traction.

What is collective impact? The premise of this is that we need to replace performance measurements of individual organizations (called “isolated impact”) with the . . .