Walking the Walk (or, to riff on Hamilton, words are easy, young man, deliverin’s harder) (post #7)
How we support partners to succeed at their commitments
From its first moments, 100Kin10 has been a network of commitments: The original 28 organizations each committed to do something above and beyond to contribute to the goal of 100,000 excellent STEM teachers. We helped organizations make stretch commitments. We ensured every organization that joined was vetted by experts for those stretch commitments (along with their track record of success and their interest in contributing to the learning life of the network). Within a year, we had 100 leading organizations from across sectors making commitments. We proudly said that we were not your grandfather’s coalition, some toothless tiger of sign-on support: In our network, you had to commit to action in order to join.
And then we took a hard look and asked ourselves one very uncomfortable question:
If commitments to action remained on paper and went unfulfilled, were they any better than John Hancock’s on a sign-on letter?
So we set about not just inspiring more great organizations to make commitments to the shared goal of 100,000 excellent STEM teachers but to help those diverse and powerful organizations that joined actually fulfill their commitments.
Which, it turns out, is really hard to do. For several reasons.
- The cumulative budgets of our now 280 partner organizations dwarfs ours by many orders of magnitudes (and how often in real life does the fable of the lion and the mouse actually come true?).
- Many organizations in the non-profit sector function in an imperfect market in terms of information flow, meaning that it is difficult to access existing knowledge on what does and doesn’t work, forcing them to improvise or innovate where they could more efficiently and effectively be adapting.
- And words — and commitments — are a lot easier than actions; change in any context is hard.
In our scan of the field of collective impact, there are scant examples of a network supporting a diverse array of organizations to complete commitments. Even marquee networks struggle with this. As a field, we have gotten better at inspiring commitments but have hit a wall around implementation.
So, working with GOOD Corps, we began to design innovative, highly leveraged ways to support partners to succeed at their commitments. We launched the first supports in February 2012. Some of the ideas were big fails (a partnership with a university journalism school to create a news bureau to tell and amplify partners’ STEM stories; a partnership with another non-profit to help source HR and other capacity-building to the partners), but some were early wins.
Over nearly five years, we’ve improved those early wins and experimented, tweaked, studied, adapted, and innovated to develop a robust suite of supports to help our partners strengthen and accelerate their work and fulfill their commitments. (If you have lots of extra time on your hand or are obsessively interested in the evolution of our thinking (thank you, whoever you are (+my mom)), you can see our 2012 partner supports here, and you can see how, by 2015, those ideas had evolved here. Spoiler alert: The biggest refresh is that we used to separate collaborating from learning and have come to seem them as two sides of the same coin; we also used to call out funding as its own category and now see funding as a part of implementation.)
Our ideas kept evolving, because we’re borderline obsessive ourselves about continuous improvement based on data on what is and isn’t working, and the data showed that plenty of partners were succeeding (by our 2015 Summit, we announced 30 organizations that were exceeding their commitments ahead of schedule), but too many weren’t.
This fall, we reorganized our supports along three axes that are the keys to moving partners from commitments to action: learn, ideate, and implement.
- Learn: Exchange knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.
- Ideate: Adapt existing solutions and create new ones as needed.
- Implement: Implement solutions, monitor progress, and continuously improve.
You can see the full range of offerings that we’ve designed here. You’ll see that there are in-person and virtual offerings, crafted to respond to the differing needs of our diverse network. And you’ll notice that each one is designed to provide value to the participating organization while simultaneously building trust and connection within the community.
The fundamental insight of our approach to partner support is that most solutions are extant within the network, and the real impediment to progress is the lack of good information flow. The related insight: Innovation is sexy; learning is less so; so incentives to take the wheel and improve on it are few, while incentives to design the shiny new thing are many. So we hyper-invest in helping partners share what’s working and what isn’t in light-touch, easy-to-access ways.
Here’s one example: Steal This Sessions. Focused on one concrete challenge, three partners share their solutions, both verbally and on one page. Other partners interested in learning about the same challenge listen, and then the whole group provides suggestions to the three presenters to improve their ideas and brainstorms together about possible adaptations and next steps. We hold these in-person at our Summit and virtually every month or so.
But we know that, sometimes, even with a network of organizations as strong as 100Kin10’s, there are some challenges we have yet to solve. For those, we ideate, adapting existing solutions to different contexts and innovating new solutions.
Here’s an example: Our Fellowship. Also focused on one concrete challenge based on our map of the grand challenges impeding progress toward 100Kin10, partners apply to participate in a 6–9 month human-centered design fellowship, in which they explore the dimensions of that one challenge from the perspective of both the end-user and the research; prototype and test solutions; get feedback from experts and end-users; and apply for funding to bring their solution to market.
Another example: Collaboration Grants. Partners apply for micro-grants through a speedy and lightweight application to meet face-to-face with fellow partners and advance work on commitments, including collaborating on new projects. Since 2012, we’ve awarded 84 collaboration grants — totaling almost $375,000 — to enable over 100 organizations to learn and innovate together; these have leveraged literally millions of dollars in follow-on support, as well as improvements of all kinds, from redesigned programs to new partnerships.
And finally, we have come to believe that, too often, the value of learning and ideation is left on the table in the non-profit sector, as organizational stasis resists change and leaders underinvest in change management (this article from 2011 makes the case well). So we invest in implementation support.
A final example: Networked Improvement Communities. Partners that participated in the fellowship and are now implementing solutions, plus other partners working on a similar challenge, come together to continuously learn and problem solve in real-time, knowing that no program runs in real life the way it does in theory. Organizations share challenges, run experiments, measure progress against agreed-upon measures, and — most important — look to each other for support.
Our network of 280 organizations is hyper-engaged: All of our partners contribute deep data through an annual survey to fuel the learning life of the network. Over half have engaged in at least two opportunities, with nearly a quarter engaging in four or more. On average, partners rate our experiences between 4–4.5 / 5. This winter, we’ll finish our annual commitment review to assess how partners are succeeding at their commitments, what challenges they face, what we can learn from their successes and struggles, and how we need to improve our own work to continue to support them better.
