Using internal communications to prevent crash and burnout.
I’m headed to Nashville for a workshop. It’s just far enough to pose a toss-up between flying and driving. Six hours and forty-five minutes by car. Last time, I drove, but this go-round I chose to fly. My rationale, a flight delay is no more or less likely than a traffic jam.
Airlines don’t have any fans these days. The news outlets just love to show long lines and the de-icing of wings during snow storms. Queue the shot of a huddled, should-be passenger trying to sleep in a corner on the airport tiles. Extra points if it’s a student on the way home for Thanksgiving dinner.
Please allow me to shirk that trend and defend the airlines for a moment. They’re navigating multiple factors beyond their control like weather and fuel costs. They face complicated regulations. Their operating costs are high, their customers seldom satisfied, their margins razor thin. And when they fail, people get hurt or killed.
Sounds a bit like running a state agency or nonprofit.
Just like a network of air hubs is necessary to traverse the globe, agencies and nonprofits understand that it takes a multitude of organizations to navigate our most complex social issues. For example, tackling homelessness may need to involve any combination of mental health, addiction, workforce readiness and financial literacy partners. And coordinating the legion of players can be as frenetic as anything that happens in an air traffic control tower.
The new(ish) way of managing partners is called collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review first published an article on the subject in 2011. The approach has gained favor among public and private initiatives because it’s proven especially effective in addressing complex and intractable issues. The philosophy rests on five core principles.
Common Agenda: A shared vision for change and approach toward achieving it.
Shared Measurement: Collecting reporting data to measure progress and hold one another accountable.
Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Coordinating interventions.
Continuous Communication: Constant and open feedback to build trust and motivate one another.
Backbone Support: A dedicated team coordinating a collective of partner organizations.
In theory, the approach is logical and sound. In practice, I’ve seen it go awry as many times as not, particularly when the backbone organization isn’t bolstered by a major funder. The environment facing most agencies and nonprofits is just too turbulent. And the crosscurrents foiling progress create a scarcity mindset.
Principle four, continuous communication, is the way through the thunderstorm. We know that communication breeds understanding, trust and cooperation. And it can also beat back the scarcity mindset. I’ve seen it happen, but not without the proper tool.
In 2017, I got my first experience working with a collective impact model. The effort involved over 150 clinical locations. Participating organizations included state department health clinics, over 20 Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers, Department of Rural Health offices, free healthcare clinics and four universities. Meanwhile, the backbone organization had limited staff working to meet tight deadlines associated with a finite grant period. There were nearly 1,000 people involved. It was part heroic effort and part recipe for disaster.
Amidst these strong communications headwinds, we opted to invest in technology to unify the network of partners and streamline administrative support. We built an online hub for partners containing the following tools:
Onboarding materials
Marketing assets
Patient-facing collateral materials
Staff directory
Referral mechanisms
Data dashboard
Training modules
Event calendar
Monthly newsletter
Grant reporting forms
Clinic maps
Peer-to-peer forums
It mirrored an approach I had seen decades prior working on a global financial services account. It was a leap of faith. And thank goodness, it worked.
Administrative tasks were streamlined. The provider network became more unified. Everyone had equal access to the same tools and data. Referrals converted, the scarcity mindset faded and cooperation replaced competition. Since then, I’ve helped two other initiatives implement the same tool.
Are we on to something? Maybe. My colleagues and I decided to embark on an informal study about nonprofits’ interest and investment in technology. Our goal was to explore what tools might help them work more effectively and efficiently.
And here’s where we found the most daunting conditions. For the most part, even the most sophisticated and well-resourced organizations had a low appetite for investing in technology. I can’t say this surprised me in a sector known to take pride in frugality. But that wasn’t the biggest resistance point. The top concern among executive directors: staff resiliency and turnover.
Believe it or not, that’s when I became most optimistic. And it’s because of what I’d witnessed after our teams started using the hub.
In our cases, shared technology lessened the burden on the workforce, damping the flames that so often result in burnout. We’ve seen that when our teams can communicate with one another, share the same information, and track the real-time impact of their efforts together, they grow more entwined, more satisfied and more resilient. And the directors? They become less worried about a tailspin and more excited about logging the next million miles.
In solidarity,
Kevin
