By: Anne-Marie Boyer We live in a society obsessed with numbers. In this day and age of big data, no longer are conversations around metrics and quantification limited to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. The social impact sector is also expected to legitimize and improve its efforts through strategies that involve iterative evaluation and assessment. Demands for smarter reporting and transparency from funders and community stakeholders alike can exacerbate these

View the Resource By Sophia Fu, Katherine R. Cooper, Michelle Shumate Interorganizational collaboration relies on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, previous ICT research often takes place within a single organization, lacking insight into how ICTs sustain interorganizational structures. This study examined both the product categories and functional uses of ICTs for interorganizational collaboration, drawing from surveys among a random sample of 181 human services nonprofit organizations in

View the Resource By Rong Wang, Katherine R. Cooper, Anne-Marie Boyer, Shaun M. Dougherty, Michelle Shumate “Collective impact” has gained prominence as a particular means for organizations to respond to social problems in their community, though there is some concern that the term is over-used or improperly applied. In this study, we draw from research on collective impact, collaborative initiatives and network governance to suggest that what constitutes “collective impact”

View the Resource By Jennifer Ihm, Michelle Shumate Board members play a significant, yet largely unexamined, role in nonprofit collaboration. Processes, such as finding prospective partners, creating common ground with a partner, and establishing appropriate collaborative governance implicate nonprofit board members. In contrast to the scholarship of the role of interlocking directorates as potential networks for nonprofit collaboration, this paper examines the role of board members’ social and human capital

View the Resource By Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate In this article, we introduce a multidimensional network perspective as a theoretical and methodological touchstone for the study of strategic communication. The perspective embraces the various disciplinary traditions that are found under the strategic communication umbrella (e.g., advertising, corporate communication, organizational communication, and public relations) and gives primacy to communication as the constitutive element through which organizations make strategic decisions about network

Prof. Rob van Tulder of the Partnership Resource Center at the Rotterdam School of Management asked this question during the typically questions and answer session following my presentation at the Cross-Sector Social Interactions conference at the Copenhagen Business School. It’s a loaded question, with proponents of collective impact publishing reports like this one (https://orsimpact.com/blog/When-Collective-Impact-Has-Impact-A-Cross-Site-Study-of-25-Collective-Impact-Initiatives.htm) and articles in Stanford Social innovation Review (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact) and detractors publishing critiques in Nonprofit Quarterly (https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2016/04/28/voices-from-the-field-10-places-where-collective-impact-gets-it-wrong/).