By Michelle Shumate, Rong Wang, Katherine R. Cooper, Jack L. Harris, Shaun Doughtery, Joshua Miles, Anne-Marie Boyer, Zachary Gibson, Miranda Richardson, Hannah Kistler
Consultants and foundations often tout collective impact as the best approach for organizations responding to social problems in their community. Organizations that function under the collective impact tenets, such as having shared metrics and goals, are said to have more significant community outcomes. This study investigates whether the collective impact tenets represent the best way for all communities to make a social impact and which of those tenets is associated with student achievement.
Although collective impact has not gone entirely uncriticized, previous studies have failed to consider the potential influence of community context on social impact or have relied on perceptions of success as metrics for network effectiveness. This study measures networks’ impact at the school district level (i.e., fourth and eighth-grade reading, high school graduation). It ensures that the measured impact is attributable to the network’s initiatives and not external factors (e.g., changes impacting other communities within the state, changes in student achievement measures). We designed this study to answer the question: Under what conditions does collective impact result in more significant social impact than other approaches? This question is novel in and of itself, as it takes a step back from the collective impact case studies to examine alternative approaches.
This research examined 26 networks across the United States, half of which adhered closely to the collective impact model, and the other half of which did not. We matched a network from both groups based upon community similarity and analyzed differences in community-level outcomes.