All posts by Madeleine Taylor

Investing in Networks Grows Funder’s Impact

June 1, 2015 Madeleine Taylor

In a blog for Stanford Social Innovation Review , Madeleine Taylor uses the case of the RE-AMP network to examine how participation in a network allows foundations to leverage their individual investment by surfacing multiple, ongoing opportunities for collaborative grant making.

W hile still an emergent grantmaking strategy, more foundations are investing in network building as an effective tool for achieving their goals and leveraging their dollars. Even so, network investing is not for the faint of heart. Foundations must consider the scope of resources required to initiate a network approach, and support the infrastructure and collaborative projects needed to produce results. Yet we see cases where foundations with modest corpuses have leveraged their charitable dollars many times over by engaging other funders as network partners, significantly increasing the pool of funding for a change initiative over time.

The team at Network Impact is interested in understanding the resource benefits and other kinds of value created through a network approach to network funding. To that end, the Garfield Foundation —a mid-sized philanthropy—kindly offered to share financial data related to its 10-plus year investment in RE-AMP .

Read the blog.

Network Design , Network Startup

Starting a Network? Eight Design Issues to Consider

November 11, 2014 Madeleine Taylor

As more social change agents and philanthropic funders consider building networks, rather than organizations, to achieve their goals, they have to figure out what’s involved in successfully starting a network. Usually, in our experience helping to start dozens of social-impact networks during the past 10 years, the founders and funders know some, but not all, of the network design issues that have to be worked through at the beginning—and what they don’t consider can come back to haunt them.

There are two creation stories for networks of organizations or individuals seeking to achieve a social-impact goal. In one, the network bursts into life out of an unpredictable mash-up of like-minded people who share a problem, get together to see what will happen, and then invent a common path forward. They share a belief that pooling their resources and collaborating might get them what they want, but they don’t know what they’ll do together. In the other story, the network is managed carefully into existence, the result of analysis, planning, and negotiation. The founders initiate the process to achieve more impact by getting organizations to collaborate. But to engineer the collective effort they have to analyze the problem they want to solve and its causes, and determine who should be involved in solving it, what they should do together, and how to do it.

Whatever the different origin of social-impact networks, the start-up tasks for designing them are essentially the same. Our experiences with network startups has allowed us to identify eight design issues that network builders should address during the start-up process:

Purpose : What is the network’s reason for being?
Membership : Who is eligible to become a member, what are the membership requirements, and how many members will there be?
Value Propositions : What will be the benefits of membership—for individual members and collectively?
Coordination, Facilitation, and Communication : How will network members link and work with each other?
Resources : What is the network’s funding model?
Governance : Who decides what the network will do, and how do they decide?
Assessment : How will the network monitor its condition and performance?
Operating Principles : What rules guide the network’s culture?

Quite often we find that network founders have anticipated some, but not all, of these design issues. For each issue, there may be many options and there’s no one right choice—there’s the choice that is right for the network you’re building. Network-building practice isn’t based on applying a one-size-fits-all formula. It involves selecting from a repertoire of possible decisions and actions, based on an understanding of the network’s situation. Take, for instance, the design of network membership. You have to decide who is eligible to become a member and how “open” or “closed” the network will be; how many members to have and whether to cap the number or allow growth; whether there should be several categories of members with different benefits and responsibilities, or just one category; and what the requirements for participation there should be.

We explore each of these eight design issues in depth in the second chapter of Connecting to Change the World: Harnessing the Power of Networks for Social Impact, and offer practical advice about how to handle them. Because some of the issues re-emerge later in a network’s life or persist from startup to finish, we also examine them closely in later chapters on managing a network’s development and resetting a network’s design.

Successful networks are designed—they don’t just happen. Knowing a network’s essential design issues and how to make—and when to change—design choices is a crucial part of the practice of building effective social-impact networks.

Network Evaluation

What Makes Networks Generative?

September 30, 2014 Madeleine Taylor

Connecting to Change the World builds on an earlier resource that Pete and I developed called Net Gains. This latest collaboration with John Cleveland includes examples and lessons that have emerged from our work with social impact networks over the last decade or so. During that time, we’ve been introduced to many new networks and deepened our work with others. As a consequence, we have a better understanding of what makes some networks highly “generative.” By generative, we mean networks with a renewable collaborative capacity to generate numerous activities simultaneously. These are networks that activate members’ connections on an emergent basis as need and opportunities arise. Examples in the book include RE AMP – more than 165 nonprofit organizations and foundations in eight Midwestern states working together on climate change and energy policies, Reboot- a network of young Jewish American “cultural creatives” who are exploring and redefining Jewish identify and community in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, ten regional networks of state agencies and nonprofit providers that have organized to end homelessness in Massachusetts, and five regional and two national networks of rural-based organizations that are promoting public policies that benefit rural communities in the U.S. In all of these networks, members have been very deliberate about creating, strengthening and maintaining network ties in order to establish a base of connections from which many activities can arise at the same time or over time. This foundation is the starting point for the progression from connecting to aligning to production or joint action that we also discuss in the book.

Network Evaluation

Evaluating Networks

August 13, 2014 Madeleine Taylor

Changemakers everywhere are investing in and building new networks—from large-scale, cross-sector, “collective impact” initiatives to more targeted efforts to promote policy change, spark social innovation, or improve the delivery of services. All of this activity has made evaluation a priority for funders and practitioners who want to learn more about what networks can achieve and how to build networks more effectively. Network assessment—systematic, practical, and focused on a network’s unique capabilities—is coming into its own.

In response to increasing interest from grantmakers, network builders, and evaluators, Network Impact partnered with the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI) to develop a “State of Network Evaluation” framing paper about network evaluation and an accompanying network evaluation casebook, as well as a convening for funders to discuss practical questions about designing and funding network assessments. Supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and The California Endowment, our three-pronged network evaluation project aimed to gather and share information with evaluators and leaders in the network development field about evaluation approaches, methodologies, and tools that are particularly suited to the assessment of networks.

We began the project with an extensive document and literature review of different types of networks and their evaluations, both domestically and internationally, as well as interviews with funders, network practitioners, and evaluation experts. This led us to some of the real-life examples of funder-supported evaluations that we’ve included in the completed casebook “Evaluating Networks for Social Change: A Casebook.” Producing a casebook with lots of “how to” detail was a priority of the project: it’s one thing to have a good general understanding of how to design a network evaluation and another to gather the necessary resources and expertise to implement one on the ground.

Four of the networks in the casebook—Reboot, Urban Sustainability Directors Network, RE-AMP and Massachusetts Networks to End Homelessness—also appear in Connecting to Change the World: Harnessing the Power of Networks for Social Impact , a new book co-authored with Peter Plastrik and John Cleveland, that goes deeper on network development strategy, with more information about how to build and manage high-performing social impact networks.

Three Pillars

The nine networks profiled in the casebook represent a variety of network types (networks at different stages of development, of different sizes and issue focus), illustrate a range of network evaluation methodologies, and are organized to reflect three basic areas of focus for a network evaluation: network connectivity, network health, and network results. In our state of the field framing paper, we call these the Three Pillars of Network Evaluation and offer guidance on the types of evaluation questions that can be pursued under each of the pillars and their sub-dimensions. A single evaluation may focus on one or more of the pillars at the same time, and several evaluations in the casebook do.

The framing paper also includes a guide to evaluation questions that come up at different stages in a network’s development. We built this guide based on a resource for funders created by the Monitor Institute.

What’s Next?

The collaboration between Network Impact and the Center for Evaluation Innovation is continuing as part of our shared commitment to grow the field and increase the practice of network evaluation. In coming months, we plan to explore the intersection of network evaluation and systems mapping and look in greater detail at the evaluation of informal (small “n”) networks. This was an area for further investigation identified by funders at the April 2014 network evaluation convening: how to assess the progress of networks that many grantmakers hope to catalyze by convening or connecting their grantees.