Planning for results
13 August 2020, Kuwait City: The Collective Impact Coalition is not only about the work we do, but about the community of practice which we create together. In light of everything happening around the world, with people raising their voices for social justice, equity, and systemic change, compounded by the pandemic’s impact on education, our work becomes even more relevant. The coalition has been working hard the past few months, getting the data input and the skills which we need to move into our next phase.
MOVING ONLINE. As the pandemic hit, we moved all of our activities online, conducting workshops and think tank meetings on Zoom. Dr. Melissa Langworthy led a workshop on creating shared measurements for collective impact, equipping us with the tools to collect much-needed data, identify the most strategic interventions moving forward, as well as assess the impact of the coalition’s overall efforts. After developing a first draft of our shared measurements with inputs from all of the Think Tanks, we proceeded to gather input from the wider community through a series of focus groups with students, educators, administrators and parents from both the public and private school systems. The discussions we had were extremely enriching, and reminded us of how much we can learn when we take the time to share our diverse experiences and reflect together.
RESULTS BASED ACCOUNTABILITY. We have also begun working with Clear Impact, a US-based organization which provides performance management software, training and services to help government agencies, non-profits, communities, and foundations track the performance of their programs, measure the impact of their funding, and report on the progress of their missions to improve the lives of children, families and communities worldwide. We have been learning about Results Based Accountability - their methodology for data collection, management and evaluation – and working with their team to incorporate the inputs from our focus groups into our final shared measurements. We will also start utilizing Scorecard, a software tool which will allow us to monitor our performance and measure our impact across organizations and initiatives.
