Given the likely complexity of the issues underlying your action priorities, building diverse work teams that can tackle them from all sides is important. Collaborations across sectors and communities of interest catalyze innovation and smooth pathways from beginning to end. How you do this can be specific to your community. In some cases, established coalitions may provide a foundation for reaching out further. In other cases, the idea of working together may be a more difficult sell. With luck, you established the groundwork for these collaborations up front when you built support for the survey and when you involved those same stakeholders in understanding its results. Along each stage of the data cycle, however, new structures may need to emerge.

One such approach is called Collective Impact (CI). CI is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda to solve a specific social problem, using a structured form of collaboration. The concept of CI was first articulated in the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Collective Impact” by John Kania and Mark Kramer. 

Initiatives must meet five criteria to be considered Collective Impact:

1. Common agenda: All participating organizations (government agencies, non-profits, community members, etc.) have a shared vision for social change that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving the problem through agreed-upon actions.
2. Shared measurement system: All participating organizations agree on the ways success will be measured and reported with key indicators. In this case, the outcome or impact indicators can be drawn from the survey.
3. Mutually reinforcing activities: A diverse set of stakeholders, typically in multiple sectors, are engaged and coordinate a set of differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action.
4. Continuous communication: Frequent communications over a long period of time among key players within and between organizations build trust and encourage ongoing learning and adaptation.
5. Backbone organization: The backbone staff tends to play six roles to move the initiative forward: guide vision and strategy, support aligned activity, establish shared measurement practices, build public will, advance policy and mobilize funding. 

While CI sets a high standard for community-wide collaboration approaches, you don’t need to follow the steps exactly as written. 

For more information about Collective Impact see Essentials of Social Innovation: Collective Impact