SNA of a “collective impact” initiative: Shape Up Somerville

Overview of collective impact

A few weeks I posted an article from the NYTimes about emerging community-based efforts to address social problems, sometimes referred to as “collective impact”. The idea is that by bringing a variety of public, nonprofit and private sector partners to the table, agreeing to a common vision and measurable goals, and pursuing evidence-based actions toward those goals, communities are capable making a difference in addressing problems that no single institution can accomplish alone. The idea of multiple community actors cooperating toward a common goal is nothing new. What is new is the depth of collaboration and sharing of resources across different actors, facilitated by several factors: technology and communications technology have greatly increased the ease of information and data sharing; trends in the nonprofit and public sectors toward quantitative methods of evaluation and “best practices” programming; the emergence of the public health field; the growth and mainstreaming of CSR.

Intro to Shape Up Somerville

One of the most lauded recent collective impact efforts is underway in Somerville through an initiative called Shape Up Somerville (SUS), which is coordinated by the SUS Task Force in the City’s Health Department. Recognizing the need to address childhood obesity, SUS was started in 2002 and designed largely by Friedman School professor Christina Economos. The central SUS goal was to decrease the average student intake by 125 calories a day by increasing their physical activity in and outside the classroom, increasing their intake of healthy foods, decreasing consumption of less healthy foods, and enhancing students’ knowledge of the link between diet, exercise, and health. (http://bit.ly/naJGbM)

Some of the activities coordinated under the SUS banner include improving the city’s walkability to encourage students to walk to school, increasing the number of bike paths, adding healthier options to the school lunch menu, incorporating physical activity in the classroom, increasing access to healthy foods outside of the schools through farmers markets, and promoting healthy meal options at local restaurants. (http://bit.ly/rithQM)

It takes a village: the network of shareholders

To execute all of these activities, the project involved over 25 stakeholders in the project, including teachers, parents, school nurses, school food staff, after school and nonprofit program managers, local restaurants, farmers markets, and city policymakers.

Evaluating SUS: the role of SNA

The program is recognized as a success, with published studies showing that Somerville students in grades 1-3 gained significantly less – about 1 lb. per student – than students in comparable schools without this type of intervention. (http://bit.ly/pOcLLb)

This success is chalked up to the fact that so many different players are committed to achieving the same goal: it’s a networked effort. But what is this network? The SUS Task Force might produce an organizational chart with them as the hub of a spoke-like network, connecting them to all the different players, and maybe some of them to each other. But is this a realistic depiction of how the network really functions? And what of the dynamics within the network that help make it so successful? No one has yet examined these questions, and this is why I would like to conduct an SNA of the SUS initiative, which I believe can make a meaningful contribution to the understanding of what’s working here, and what might be done to make it even better.

SNA study design

I propose to design and distribute a survey. Ideally, I would distribute the survey to all members of the SUS network, though there would be far too many respondents for that to be practical, so instead I will select representative organizations of each stakeholder (school, nonprofit, restaurant, etc.), and distribute the survey to each employee within that organization whose role is relevant to the SUS initiative (ex. School custodial staff would not be surveyed).

The network question:

“Please note how often you have discussed Shape Up Somerville with this person in the last three months”.

Underneath the header for each representative shareholder organization, I will list every relevant employee along with their position, and include the following options:

1. Never
2. Occasionally
3. Frequently

Note on a limitation of the network question: it does not distinguish between favorable and critical discussions about SUS. This distinction is important, and follow-up would be required to determine the type of discussion about SUS one has had (a clue about the likely nature of one’s conversations re: SUS could be found in a respondent’s answer to the attribute question about their satisfaction with SUS described below). However, I am making the assumption that the measure of one’s conversations about SUS is an indicator of one’s interest and stake in the outcome of SUS.

The survey would include a number of attribute-based questions that could be helpful in the analysis of the network data, including:

• Place of work and job position(s)
• Knowledge of SUS – how familiar are you with the SUS initiative (scale of 1 to 3)
• Do you read the publications distributed by the SUS Task Force?
• Please rate your satisfaction with SUS (scale of 1 to 3).
• Personal exercise routine/diet habits

Analyzing the network data

There are several questions I would like to explore through this network survey:

1. What does this network look like? How are people connected to one another?
I would like to explore what the pattern of communication ties reveals about the configuration of the SUS initiative on a whole-network level. Does it appear to have a more centralized, decentralized, or distributed form? I would expect there to be either components or communities (in the clustered Girvan Newman sense) formed around certain attributes, particularly place of work and job position. What would be very interesting is to see what connections might occur between communities.

I can also analyze the data to test certain assumptions about what distinguishes successful collective impact efforts. FSG is a nonprofit consulting firm that assists communities design collective impact initiatives, and they argue that successful collective impact efforts share some basic elements, including: regular communication within and amongst partners, particularly among players at the chief executive level; an organization serving as the “backbone” dedicated full-time to managing the partnership. These elements assume certain patterns of communication between partner organizations and people within those organizations, which I can investigate. For instance, is the SUS Task Force really serving as a backbone, or is the spoke-like organizational chart a myth?

2. How much collective interest is there about the initiative? Along with respondents’ answers to some of the attribute questions, looking at density of ties within, and perhaps across, different communities may provide an indirect indicator of how prevalent the issue is on the minds of all the partners.

3. Who are the go-to people in the network? In identifying node-central people (particularly high in-bound, out-bound centrality, and high Eigenvector), we’d be able to pinpoint influential members who are also likely among those with the greatest interest in SUS. It would be interesting to look at any commonalities among these people. Do they occupy positions of leadership within the SUS structure or their respective organizations? Are the people who occupy formal positions of leadership actually the thought leaders?

4. How might the SUS leadership facilitate connections within and between different communities? / How might information about SUS might be more efficiently disseminated across the network? Identify and strategize how to better incorporate the influential people within a component/community, as well as strategizing how to utilize the in-betweeners to connect different communities and spread information across the network.