Our Questions for 2016
Network Impact is looking forward to 2016! As a team, we’ll be exploring new themes as well as deepening our work in some key practice areas. Here are a few questions we’ll be investigating in the coming year…
In what contexts are online communities most useful to networks?
What are best practices for creating and managing online communities that enhance network connectivity, alignment and action?
For several years we’ve been learning from practitioners about challenges and successes in this area. We’ve also developed some resources for tracking the effects of digital platform use on individuals, their organizations and the communities in which they work. (You can read more about these projects: Civic Tech Assessment Guide and Community Commons.) We are now compiling our top lessons learned and will have a blog post on the topic early this year.
How can funders track and improve the network impact of their efforts to connect people at convenings and retreats as well as in online environments that bring diverse groups into contact with one another?
Over the last year, we’ve fielded an avalanche of questions about social impact networks (of grantees, investees, fellows, awardees) that grantmakers hope to catalyze by creating environments in which people with related interests can connect. Our guest post for Philantopic discusses what we learned from a social network analysis of the Durfee Foundation’s Stanton Fellowship. This year, we’ll be looking at strategies including human-centered design that aim to boost positive network outcomes in this area. We’ll also be exploring frameworks and tools for evaluating these “mass-weaving” efforts focusing on the value they produce for individuals, organizations and at the field level.
As big data, and even “medium data” become ubiquitous, who is successfully leveraging data and technology for social change and how are they doing it?
In our work with Kaiser Permanente and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, we spoke with dozens of grantmakers, innovators and change agents in multiple sectors to find out how funders can catalyze and spread the use of data and technology to advance social change. What we found is that most organizations, including funders, are struggling to use data and technology well. It will take a concerted effort, and strategic investment, to bring the social sector up to speed. In the coming year, we’ll be looking more closely at network initiatives in this domain such as strategies for connecting technologists to nonprofits, to each other and to each other’s open source projects.