High-Performance Partnerships - National Academy of Public ...

RESULTS
chapter four
4. Define results that are important to the
partners, community, and funders.
Most public/nonprofit partnerships are not
blessed with self-sustaining funding sources. It
is imperative that they achieve results important
to funders and the community at large.
Key stakeholders must conclude that their
return on investment warrants the time and
resources devoted to the collaborative effort.
5. Low risk means low success.
The public sector generally is risk adverse, and
for good reason. Government must be a steward
of the public’s interests and tax dollars.
However, partnerships that avoid all risk will
not realize their full potential. They must be
willing to take reasonable, informed risks that
are designed to achieve significant results.
Otherwise, their success can only be so great.
If the initiative does not work, partnerships
should be prepared to evaluate what happened,
retool, and try again.
6. Use research on best practices.
Partnerships benefit enormously by studying
the successes and failures of other communities
that deal with similar concerns. Public
organizations at every level—federal, regional,
state, and local—provide excellent research on
a wide range of public policy issues. Each sector
has organizations that can provide best
practices data for defining appropriate objectives
and outcomes and assisting implementation
strategies. The partnership may use neutral
parties to facilitate the selection of measures
and evaluation processes.
In the City of Des Moines, debate continues over how
data should be interpreted. If there is an increase in
police calls from a neighborhood, does this mean there is
more crime or greater awareness and reporting due to
an officer being assigned there? If calls decrease, does
this mean the neighborhood is safer or that calls are
being directed to the NBSD officer? The likelihood is
that data must be tracked for several years before they
can be meaningfully interpreted.
Neighborhood Based Service Delivery (Des Moines)
AVAILABILITY OF ACCURATE,TIMELY
DATA TO MEASURE RESULTS
The Challenges
Once a partnership identifies its results, it
must adequately measure performance. Yet
securing accurate and timely data can be problematic.
One challenge is the lack of sufficient
baseline information to evaluate current conditions.
This frequently causes communities
and organizations to embrace a policy or program
based on anecdotal information. One
example is a partnership that uses juvenile
arrest statistics to measure the reducing juvenile
crime goal. This measure may capture the
police department’s effectiveness in apprehending
criminals, not the true number of
juvenile crimes. Raw data can be difficult to
interpret without considering the context, so a
partnership must avoid the temptation to
define its objectives based primarily on those
data alone.
Important community outcomes often are difficult
to quantify, at least on a timely basis.
High data gathering costs may cause a partnership
to rely on information collected for general
community purposes, such as the Census.
Unfortunately, definitive results every decade
are not sufficient to evaluate partnership performance
and make midcourse corrections.
For example, Neighborhoods in Bloom identified
increased home ownership as a critical success
measure. Other than decennial census
information, however, homeownership data
were not available on a reliable basis. As a result,
the city’s ability to accurately measure its impact
on ownership rates proved challenging.
Even with quantifiable information, reporting
timelines and formats may be different. The
partnership must be aware of the general availability
of data, and the partners’ willingness
and ability to record them in a consistent and
timely manner. Complexity further increases
when the data come from different organizational
systems, raising the “my computer doesn’t
talk to your computer” syndrome. When a
partnership’s purpose is human services-related,
confidentiality of information can be an
obstacle, as well.
70 Powering the Future: High-Performance Partnerships