Collaboration is a broad term encompassing many kinds of connection, interaction, and partnership. While there are many different ways to measure this intensity, we use a four-level scale to avoid complicating things and make the survey easy for network members to answer. This ensures we collect better, high-quality data while boosting our response rates. The scale ranges from no collaboration through integrated partnerships. Some organizations choose to add one additional category targeting potential future partners: Awareness. These organizations are aware of each other and may attend the same meetings by chance or work on similar projects, but they are not sharing resources or working together with any intention.

You can filter a network map to view relationships by the level of collaboration intensity. This is an interesting way to view your partner interactions and identify where there are groups of partners collaborating intensely within the more extensive network. These natural sub-groups can be leveraged strategically as the ‘engines’ of your network to avoid burning out the rest of your partners.

Check out the infographic below to learn more about the intensity of collaboration in a network of community partners.