Evaluating The Growth & Impact of Community Partnerships
The Mile High Health Alliance used the PARTNER CPRM to demonstrate the impact of their relationship-building efforts in the Denver area to funders and community stakeholders.
Case Study Executive Summary
The Mile High Health Alliance works to coordinate health and human services in the Denver Metro Region to improve community health outcomes for all. They struggled to find a way to measure their relationship-building work and demonstrate their collective impact to their funders and key community stakeholders. They used the PARTNER CPRM and our community partnership survey to collect data from their network of partners, visualize their relationships and attribute them to their work. Their results have been helpful in measuring their progress and guiding their strategy for the future. They plan to conduct additional surveys in the future using PARTNER to conduct longitudinal analysis and track changes over time to provide further insight.
The Mile High Health Alliance is Improving Health Outcomes
The Mile High Health Alliance makes Denver a place where every resident can live their healthiest life by bringing together key decision-makers to align housing, transportation, food, and medical care systems. Their members include Denver’s leaders in health, human and social organizations – public, private and nonprofit alike – to make all our systems work to make Denver the healthiest place to live, work and play.
The Alliance Struggled to Demonstrate Their Shared Impact.
The Mile High Health Alliance, located in Denver, CO, is an Alliance of twenty health organizations working to achieve better health through collaboration. Originally formed in 2015, they needed a way to measure the bonds between their members. While more than half of what they do involves relationship-building, they didn’t have a way to show the relationships were really having an impact to their stakeholders and funders. The Alliance also wanted baseline data that would help them compare future progress to where they started.
PARTNER Helped Them Measure Progress & Adapt Their Strategy for the Future.
The Mile High Health Alliance created a PARTNER survey to send to their network of twenty partner organizations in the Denver Metro area. They created the survey with several questions in mind:
- First, who is working with who, and what is the quality of those relationship in terms of trust and value?
- Second, How do our members perceive our progress on various network goals like sharing information and creating relationships?
After creating and customizing the survey, they sent it to their twenty partners along with several other core community stakeholders. In the past, their survey efforts resulted in a 40% response rate. However, in part thanks to PARTNER’s easy to use email reminder system, the Alliance achieved an 80% response rate on the survey.
From there, they ordered a complete report on their results from the VNL staff. They consulted with our Projects Team who walked them through their data and helped teach them how they could analyze it. Finally, they compiled the findings into a final powerpoint presentation (which you can read below) for their quarterly board meeting.
Their PARTNER Results Helped Them Communicate The Importance of Their Work to Stakeholders & Funders.
The data from the PARTNER analysis has been invaluable. They saw that trust in the network is high overall, and they will be able to compare their future progress to this baseline value. They also have an idea of which relationships need attention now, to guide their future relationship-building work. The responses on member perceptions of success are huge for guiding their work moving forward and identifying where their members believe they are falling short.
When they first rolled out the PARTNER survey, they had some pushback from our members about rating other members. But after their presentation, there was greater understanding of what the survey was and the results it yielded. One of their biggest critics even said “I get it now, I get why we’re doing this.” It was such a breakthrough!
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