4 Benefits of PARTNER CPRM for Organizations, Partners, Communities, & Ecosystems
A systems approach to collaboration is a powerful way to improve social and environmental outcomes and strengthen communities and neighborhoods. However, most systems are messy and complex creatures that take time and resources to study and understand. Without the right insight into how the system is currently functioning and why, well-intentioned efforts may lead to unintentional negative consequences. The history of public health in America is rife with examples: Doctors and researchers who meant well, but whose interventions actually created more problems than they solved. To shift a system towards equity, we have to understand and visualize its structure and function.
That’s why we created PARTNER CPRM: A tool for community partner relationship management that leverages network science and systems thinking principles to strengthen social impact. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the four main benefits of PARTNER CPRM for the organizations who use it, along with their partners, the communities they serve, and the broader community health ecosystem within which they exist.
What is PARTNER CPRM?
PARTNER helps track and manage your community partner relationships, using an ecosystem approach rooted in network science theory and systems thinking principles. Drawing from CRM systems, social network analysis methodologies, and up-and-coming ecosystem interventions, it helps measure and visualize your entire collaborative ecosystem, including how your community partners are interacting, interconnecting, sharing resources and information, and changing over time. Because PARTNER is designed to help you shift and advance entire ecosystems, it has spillover benefits for the partners you work with, the communities you serve, and the whole ecosystem in which you are a part. Here’s how it helps each of these groups, starting with your organization’s internal team.
Who Does PARTNER CPRM Support?
PARTNER CPRM was created to help organizations manage and track their network of community partners. However, because the platform is designed to help you understand and advance entire collaborative ecosystems to serve the community better, it has spillover benefits for each of the partners you work with, all the communities you serve, and the entire ecosystem in which all of you are a part. Here’s how it helps each of these groups, starting with your organization’s internal team.
Streamline Your Organization's Collaboration
Anyone working to improve community health, education, and other social issues knows that it takes a collaborative effort to address the root causes of inequity. However, managing your partnerships across multiple departments, divisions, and programs can get confusing quickly, with silos developing between different teams that keeps partnerships disconnected and limits their contributions across your entire organization. PARTNER CPRM centralizes and streamlines your community partner relationship data so you can identify and eliminate redundancies, streamline resource-sharing and communication flows, and prioritize areas for relationship-building and development work. It is the key to taking a data-driven, ecosystem approach to your collaboration across the entire organization.
Assist Your Partners in the Community
PARTNER CPRM makes sharing data and insights with your partners easy so everyone can benefit from your discoveries and findings. You can set up surveys, and question sets to provide a Profile to each partner with all their data and network maps immediately after submitting their responses – enabling the rapid dissemination of your results. You can also wait until all your data is collected and then share your profiles with them with a link or PDF report.
Suppose you want your partners to engage in their exploratory analysis of your ecosystem and network maps. In that case, you can set up a public-facing dashboard with preset network maps and filter options. This is a great way to promote engagement among partners by letting them roll up their sleeves and start filtering and exploring the ecosystem for themselves. Often, we see different partners in a network identify unique but complementary findings when looking at the same map due to their unique history, experience, and context. This is emergence and systems thinking at work – and a demonstration of the power of an ecosystem approach to collaboration.
Support the Communities and People You Serve
As your staff increases their collective capacity and your partners shift their mindsets and leverage their data, your community will begin to feel and see the impact of PARTNER CPRM for themselves. While all systems change takes time and hard work, multiple studies suggest they lead to population-level changes in health behaviors and outcomes when done correctly and sustained over time.
Moreover, systems-based approaches typically pay more attention and resources to equity and inclusion considerations than traditional interventions. For example, the MAPP Framework used by NACCHO to take a systems approach to community health improvement planning recently integrated reflections of health equity and power inequities as foundational aspects of the program. They argue that it is impossible to truly advance community health without addressing health inequity – which requires evaluating the power dynamics in the community that lead to the rules controlling the ecosystem.
Lastly, the shifts made at the community level often have spillover effects into related or tangentially connected policy domains or issues areas. For example, a new collective impact initiative focused on health equity may involve the local school system – which is so inspired by the effort they decide later that year to convene their education partners to launch a similar approach to K12 education in their community.
That demonstrates the exponential power of networks to create explosive positive growth in impact through their connections to other systems and partners.
Strengthen the Entire Community Health Ecosystem
As your organization builds its capacity, your partners work together more strategically, and your community begins to see and experience the benefits, the stage is set for transformative change across the ecosystem that creates once-in-a-generation improvements in health, education, civic engagement, and other social and environmental impacts. Ecosystem-level enhancements can range from a shift in the ecosystems’ underlying purpose, a new level of awareness and ecosystem thinking among its members or a dramatic shift in system inputs or outputs due to its re-orientation. Ecosystem-level changes are often as unpredictable as they are powerful, a result of many small changes in behavior and interaction that create cascading waves of progress. The key is to create the right culture, make ecosystem data visible and accessible, and follow and open and collaborative process that lets the ecosystem self-organize and self-govern to create the best possible way forward.
See PARTNER CPRM for yourself during a personalized web demo!
Curious about using PARTNER CPRM to strengthen your own organization, partnerships, communities, and ecosystem? The best way to learn more is to see the platform for yourself during a web demo with our Partnerships Team. We can learn more about your mission and context to discuss how you might use PARTNER CPRM to streamline your partnerships and shift your system towards better outcomes. You can click here to request a demo with Kelly or Will, or click here to schedule a Discovery Call on a date and time that works best for you.
We look forward to connecting and collaborating with you.
