Visible Us Blog

The Visible Us Blog is home to all our articles written by our team and our partners and guests. Try searching for a topic related to network leadership, social connectedness, or network science, or explore another content category below. Interested in contributing a guest blog? Contact our team for more info.

Want to learn about network science? Have a collaborative problem you need to tackle? The Visible Us Blog is our space for sharing stories, advice, and inspiration with our community. Subscribe to our newsletter on the right so you don’t miss any blog updates! Have a suggestion for a new blog topic? Shoot us an email at hello@visiblenetworklabs.com

Tools for Partners to Collaborate Online
Blogs

Tools for Partners to Collaborate Online | Our 9 Favorites

In this age of social distancing, it’s harder and harder to work with partners in our networks to reach common goals. We’ve found great success from a number of tools for partners to collaborate online. Some are community platforms, others help with communication or project

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Benefits of using a CPRM
Blogs

Benefits of Using a CPRM to Manage Your Network of Partnerships

The Many Benefits of Using a CPRM… A Community Partner Relationship Management System allows you to track, manage & leverage your interconnected network of partnerships. Whether you’re a University managing community partnerships, a Government Affairs Department tracking your policy ecosystem, a CPRM offers many benefits

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Blogs

From Scattered Fragments to the Spokes and Hub in a Wheel

Many churches value local connections and partnerships, but, too often, churches and similar faith-based organizations look to make an impact only among their congregations and immediate constituents. My experience is that these two pieces go hand-in-hand. For local churches to broaden their reach and more

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How to Evaluate a Network with PARTNER

Today it’s common to use a network approach to build and leverage cross-sector partners for collaborative impact. However, very few organizations are evaluating these tactics and strategies to demonstrate their progress and find ways to improve. Collaboration in a network requires time, energy and resources

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Ecosystem Strategies Need CPRMs
Blogs

Ecosystem Strategies Need CPRMs

The Era of the Ecosystem Strategy This is the era of the ecosystem strategy (citation), the latest intervention to build an adaptive workforce, tackle wicked social problems, and solve the problem of insufficient resources when going it alone. For decades the nonprofit sector has called

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Network Weaver Network Leader
Blogs

I’m a Natural Network Weaver. But Am I a Good Network Leader?

I’m not going to lie: I’m a pretty amazing visionary. I’m great at getting people excited about something, moving them to acton, getting them to join me in a cause or movement. I’ve started a number of clubs, coalitions, networks, and organizations …even city-wide, cross-sector

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Relationship Budgeting
Blogs

Relationship Budgeting: Building Networks with Intent

A bigger network is a better network… right? That’s what most of us learn our entire lives. More friends, partners and network members provide more ideas, more opportunities, and more connections in turn. More is better… or is it a problem? When asked what’s limiting

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Comparing Public and Private Sector Networks
Blogs

Comparing Public and Private Sector Networks

Two years ago, I decided to apply to CU Denver’s MPA program at the very last minute, many months after having submitted applications to MBA programs. Still, I’m often drawn to comparisons of public administration and business administration. So, I was excited to be assigned

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Network science and COVID-19
Blogs

Network Science and COVID-19: What’s the Connection?

As the news from recent weeks about the worldwide spread of Covid-19 has hit us here at home, I continue to see the important role that network science plays in this pandemic. We may not all be infectious disease experts, but we are all network science experts

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Blogs

An Intro to PARTNER’s Validated Measures

One of the things that makes PARTNER such a special tool for organizational network analysis are the metrics it uses to measure collaboration. Through a two-year process of interviews, surveys & focus groups, our team studied what mattered most when it comes to measuring networks.

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Blogs

Who is the Best Person to Take My Network Survey?

If you’ve ever designed a survey, you know that one of the most crucial steps is picking respondents. For a survey of members of an inter-organizational network, this step usually first involves identifying the organizations to which to distribute the survey. At Visible Network Labs,

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Managing Turf in a Network
Blogs

Managing Turf in a Network: Keeping it Under Control

This December, we surveyed more than 150 network leaders in our annual State of Networks Survey. The number of people mentioning “turf” as a daily problem in their collaborative work really struck me! Responses suggested that “turf” was associated to issues such as an unwillingness

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