Results-Based Accountability for Community Impact

When it comes to community impact work, chambers often express frustration that work seems to be happening in silos, and actors in the private sector and public sector are often disconnected. It can be challenging to get everyone together to work collectively towards a shared goal that will improve community outcomes. How do we approach persistent population-wide problems that require many partners and sectors to solve?

Results-Based Accountability (RBA) can be a helpful tool for these kinds of transformational efforts. RBA is not about measuring services or programs offered to individuals, but rather sharing accountability for the changes in well-being and outcomes for those living in a community. RBA is a simple data-driven framework that can give organizations across sectors a common language for describing the impact they are seeking. This has been a particularly helpful framework for collaboration between public health and the private sector.

Public-private partnerships can use Results-Based Accountability to help facilitate a strategic planning process that addresses a community-wide problem and identifies the actions each contributing member of the partnership can take. The design of that process should include clear goals, define indicators and benchmarks, and ensure that the community is regularly updated on progress and decisions along the way.

When partnerships start an effort that is guided by Results-Based Accountability, it can be helpful to keep these three guiding principles in mind:

1. Start with the end and work backwards. This may seem simple, but starting from a common understanding of the ultimate end state is a helpful way to design the path for getting there. It might be something like, “All adults have a well-paid job,” or “All of our residents have access to high-quality health care.” Working backwards allows many opportunities for disrupting traditional thinking and brainstorming new and innovative ways of addressing challenges.
2. Employ data-driven, transparent decision-making. It is impossible to gain a community's trust and buy-in without transparency. Everyone at the table needs to trust that partners are all on the same page with decisions and that those decisions are based in data. In this case, data should include both quantitative data and qualitative data from those with lived experience.
3. Move from talk to action. When we’re tackling big problems, it can be easy to spend endless sessions and months discussing the problems, only to realize that no progress has been made on changing outcomes. The structure provided by RBA helps communities make meaningful progress on their goals and indicators.

Results-Based Accountability uses a process to help communities “turn the curve” on the outcomes they want to achieve. Turning the curve is the process of looking at graphs of shared and/or community data, identifying the moment where things started to be off track with that measure (“the curve”), and identifying shared partnership strategies to shift that curve moving forward. The key steps in this process are:

1. Define the end. What kind of result, metric or goal do you want to achieve.
2. Analyze the current state. Look at both historic data and projected data for that metric or goal and summarize what the data is telling you about how your community is doing.
3. Uncover the story behind the data. Begin to peel back the layers of data to get to the story behind the numbers, identifying the variety of positive and negative factors that have created the “curve” in your data. This should also be informed through conversations with members of the community most impacted by the challenge.
4. Identify partners. The kinds of problems that these data reveal can’t be addressed by a single organization. Brainstorm everyone who needs to be at the table to “turn the curve” for this metric. For example, when addressing an issue like mental health, public health partners bring knowledge of available resources and how to navigate systems, while private sector partners can share information from employer and employee surveys on how mental health impacts work. Both perspectives, in addition to others, are critical to “turn the curve.”
5. Think big and small. In this step, anything goes as you brainstorm ideas for what might work to get things moving in the right direction. This can be anything from big, hairy, audacious goals to low or no-cost strategies – and everything in between.
6. Decide on the path forward. Once everything is on the table, it is time decide which ideas to pursue first. That doesn’t mean that other ideas are not valuable, but partners cannot tackle everything at once. There may be disagreement between partners on the next steps, so partners should revisit their guiding principles and data to help make these decisions. After determining next steps, partners should come to clear agreements about everyone’s role in that path forward.

This framework resonates with partners from all sectors because it is straightforward and grounded in shared data. Participants can leverage their collective strengths to address challenges that they have identified together. Of course, this process is ongoing, and partners can come back to “turn the curve” whenever they need to assess progress and adjust strategies. This allows the partnership to hold each other accountable for commitments and outcomes.

Chambers of commerce can champion the use of the Results-Based Accountability framework in their communities. You have strong relationships with many partners, and chambers can serve as convenors and drivers for this kind of community impact work. The next blog in this series will look at the successes that came from a collective effort between child care provides, a chamber of commerce and a public health department in Iowa using RBA to solve the child care crisis in their community.