FSG – Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations

Why Is the Work Holding a Coalition Together So Hard to See?

FSG’s study of backbone organisations is useful because it examines the work that disappears when collaboration is described simply as organisations “working together.” It finds that individual organisations cannot perform collective-impact work effectively without dedicated support for strategy, aligned activities, shared measurement, policy, communications and resource mobilisation, and that these functions change as a coalition matures. What struck me is how closely this resembles many climate-resilience systems, where the visible intervention receives funding while the work connecting institutions is treated as administration. A heat programme can fund sensors, cooling and communications while nobody adequately funds the people who align health departments, employers, utilities and municipalities around a shared operating model. The problem is partly measurement: the better the backbone performs, the more its output appears as improved behaviour elsewhere rather than as something it can claim for itself. This suggests that philanthropic leverage should sometimes be measured not only by money mobilised, but by reductions in institutional friction, stronger shared capability and decisions that previously could not be made. If coordination is essential but deliberately becomes invisible when it succeeds, how should funders know what it is worth?

Source: Turner, Merchant, Kania & Martin, Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations in Collective Impact, FSG, 2012. Read the source