Convening by Design

(Illustration by iStock/blackred)

Convening is a loosely used term that covers regular staff meetings, major public events, and everything in between. Convenings may bring people together to deliberate on day-to-day organizational opportunities and challenges, or to launch a world-changing solution, coalition, or institution. Regardless of size or agenda, groups that convene with intention rather than by rote are infinitely more likely to produce meaningful interactions and outcomes.

Unfortunately, most convenings fail to realize their full potential. Marlee Margolin, who manages The Rockefeller Foundation’s convening design practice says, “We've all attended a gathering where participants were distracted or disengaged, where we didn't connect meaningfully with the content, where there was a missing crackle of energy between the participants.”

Indeed, many organizers and participants talk about wanting to achieve outcomes when they convene but find themselves dissatisfied with the results. Common complaints include:

• “This Could Have Been an Email.” You have 60 minutes, and at minute 49, you finish hearing everyone share their name and formal biography—information everyone could have read quickly in an introductory email.
• “Why Am I Here?” You walk into a room (or sign into a Zoom call) and have no idea why you were invited. You recognize a few people, but as the convening carries on, you think, “I have so much to do, why am I here?”
• “I’ve Heard This Before.” You’re energized by a topic and have ideas, solutions, and questions you want to raise, but the organizer takes up all the air presenting things you already know from reading the materials sent in advance.
• “Great, but Now What?” You leave a convening feeling motivated to do something, but what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with isn’t clear, and there’s no follow-through. Everyone’s ideas are captured on a flip chart, where they will remain.

These are tell-tale signs that a convening didn’t reach its potential. But there are ways to avoid them. Organizers can significantly improve outcomes by treating convening design as a strategic discipline. A good convening requires careful thought and choices about the purpose, participants, structure, preparation, and follow-through. Using a structured approach to realize the potential of a convening can lead to more-informed organizational decisions, more-effective collaborations, and stronger solutions to social challenges.

Designing Strategic Convenings

We have been fortunate to learn from one of the world’s longest-standing convening laboratories. For decades, global leaders have come together at The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy, using convening as a tool to map the landscape of emerging fields, forge new alliances, discover breakthrough pathways to impact, and accelerate collective action. The convening design practice we apply to Bellagio Center and virtual convenings helps ensure that convenings are strategic, meaning they achieve near-term outcomes and fuel a long tail of impact afterward.

The endpoint of strategic convenings should always be different from the starting point. They’re different from gatherings where people listen more than talk or simply network. Whether virtual or in-person, an hour or multi-day, strategic convenings drive concrete, meaningful change. More specifically, they:

• Achieve breakthrough outcomes by overcoming a stubborn barrier or making an innovative leap forward to accelerate progress toward a longer-term goal
• Draw on a diverse set of stakeholders to participate in a curated experience that elicits a range of perspectives and ideas required to achieve a breakthrough
• Secure commitment for post-convening action, often mobilizing additional resources
• Spark unforeseen collaborations to address new challenges and opportunities

To give an idea of what this looks like in practice, in the summer of 2021, The Rockefeller Foundation’s innovation team designed a convening series. It consisted of several 90-minute convenings over three months aimed at aligning the agendas, definitions, and priorities of different groups working on digital public infrastructure. The goal was to build on the extensive work of participants and determine how to coordinate action and attract investment for digital public infrastructure.

The convening began with the basics. A group of funders, bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, government officials, and technical experts came together in the same virtual room to collectively define and understand the values each participant attached to working on digital public infrastructure. The conversation built on responses to a questionnaire that participants had filled out beforehand, about the goals of their initiative and how they planned to reach them. The group discussed areas of misalignment that the questionnaire had revealed and that otherwise might not have surfaced, and worked to come to a consensus on how digital public infrastructure could meet population-scale needs like emergency cash transfers.

The series included separate sessions for defining the problem, creating an action plan, and building a stakeholder engagement plan. By not packing all three into one convening, participants had time to dig into the details of each topic and deepen their alignment. Separating these sessions also gave the group space in-between to reflect and prepare for the next conversation with more clarity.

At the end of the convening series, the group made a big leap forward. It published a common vision document aimed at influencing and attracting other partners, and co-hosted a catalytic, ministerial-level event called Co-Develop, where entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani proposed a collaborative fund. The fund will mobilize resources to help countries build inclusive, safe, and equitable digital public infrastructure. The Rockefeller Foundation, Nilekani Philanthropies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Omidyar Network are all providing initial funding.

“What we needed was the opportunity to talk directly to each other and understand where everyone was coming from,” shares Kevin O’Neil, a managing director of The Rockefeller Foundation’s innovation team and a facilitator of the Co-Develop convening conversations. “This meant getting specific about first principles: definitions, values, and visions for what ‘good’ looks like. We didn’t try to design the [fund] itself. The goal was to build a foundation of mutual understanding so that we could imagine moving forward together.”

How to Convene Well

Four core principles helped guide the Co-Develop convening series and many other convenings The Rockefeller Foundation has designed over more than a century. These include:

1. Focus on a single purpose. Often, the vision for a convening can be so bold or aim to please so many different groups that there’s no way to realistically achieve the intended outcome. It’s important to ask: What, specifically, are you trying to achieve, and how will bringing people to a shared table or engaging them in a shared experience help achieve it? A strategic convening can’t surface, design, and commit to an initiative in one fell swoop, no matter how long it runs. It must have a precise purpose, based on where the initiative stands and where it needs to go, and an agenda that actively drives that purpose forward.
2. Design for the experience. When a convening has an ambitious goal, it can be difficult to provide opportunities for anything other than deep, substantive engagement. Counterintuitively, providing space for connection can maximize the value of bringing your participants together. Ask: Are you over-scheduling every moment? Is there an opportunity to build in breaks and moments for connection and reflection, such as pairing people up for walks? Connections between participants drive mutual accountability and can lay the foundation for active collaboration after the convening.
3. Be intentional about participants. A convening brings together a group of people to share knowledge and insight toward a purpose, such as solving a problem or surfacing a new opportunity. So, it’s important to ask: Whose perspectives do you need to achieve your purpose? How can you integrate diverse voices to help develop stronger solutions? If the first thing you do when planning a convening is send invitations, you probably don’t have a strategic convening. Success depends on crafting the participant list around the defined purpose, thoughtfully considering the collection of perspectives and experiences you need to advance the purpose of your convening.
4. Make commitments explicit and deliver. A convening can be a step in a process to achieve impact. Having a resourcing plan and convening the people who can commit to the actions they recommend, versus recommending them to others who aren’t in the room, increases the potential for action following a convening. Ask: Who needs to take action after the convening to achieve your ultimate goals? How will you engage the participants before, during, and after the convening to help ensure that they act? Without an expectation for participants to follow through and a supportive structure to make it happen, convenings usually don’t move beyond conversation.

Tactics to Make Convenings Effective

Convenings are won or lost in the details. After getting the four basics in place, build out a set of tactics to help achieve your goal. Here are just a few examples we’ve used across a wide range of convenings:

• Construct a solution together. For convenings focused on attracting support for and engaging people in an initiative, share a draft of the solution at the outset with the expectation that it will change. In 2022, we hosted a convening to develop a promising initiative. The organizer introduced a solution to address the security threats of climate change and framed it as a “sacrificial concept” to get ideas flowing. The group, including climate experts, investors, and security experts, refined and substantially changed the solution itself, but the process of shaping it together generated deep buy-in and commitment to the work ahead.
• Present, but not too much. To balance presentations with participant engagement, set time limits and provide structure. During a lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we hosted a virtual convening of leaders in education and policy to discuss how to reopen schools in the United States and keep them open. A gathering of prominent leaders with passionate views about complex topics like education and the pandemic could have led to a convening mired in details and presentations. To avoid this, we introduced a structured, three-minute presentation format to solicit a range of perspectives, without pressure to come to a consensus, that informed an action plan.
• Connect personally. To forge meaningful connections between participants, create the space and the permission for them to connect personally. For example, the Bellagio Center hosts a group of 15 residents, each working on breakthrough solutions to social challenges, each month. Before bringing them together in person, we convene virtually and pose a simple question: By joining the group, what are you leaving behind? Their responses open up unexpected conversation, allowing them to share things that make them human and enrich their lives—such as pressure at work, or their families and pets. They arrive in person with some level of familiarity, and this accelerates their personal and professional connections.

Convenings are a powerful tool for achieving social impact when they’re designed to foster intentional engagement between a well-curated set of participants at a pivotal moment, and when they’re convened by an individual or organization that’s positioned to influence change and take action. Done poorly, convenings exhaust sorely needed resources. Done well—with these design principles and tactics in mind—they can complement and sometimes even leapfrog other tools, like grants and research, to drive transformative social change.

Read more stories by Sarah Troup Geisenheimer & Zia Khan.