(Illustration by Chris Gash)
Large in-person events have been canceled around the world because of COVID-19 restrictions. Have you missed them? In retrospect, how valuable were those meetings? During the pandemic lockdowns, many of them shifted to online. Did you feel compelled to participate? If not, why not? If you participated, how clear were the events’ goals, and how effectively did they advance the issues that you most care about?
The case for convening—bringing people and organizations together around shared objectives to foster collective action—may seem obvious. The challenges of our time, whether they be climate change, social and environmental injustice, or the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, cry out for collaboration. As Sarah Zak Borgman, who directs the annual Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship, points out in her 2016 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “The Power of Convening for Social Impact,” convenings can be transformative for attendees: “We’ve seen the incredible opportunities, enthusiasm, and ideas that can come to fruition only by bringing people together and providing a safe space for exploration and innovation.”
However, the effectiveness of convenings is highly uneven. They often do not focus on outcomes, and organizations that plan them are not necessarily driven by considerations of likely effectiveness. We have reached this conclusion based on evaluating convenings in international development as well as in US social sector circles, including foundations, affiliate groups, infrastructure organizations, nonprofits, and NGOs. Our evaluations grappled with conceptualizing convenings and their power and effectiveness. Our review of convening objectives found either vague references to making connections and learning or no objectives at all.
Meeting fatigue is a common theme in our interviews. To take one glaring but illustrative example, we talked to a leader in global education policy who over a span of some months had traveled to three continents to attend three different conferences on global education issues, only to end up talking to the same people at all the events. Others expressed frustration over missed opportunities and events that generated no action or follow-up. Other themes come up as well, including how power differentials between the participating organizations are mishandled.
Convening effectiveness matters. Convocations that fail to enable change waste time and money, generate greenhouse gas emissions (especially when associated with air travel), exact costs that are disproportionately carried by those with the scarcest resources, and give the appearance of action and results while actually failing to deliver outcomes. At their worst, failed convening initiatives can set back causes, fragment a movement, stall momentum, and hurt the convening organizations’ reputations. Their participants would be better off spending their money and time on other things.
As COVID-19 restrictions lift, we will collectively seek to find a new normal—striking a balance between alleviating our physical isolation and not returning to overwhelming event hopping. Be they in person or online, convenings will inevitably play some role—we are, after all, a social species with an innate urge to connect. But organizations should take the opportunity to reassess their effectiveness. We suggest that the answer is not to rush back to doing more convenings, but rather to take some time to strategize about doing better, more intentional convening.
Convene for What?
Organizations with social missions use convenings to rally attention and action to their cause. They convene because they cannot be effective when acting in isolation; they must galvanize collective strength, challenge conventional wisdom, and seek, elevate, and amplify shared solutions to complex social problems. So they call together diverse members from the world of nonprofits, business, government, foundations, and academia for cross-sector collaboration.
That being said, the social sector has developed a sweet tooth for convenings. Too often, organizers decide a convening is needed without due diligence of the convening’s strategic value. For some professionals, the default setting is to hop from convening to convening. Too few people take the time to reflect on the value and outcomes of these repeated sessions.
Convening is a fuzzy concept. The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), where coauthor Rasmus Heltberg works, defines convening as “bringing together relevant actors to act collectively to address common challenges.” The TCC Group, where coauthor Jared Raynor works, defines convenings as “‘spaces’ created for varied stakeholder groups to influence the future collective and individual solution-oriented action on a particular topic.” We in the social sector host such spaces to try to create systemic change together. In his 2018 SSIR article “Four Strategies for Large Systems Change,” consultant Steve Waddell distinguishes four types of social change: doing, forcing, directing, and cocreating change. Convenings fall into the last category: Participants meet with the hope of collaborating on and co-evolving social change. Convening requires broad agreement that change is needed along with shared beliefs, values, and commitment to a common cause, or the ability to create a common cause.
Convenings have value when they produce results. IEG identifies three types of positive convening outcomes: shared understanding, shared solutions, and shared implementation. IEG used these categories of outcomes to evaluate convening effectiveness and distinguish substantive outcomes from modest progress. Shared understanding is when actors achieve a common framing of the problem and its solution—for example, via joint statements, task forces, and analyses. Shared solutions are generated when actors negotiate common ways to address a shared problem—for example, by aligning their strategies, policies, tools, or methodologies. Shared implementation occurs when actors jointly implement a program—for example, by setting up a new financial mechanism to fund collective action.
TCC Group uses a similar framework to identify five types of convening outcomes: reputation, capacity, connection, salience, and action. Such lists are not exhaustive; other types of outcomes can result from convening. Regardless of type, the value of convenings resides not in the quality of their implementation (the venue, speakers, and social events on the sideline) but in the results they generate.
Toward Greater Effectiveness
So how do we generate better results from our convenings? Monitoring and evaluation practices have sometimes sent the wrong signal and need to be overhauled. Organizations often collect data on convening execution such as number of events and attendees and attendee satisfaction surveys. Such output data can incentivize focus on activity volume and self-led events. By contrast, organizations rarely assess the outcomes of their convenings and how well they contribute to convenings led by others—even though such data would help inform managers about their effectiveness.
Our research suggests that effective conveners are intentional about the change they seek to foster. They have conversations about strategic intent early in the planning process for their engagements. Organizations can become more effective conveners by following their lead and systematically reviewing their reasons to convene in the planning phase. Conveners should be explicit about why the issue’s salience and strategic value motivate them and why they believe the strategic context outside the organization might provide a window for change to occur.
Effective conveners also understand that achieving social change takes time. They plan for following up after the convention by creating an interorganizational working group for reviewing and appraising it before the next event, by supporting specific projects that emerge as a result of the convening, and by employing strategic communications to target audiences that might leverage the work that emerged from it.
Organizations also need to weigh their convening power, which resides in their credibility, relationships, and resources. For the World Bank, for example, its ability to produce credible data and research on the issues it works on is a source of convening power. Convening power also comes from what we call cachet—the ability to attract the right people and organizations to your convenings. Failure to consider intent and convening power leads to unsuccessful convenings that do not achieve noteworthy outcomes.
The World Bank has taken positive steps along these lines. It faces immense demand to lead or support convenings on numerous issues and has often found it hard to prioritize. The resulting multiplication of convening initiatives can stretch the World Bank’s capacity and resources thin across many agendas. Starting around 2015, the World Bank’s Social, Urban, Rural, and Resilience Global Practice addressed this situation by adopting a purposeful and disciplined methodology to convening. Its management adopted a structured approach to partnerships as a business line. It decided that the primary criterion for selecting engagements would be whether the engagement has links to operational work. To minimize proliferation, the Global Practice bundled smaller initiatives into larger umbrella programs and redirected some convening requests to other partners who might be better suited to lead.
Organizations can systematize how they manage convening initiatives. They should consider integrating convening into routine management systems to collect basic data and support convening planning. In this, they should complement data on convening execution, attendee satisfaction surveys, and so on with evaluations of outcomes. At a minimum, conveners should have clarity of purpose and a realistic sense about their power to cocreate change. This would appear to be common sense management practice, so it can seem puzzling that many organizations don’t do so. We suspect that many people believe naively that if you just call a conference to discuss an issue, change will happen. We also wonder whether a good number of convenings are not really motivated by the pursuit of social change outcomes but rather by seeking publicity and wanting to signal the organization’s ownership of the issue.
Organizations with social purpose should strive to maximize convenings’ value as a lever of social change. They should conduct preconvening assessments in which they clarify their intended outcomes, reflect on their power and capacity to convene, and evaluate the convening’s return on investment. Only in this way can conveners ensure that they contribute to more impactful meetings and ultimately to a more effective and efficient social sector.
Read more stories by Rasmus Heltberg & Jared Raynor.