Over the past 6 months, I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating a community of practice for funders supporting networks. The question that keeps coming up is: how to make the case that working through and investing in networks will produce the intended social impact? At the same time, the belief in network impact is becoming more widespread–-the potential for organizing without organizations, the power of developing a strategic understanding of webs of relationships, and the promise of openly sharing both data and new knowledge. There is more and more experimentation with network models for social impact. There are a handful of funders investing in these experiments. Yet there is only limited evidence to make the case that networks work.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make that case. As a strategy consultant, not an evaluator by training, I come to this with truly a beginner’s mind. Here a few things I’m learning about assessing network impact in collaboration with the network funders community of practice.

• Top of the list: assessing the impact of networ