How to Assess Relationship Intensity
Next, you can consider the quality of connections in your network by assessing the intensity of your relationships. Our relationship-intensity scale ranges from simple awareness of each other to full integration. The emphasis is not on the frequency of interactions, but on the degree of integration and involvement in terms of your goals, decision-making, budgets, and actions. The levels of our scale include:
- Awareness: Having basic awareness of what a relational partner does (e.g. understanding of services offered, resources available, mission/goals).
- Cooperation: Informally exchanging information, attending meetings together, and sharing in-kind resources.
- Coordination: Synchronizing activities for the mutual benefit of services and/or programs (e.g., sharing proprietary data, timing events/activities together).
- Integration: Entering into mutual, binding relationships that support work in related content areas (e.g., through contracts, grants, MOUs, pooled funding with collective implementation).
How to Assess Your Relationship Intensity:
- Open the Relationship Filters” on the left (click the handshake icon).
- Under “Color By,” click the dropdown menu and select the ‘relationship intensity’ question.
- Use the controls on the right to zoom in and out and move nodes by clicking and dragging them. Use the node settings button to save or reset node positions.
Click each line color on the legend to the right to filter relationships by intensity. As lines disappear, you can get a sense of the intensity of the partnership between each set of networks. You can see which members cooperate, coordinate, or integrate, as well as those only aware of each other.
When thinking about relational integration, we tend to revert to the conventional wisdom that “more is better,” and of course a highly integrated relationship may yield many benefits. Keep in mind, however, that there are also drawbacks to high integration: the greater the degree of integration, the more time and effort the relationship likely requires. A network with relatively high percentages of integrated relationships may be at risk for member burnout and eventual disengagement.
Next, we'll show you how to explore network demographics across your partnerships.
Next Article: How to Explore Network Demographics
Related Articles
How to Map Your Network
Start by displaying a network map with results from your network member selection (NMS) question. This shows who in the community is working together and where there are gaps. Coloring your nodes by sector or focus area provides another layer of ...Understanding your CPRM Account
PARTNER CPRM™ Key Terms PARTNER is built using network science and social network analysis principles and methods that aren't always obvious. Getting familiar with some common terms and concepts is a good first step to get to know the PARTNER CPRM ...How to Explore Network Demographics
Your network is made of diverse members, representing a variety of sectors, focus areas, and communities. Using member attributes to color nodes can help identify subnetworks and subgroups organized around subtopics, as well as understand the breadth ...How to Analyze Trust and Value
One of the most significant measures within PARTNER CPRM is our validated trust and value scores. Among the many qualitative factors involved in collaboration, research points to these two as critical indicators and predictors of success. By ...Add a New Question
This article shares how to add a question in your question library. These can be used to create question groups and surveys which you can send to capture relational data from the members of your ecosystem. Create a question from scratch or use our ...