On the Road to Nonprofit Collaboration
Nonprofits today are turning to creative collaboration to accomplish their goals. For-profits have long utilized various forms of collaboration to capture market share. With a foray into collaboration, nonprofits now must determine the extent to which collaboration will be legal versus non-legal. The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently featured an article entitled “Collaboration-palooza” that shows the four main types of collaboration nonprofits are using and where they fall along the spectrum of legal forms. The article also deals with the impediments to collaboration. Specifically, the article details the following three:
“Along with strong momentum across the collaboration spectrum, we found three inconsistencies between funders and nonprofit leaders that are creating barriers to collaboration done right.
1. Struggling to find philanthropic support A significant barrier is nonprofit leaders’ perceptions of low philanthropic support across the collaboration spectrum. Fewer than 20 percent of nonprofit leaders said they received support from their funders during the process, and more than 50 percent reported no support whatsoever for any form of collaboration. Leaders pointed to especially low levels of funder backing for sharing support functions, which are usually intended to lower operating costs and free up funds to expand programs. This foots with survey data from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations 2014 report Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter, which found that 53 percent of funders never or rarely funded collaborations and only two percent did so consistently. Yet, strikingly, the reason funders most frequently cited for failing to support collaborations was that their grantees didn’t ask. Further, they told us in follow-up interviews that they worried they would inject bias if they initiated the conversation. A program officer in Pennsylvania said, “We have to be careful. Whenever I speak up at a meeting, I get a proposal about the idea!” But the same funder told us that when grantees came forward with a plan to collaborate, he was eager to support it.
2. Difficult match-making A second barrier to collaboration lies in finding the right partners and negotiating respective roles. Nonprofits and foundations both cite defining relationships and roles as a top challenge to collaboration. But nonprofits rated finding the right partner as the biggest barrier, while foundations rated it the smallest one. In our study, helping nonprofits find partners was the most common way that funders supported collaboration, but they said they needed to tread cautiously: “I don’t feel comfortable recommending partners,” said a Chicago grantmaker. “In part I worry that nonprofits might take my word as dictate, but also I feel that they need to be committed enough to do their own homework.”
3. Unsuccessful joint programs A third challenge is the disparity between funder and CEO perceptions about which forms of collaboration fail more often. Funders see joint programming as the most successful form of collaboration. Nonprofit CEOs, on the other hand, found that the more integrated forms (shared support functions and mergers) were most likely to succeed and cited joint programs as having the highest failure rate (20 percent).”
If collaboration nonprofits are able to show overall better returns, i.e., social impact, the first barrier will be largely resolved. Donors could play a role in the second barrier if they have enough information about the social impact various charities are having. A push in the sector toward using legal forms, such as mergers, would assist with the overall success rate.
The full article is available here.
Khrista Johnson