Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review examines the way nonprofits should approach mergers, specifically in communicating with stakeholders on what can be a complicated scenario.

• SSIR gives the example of Boston Scores, an after-school youth development program which used a merger to strengthen its local reach and serve as a hub of innovation for a national network. This could serve as a model for other orgs thinking about merger possibilities. But the main crux is: keep taking the temperature of staff involved.

• Need some more boardroom advice? Check out this piece on challenging conventional wisdom.

Ample data supports the need for nonprofit boards to consider inorganic growth — through mergers, acquisitions, and other strategic alliances — as they look to scale their organization’s impact on, say, college access, climate change mitigation, or obesity prevention. But figuring out how to start that conversation can be tricky, because it requires giving up control to advance the mission.

A recent BoardSource survey found that close to two-thirds of boards are open to considering mergers. Meanwhile, The Bridgespan Group study “Making Sense of Nonprofit Collaborations” shows that across a spectrum of formal approaches to collaborations, more nonprofit leaders reported success in the most tightly integrated forms — such as asset transfers, subsidiary relationships, and full-fledged acquisitions — than in looser joint programming and associations.

A collaborative project, The Power of Possibility, between BoardSource, The Bridgespan Group, La Piana Consulting, Propel Nonprofits, The Lodestar Foundation, Lyda Hill, and The Patterson Foundation, has zeroed in on six ripe moments in a mission-led organization’s business cycle to consider such alliances, with supporting case studies and how-to checklists to start the conversation. (View a webinar discussing these approaches here.)

Read the full article about nonprofit merger conversations by Anne Wallestad and Katie Smith Milway at Stanford Social Innovation Review