Giving Compass' Take:

• Maureen Johannigman and Mollie Bunis detail the role that funders and foundations can play in nonprofit collaboration and ensuring strategic partnerships. 

• Are you ready to support collaborative efforts? What partnership(s) can you begin or support? 

• Read a roadmap for effective collaboration. 

Funders can play a crucial role in promoting collaboration and ensuring the success of strategic partnerships, including:

  • Providing flexible, risk-tolerant funding that allows for complex, organizational collaborations to be assessed and implemented. Funders are increasingly pooling funds and technical support resources to help nonprofits pursue a range of strategic partnerships.
  • Helping normalize collaboration by asking nonprofits how they are partnering with others and providing information on how strategic partnerships can be implemented. For instance, hosting a session to raise awareness and educate nonprofits about the different kinds of merger strategies and how mergers can be used to achieve mission and increase impact.
  • Connecting organizations when you see opportunities for partnerships. There may even be opportunities to forge connections between nonprofits across your portfolios.
  • Convening stakeholders and bringing together people and organizations that wouldn’t normally talk to one another.
  • Serving as the backbone coordinator or a facilitator of a collaborative effort, so as not to “add one more thing” to a nonprofit’s plate, providing administrative support while allowing the collaborative to steer the work.
  • Providing shared back office space or services or serving as a fiscal sponsor.
  • Being a sustainer. When the going gets tough, help keep the partnership going, both with resources and emotional support.

Read the full article about nonprofit collaboration by Maureen Johannigman and Mollie Bunis at Exponent Philanthropy.