Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’
Posted by Gayle Gifford on November 2, 2010 in Big ideas, Strategic Thinking
I was really intrigued by a story in the November 1 edition of the Providence Business News. A local web development business named BatchBlue decided to share its extra office space once a week for free with other small shop folks. 
The gathering, dubbed BatchHaus, is pretty informal. (It was a delight to spot my neighbor with laptop sitting on a couch in the photo that accompanied the story).
The PBN article quotes the visitors to BatchHaus, many of whom work alone, expressing their appreciation for the opportunity to meet similar techies and make connections. Some of those connections have led to business leads, but overall, the camaraderie helps to create a stronger tech community, which is important to these new entrepreneurs. I was intrigued by the idea.
Then, the very next day, I was at a meeting with colleagues. I reported on the progress of multi-stakeholder learning teams I was using to do the environment scan for a strategic plan for a colleague. (for a future blog).
The colleague I had recruited to facilitate one of the learning teams mentioned that a number of the stakeholders had never visited each others’ facilities, even though they often referred clients to each other. So site visits were put on the agenda.
There are many encouraging reports of the wonderful benefits to co-locating nonprofits. But you don’t have to jump all the way to permanent rental arrangements. Like the BatchHaus folks, hanging out together can be good for your organizational health. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on November 25, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Effectiveness
In the national rush to accelerate nonprofit collaboration and consolidation, we shouldn’t lose sight of the goal.
At the end of the day, nonprofit collaborations, joint ventures, mergers, or whatever should produce a better result for their community than what any individual organization might achieve working alone.
A few benefits:
- Fiscal sponsorship enables a group to focus on the challenges or needs in its community — the reason it was started – without having to staff finance or payroll departments. In turn, the fiscal sponsor enables valuable mission-related programs to flourish while it puts its excess administrative capacity to better use and gains the additional revenue from the small fee it charges to provide these services.
- Each member of an advocacy coalition realizes the political power of a larger group, or benefits from working with more knowledgeable partners, or doesn’t need to repeat the mistakes their colleagues have made. And often the coalition itself becomes attractive to funders who might have been out of reach, leveraging new resources for its members to advance their missions.
- In the Chattanooga museums collaboration I wrote about in an earlier blog post, the smaller museums gained from the administrative support and the staff expertise of the largest among them. The staff of the largest museum which was providing shared services found their jobs more interesting. And all the museums and the community gained by creating a lively waterfront populated with thriving, well-managed cultural resources.
When collaboration achieves its goal, the whole adds up to much more than just a simple sum of the parts.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on May 20, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Strategic Thinking
An rich example of effective nonprofit collaboration is the Chattanooga Museums Collaboration. This innovative partnership was one of the eight finalists in the Lodestar Foundation National Collaboration Prize.
I was fortunate to participate yesterday in a webinar led by Heather DeGaetano, Development Director for the Tennessee Aquarium, at the 2009 Conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, RI Chapter.
I sat with rapt attention listening her describe this extraordinary collaboration between three very different museums which are sharing a variety of back office services such as finance, human resources, retail, and information systems.
They have even collaborated on the third rail of nonprofits … you guessed it … fundraising! The three museums working together on a transformational waterfront program raised — hold onto your hats— $120 million in 90 days!
Over and over again I see opportunities for building strong partnerships like this. Joint ventures that don’t require giving up your sole through merger. Partnerships that could emerge organically and not by a forced marriage orchestrated by funders. Sharing back office functions can result in stronger and more competent operations, shared expertise, and even cost savings or revenue generation for providing that support to another.
What did Heather tell us this collaboration learned? Among other lessons:
- That collaboration can work.
- That good faith and trust are essential elements of strong collaboration.
- That the benefits of their partnership just keep on coming… and run so much deeper than just cost savings or additional revenue. One example, the Hunter Museum of American Art and the Tennessee Aquarium jointly opened new exhibits called Jellies: Living Art. (wish I lived nearby, the photos are fabulous)
- That they can no longer imagine doing this another way.
I was reluctant to write this piece as they’ve been inundated with calls for information and support since the articles came out. But you really don’t need to contact them to understand what they are doing (after all, they have museums to run rather than spending their time fielding questions). Heather’s report, A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, provides a pretty comprehensive description of what’s involved.
Instead of calling the museums, how about calling your own colleagues in your community and asking “if they did it, why can’t we? What can we offer each other? How will this help us be better at serving our communities? What would make each of our organizations stronger and more resilient?”
Know that you know it’s possible, you don’t really need to know a lot about the Chattanooga how. What you need to know is whether this is the kind of collaboration you are willing to say yes to. And then make it happen.
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