Do you have a collaboration story? We’d love to share it.
Have a tale of a joint venture or collaboration that has strengthened your operating capacity? We’d love to share details of that story through our blog.
Every day we are hearing more and more stories about the growing numbers of nonprofit organizations that are working together to improve their organizational capacity. We’re learning about many innovative or even routine activities that can have a big impact.
We’ve shared two examples already — the shared administrative capacity of the Chattanooga Museums Collaboration and the merger between two CDCs that created CommunityWorks Rhode Island.
We are extremely interested in hearing your stories of nonprofit incubators, employee lease backs, sub affiliates, shared back office support, group purchasing, or whatever models you’ve developed. We think that the number of published case studies don’t reflect the diversity and number of interesting collaborations happening in this sector. We think that the lack of a great recipe book — what it is, how it came about, the mechanics of the arrangement, what makes it successful, direct and indirect benefits — is one of the barriers standing in the way of more nonprofits experimenting with new ways of operating.
We are happy to share your stories on this blog. Send your story along to us at gayle@ceffect.com. Send us your phone number so we can connect if we have additional questions.
Thank you.
Follow
Here are several examples of collaborations from Wisconsin, Colorado and Florida.
1. A local foundation partnered with a group of agencies which all were recipients of operating grants from that foundation, to established a self insured healthcare plan that reduced overall personnel expenditures for the participants.
2. A group of nonprofit child care providers established a centralized employee recruiting system which reviewed all applicants, did background checks and “qualified” them for potential placement among the many providers who were part of the collaboration. This saved on overall recruitment costs and improved the quality and availability of workers in an industry with high turnover.
3. Many organizations which have similar missions, overlapping funding sources or other relationships with each other have worked together on combined capital campaigns.
4. We are seeing more multi-organization service centers around the country where several agencies locate in one building or on a single campus, sharing facilities, back office services, property management, reception, technology, etc.
5. There are several cultural organizations in the community that have collaborated on marketing, promoting each other and offering discounts to all if you are an annual member. Collectively they have become a significant player in tourism and economic development for the community.
Contact me offline if anyone wants more details on these projects.
Norman,
Thank you for these. Is it possible to share the names of the organizations so that others could find them?