Profiles in Partnership
A series on best practices and sound advice for developing and maintaining successful partnerships between nonprofit and for-profit organizations
Part 5, Final in series
BB: Are you seeing more same-sector collaborations, where several nonprofits are working together to meet mutual goals?
AW: Yes and no. I think scarce resources both bring people together in some circumstances but also can cause some hunkering down in other circumstances. Frankly, I am very inspired by our experience in the SparkPoint Initiative where mission-driven organizations are working together creatively to achieve better outcomes for their clients and maximize collective resources. What’s so motivating to me is the nonprofit partners who are at the table care so deeply about their mission and the outcomes that they contribute to, that’s why they’re at the table. They know their client is going to have a longer-term sustainable result if they’re able to do what they do so well for that person and connect them in this integrated way to the other SparkPoint resources. And that makes me very proud of this sector and our partners in SparkPoint because it’s their commitment to those families and their outcomes that bring them to the table.
BB: From your experience in putting together SparkPoint, have the funding partners understood the strength of this collaboration?
AW: Describing the ROI of collaboration can be a more complicated case to make to funders. However, fortunately our funding community in the Bay Area is a sophisticated lot. That said, the work of building and sustaining a collaborative like SparkPoint cannot be seen as “ just more overhead.” We say if that overhead is driving the results up, then that’s a good investment. But translating that to the donor, as an individual or an institution, so they say, “I’m ready to pay for that for the greater outcome” - it is often a challenging case to make.
BB: So what do you feel makes a cross-sector partnership really work?
AW: The most robust partnerships are multidimensional, so it’s not writing a check, it’s not sending a volunteer, and it’s not co-branding. There’s a sweet spot of these multiple dimensions that makes the satisfaction so great for both partners. And that’s why the design question is so important. You can send anybody in to paint the meeting room, but to say we’re going to really partner; we’re going to have an ongoing relationship with this entity and this issue. That’s multidimensional.
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