Why charities should work together
Julian Lomas
Charities are warm and friendly and work together all the time, right?
Wrong!
The reality is that competition between can be pretty cut-throat, particularly when it comes to winning funding. As the fundraising landscape gets increasingly challenging, working in partnership with others could give your charity the competitive edge it needs to survive and thrive.
There are lots of great reasons why collaboration between charities is a good idea. Winning funding is just one, and perhaps not even the most important.
Here are a few reasons why we think its important for charities to work together more:
Innovation and problem solving: collaboration can lead to new ideas and creative solutions, particularly when people with different backgrounds and skills work togethers. Collaboration allows people and organisations to learn from each other and share skills and best practice.
Self-awareness and adaptability: collaboration can help you understand betters what your charity offers and how you fit in with others who are supporting the same beneficiaries. Focusing on how your services can combine with another charity’s to maximise impact for beneficiaries is a great way to hone your own offer.
Culture and efficiency: collaboration can increase productivity, particularly for teams who work remotely most of the time. Fostering a culture of innovation where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and perspectives, can really help to identify how things can be done more efficiently and how risks can be shared between partners. In some cases, it can lead to formal joint ventures and even mergers between charities.
Maximising impact and profile: taken together, these reasons mean that good collaboration will mean that your beneficiaries will get better services that make a bigger difference to their lives and give your charity a bigger voice were it matters; far greater than when organisations work in splendid isolation form each other.
Don’t take our works for it, funders are crying out for good collaboration between charities. As Josh Cockcroft of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation said at a recent Association of Charitable Foundations event:
“[Collaboration] takes time, effort, resources and very careful management of stakeholders and the programme. But it’s worth it. Good collaboration can lead to an impact far greater than the sum of its parts.””
Equally, Nezehat Cihan of the Cripplegate Foundation, recognising that it can be difficult for charities to work on tackling systemic and structural inequalities alone, said:
“This requires a collaboration and partnership with everyone working together to actually make a systemic change that can be lasting and sustainable.”
It is equally true that, at least to start with, collaboration requires a bit more effort from the partners. It takes time to build trust, openness and honesty between; to develop a shared mission, vision and values - all of which are vital for good collaboration. This means that there can also be something of an "organic" nature to the development of partnerships, with ideas often emerging naturally through deepening relationships in which there is honest exploration of what works (and what doesn’t).
However, in an increasingly challenging world for charities, leaders need to be purposefully in seeking out partners to work with. Getting expert help can be really helpful to facilitate this, to help you develop share goals and approaches and to choose the right structure for partnership working.
If you would like to find out more about successful charity collaborations, please contact us at julian@almondtreeconsulting.co.uk to arrange free initial telephone discussion.