Partnerships the Nonprofit Way

What Matters, What Doesn't

Stuart C. Mendel, Jeffrey L. Brudney

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780253033802
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Collaboration and partnership are well-known characteristics of the nonprofit sector, as well as important tools of public policy and for creating public value. But how do nonprofits form successful partnerships? From the perspective of nonprofit practice, the conditions leading to collaboration and partnership are seldom ideal. Nonprofit executives contemplating interorganizational cooperation, collaboration, networks, partnership, and merger face a bewildering array of challenges.

In Partnerships the Nonprofit Way: What Matters, What Doesn't, the authors share the success and failures of 52 nonprofit leaders. By depicting and contextualizing nonprofit organization characteristics and practices that make collaboration successful, the authors propose new theory and partnership principles that challenge conventional concepts centered on contractual fulfillment and accountability, and provide practical advice that can assist nonprofit leaders and others in creating and sustaining strategic, mutually beneficial partnerships of their own.

1

Summing Up, Summing Down: A Review of the Literature on Partnership

Partnerships are hard work to create, hard to fund at their outset, and hard to maintain. . . . Organizations must understand why they are partnering and how they support the core mission of partnership.

—Executive director of a nonprofit community development organization

Overview

In this chapter, we consider how the most common approaches to collaboration in scholarly literature are not particularly useful to nonprofit actors seeking to maximize their chances of partnership success. Building from the overview of the nonprofit-first approach presented in the introduction, we begin to synthesize useful theory with interviewees’ practical experience. We hope both to fill a gap in the literature and to begin providing nonprofit actors with tested, replicable models of successful nonprofit-first partnerships.

Introduction

The nonprofit sector has long been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry, but most critical insight into partnership and partnership engagement can be traced to the last three to four decades. Since the 1980s, scholars have begun to outline the broad principles of partnership, drawing these principles from theory as well as the practice of their own disciplines (e.g., Barbara Gray; Beth Gazley and Jeffrey Brudney; John Forrer, James Kee, and Eric Boyer; John Yankey and Carol Willen; Darlene Bailey and Kelly Koney; Chao Guo and Muhittin Acar; James Austin and Mary Seitanidi; and John Bryson).¹

For the most part, the scholarly literature on nonprofit partnership adheres to frameworks characterized by interorganization or cross-sector collaboration intended for public, private, and nonprofit actors. Select examples of this literature also consider relationships between public and private organizations, or between individual or autonomous nonprofits on one side and institutional networks and associations on the other.² Other examples of the scholarly literature on nonprofit partnership cast interactions between two or more actors as a linear progression differentiated by varying levels of relationship formalization and integration.³

Despite the volume and value of scholarly inquiry into partnership, this literature does not adequately discuss or consider the nonprofit-first perspective; indeed, we still have much to learn about the best conditions for forming partnerships, overcoming barriers to partnership operations, and understanding the views of the officials doing the “hard work” of collaboration.

In this chapter, we elaborate the nonprofit-first point of view by bringing together the literature and interview information. We correlate the descriptions offered by nonprofit executives as they engage in partnerships with other nonprofits, governments, and businesses and weave them together with the most relevant scholarly literature. Each of the two—the executives’ experiences as a primary source, and the research literature as a secondary counterpart—adds to the discussion by compensating for what the other lacks. For instance, we are able to illustrate real-life examples of the theories that the literature hypothesizes, and at the same time extrapolate what the literature underemphasizes or even lacks from examples in the executives’ experiences.

Gaps in the Literature

Our interest in a nonprofit-first perspective on partnership is twofold.

First, we seek to fill a gap in the scholarly literature by providing answers to certain practical problems of partnership as experienced by nonprofit sector leaders.⁴ Second, we offer governments, businesses, and nonprofits ways to understand and engage in partnership differently, so that actors desiring to stimulate nonprofit partnerships do not establish unfamiliar ground rules for the nonprofit participant.⁵ For example, one nonprofit executive in a social services organization devoted to strengthening fatherhood skills shared that his past experience in working with the government is that it cast his organization as a “not equal member” of the partnership. In his view, the nonprofit did not participate in setting the rules or norms governing the partnership; rather, the nonprofit played a subordinate role. Over the course of the partnership, this subordination ultimately threatened the fiscal health of his organization. The executive attributed the poor performance of the partnership to the small size and grassroots origin of his nonprofit organization—and also to the larger partner not crediting his smaller organization with competency or professionalism or equal status.

A second example of a gap in the scholarly literature in providing answers to practical problems of partnership stems from the paucity of replicable nonprofit-first theory-tested-in-practice partnership models. Because few grounded theories in the scholarly literature on partnership adopt a nonprofit perspective, nonprofit executives entering a partnership must rely on others’ past experiences when weighing the costs and benefits of partnership endeavors, information that is often not readily available or relevant.⁶

A third example of a gap in the scholarly literature is that partnership theories centered on public sector or private market motives do not speak to the ways in which mission fulfillment is often the principal reason for a nonprofit’s engagement in partnership. Of all sectors, nonprofits most often use mission alignment as a criterion for partnership, which means that a public or business-induced partnership can be out of sync with the nonprofit actor’s intents and purposes. In public sector endeavors, the nonprofit actor is often seen as an agent to a government principal, suggesting that these arrangements are not “partnerships” but something else. Steven Smith and Michael Lipsky have notably labeled this phenomenon as “nonprofits for hire.”⁷ In such interactions, nonprofit leaders encounter government actors whose interest in the relationship is limited to contractually dictated performance outcomes, regardless of changing circumstance or unplanned, exigent conditions that may require resources beyond the partnership’s or the nonprofit’s expectations and capacities.⁸

Practice Informs Theory

Consistent with the scholarly literature on partnership and collaboration, most of the fifty-two nonprofit executives interviewed for this book expressed the opinion that their decision to enter into a partnership involved a practical and careful weighing of the ways in which a partnership would benefit their organization against the costs.⁹ Several described the need for what is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, since the time, dollars, opportunity cost, and effort required in collaboration raised the stakes and heightened the risks for their involvement in partnerships. The executive director of an organization devoted to serving developmentally disabled adults explained that, despite his organization’s due diligence and care before entering into a partnership, this partnership induced unanticipated changes in his operations that were necessary to keep up with the partner organization’s practices.

In describing their partnerships, nonprofit executives offered a range of return-on-investment (ROI) value judgments used to assess the degree to which a partnership was/is important and/or meaningful. These judgments are described in greater detail in the following chapters. In summary, they are frequently bound up in links between ROI and planning steps that set decision makers’ performance expectations and their ability to overcome problems. A specific example offered by one executive was expressed in their “advice to others” through the following list:

•Think carefully about your partner and the dynamics of the relationship.

•Anticipate as many issues in advance as you can and look for signals that engender trust.

•Create a deliberate agreement as to how you will handle issues.

•Decide how will you meet the goals that enable you to work together.

•Expect the unexpected through flexibility and compromise at times.

•Accept that time delays will be a problem.

Other examples of ROI outcomes arising from careful planning and hard-to-anticipate partnership performance included ways their organization benefits from the social, economic, and/or political capital of their counterpart.¹⁰ Although the degree of formality of ROI as might be determined through cost-benefit analysis differed, many of the fifty-two nonprofit executives interviewed expressed interest in and pointed to use of predictive indicators and progressive benchmarks against which they might measure partnership success. The scholarly literature often indicates a similar desire for tools to predict the likelihood of success in partnership.¹¹ Scholars attribute the importance of partnership process indicators and performance to the premise that, in the earliest stages of collaboration, participants seek confirmation that the partnership will succeed in at least some limited way, if not completely. Evidence or intuition that the partnership mission, external factors, stakeholders, and participant capabilities are all in sync can significantly raise participants’ confidence that the partnership is worth the risk.¹² An example offered by a nonprofit executive described the factors that work toward meeting the goals of the partnership as an historical connection between the two partner institutions, an organizations track record for successful partnership, and the alignment of goals between institutions.

In the absence of a nonprofit-first perspective in scholarly literature to guide them, nonprofit executives engaged in partnership endeavors have little to inform their work other than their own experiences and anecdotal learning from the experiences of more seasoned peers.¹³ The executives interviewed echoed another theme from the existing literature here when maintaining that their own past experiences usually offered the best source of predictive knowledge for achieving successful, important partnerships.¹⁴ As one executive noted, “My perspective on partnership was not changed by the project, it was confirmed. Our organization had a prior relationship with our government partner and that relationship was reinforced by the potential of a successful project of this collaboration. My past experience with this organization allowed for problem solving to go around the system the agency resided in so that we figured out how to deal with problems before they occurred and before we initiated the partnership. We also understood our partner’s limits and sold them on our ability to produce benefits for them.”

Other insights from this school of thought included the idea that important and meaningful partnerships occurred when both parties viewed themselves as approximate equals in participation, decision-making, risk, and accountability. By contrast, in several cases the executives interviewed shared that not all partnerships—and especially those imposed by public policy or private grant makers—rose to the level of meaningful partnership or even qualified as “partnerships.”¹⁵ For example,

Yes, there is a difference between partnering with different industries such as government, busine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Quoted Material
• Introduction: Why This Book?
• 1 Summing Up, Summing Down: A Review of the Literature on Partnership
• 2 Nonprofit Partnerships: The Gold Standard
• 3 The Point of Partnering
• 4 Good to Great: Recognizing the Signs of High-Quality Partnerships
• 5 Nonprofit Partnerships by Subsector
• 6 Grant Makers’ Partnership Practices
• 7 Toward Nonprofit Theory: Collaboration as a Way of (Work) Life
• Index
• Bio
• Back Cover