Partnerships the Nonprofit Way: What Matters, What Doesn't
240
Partnerships the Nonprofit Way: What Matters, What Doesn't
240Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253032614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2018 |
| Series: | Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 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).
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. 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.
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. 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. 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 non-profit-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.
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." 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." For example,
Yes, there is a difference between partnering with different industries such as government, business, or other nonprofits. When it is a nonprofit and another nonprofit or a nonprofit and a foundation, the relationship can feel competitive, especially if they are compelled to work together by some third organization. This is not a true partnership. You don't want to acquiesce to do things you might have not wanted. So, the agreements in advance are really important and what you get in the end is not really a partnership but a project. There are huge problems with other nonprofits as well. Barriers to enduring relationships are the limitations to the designated organization willing to take an interest in the partner. An organization can be aware of this within five minutes based on the tone of the partnerships. Mutual interests or a desire to have a return of benefits at the same time is important. In partnerships between a nonprofit and business or government, the participants don't care about competition, and there is no power struggle and issues of visibility. Sometimes this is a transactional quid pro quo relationship.
Help Wanted: Nonprofit-First Guidelines for Forming Partnerships
As discussed earlier, nonprofit executives seeking theory to inform best practices typically lack a nonprofit-first viewpoint on which they can draw to design and undertake partnerships. Here, we propose an additional reason to understand the nonprofit-first perspective to help nonprofit actors gain a sense of the differences that a nonprofit can expect in the practice of partnership across all three sectors.
In order to garner a sense of these working differences, we interviewed fifty-two nonprofit executives through the administration of a semi-structured questionnaire. Each executive was asked about dyadic partnership experiences between their organization and a partner from one of three sectors: another nonprofit, a government agency, or a business organization. Questions were mostly open-ended to facilitate description and discussion. The fifty-two executives described eighty-two cases of partnership by their organizations. Before we analyze the features of partnership as described by these nonprofit executives, we draw on the vast cross-disciplinary literature of collaboration and partnership.
What the Scholarly Literature Tells Us about Stimulating Nonprofit Partnerships and Cross-Sector Expectations
Public and private sector policies that encourage the formation of partnerships are consistent with the nature and function of nonprofit institutions. Scholarly writing and practical experience have established that collaboration and partnership are important characteristics of the nonprofit sector in the United States, and scholars note that partnership between nonprofits can arise for a variety of reasons. Rationales for partnership include purposes related to the participant organizations' missions, external incentives that encourage collaboration, the self-interest and motivation of key stakeholders, and large-scale community processes that can build trust and social capital in a system of service providers.
In the best circumstances, nonprofits' partnership arrangements with businesses, government actors, or other nonprofits are entered into voluntarily. Partnerships can take place without third-party prompting and may be entered for purposes such as program and operations efficiency, cost savings and economies of scale, changes in the marketplace, and mission convergence, among others.
Despite the nonprofit sector's fertile conditions for forming partnerships voluntarily, public managers can also require nonprofits to form partnerships as a criterion for funding by using the influence of requests for proposals (RFPs) and grant application processes. Frequently, public and elected officials raise confusion when they promote awarded contracts for services with nonprofits as "partnerships." Private philanthropy is not immune from this phenomenon, either, as evidenced by the way the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes collaboration a requisite for grant-making. This requirement came into play with the Gates Foundation's much-lauded award of $4 million to the National League of Cities in the early 2000s, an initiative that targeted seven cities to boost college graduation rates by better coordinating the services that colleges, schools, and communities provide to students.
The rationale for requiring partnerships and other collaborative ventures seems apparent: public contracting funds and philanthropic grant-making dollars are limited. To obtain the best return on investment, policy makers and funders use their dollars to stimulate and oblige partnership from nonprofit contract and grant seekers. In their view, compelling nonprofits to work together results in higher efficiencies, service delivery capacity, and public value — which in turn amplify the reach of public-serving programs. Moreover, these actors and contractors hold that by requiring collaboration from nonprofit respondents public dollars can be used as an instrument of policy to control the behavior of nonprofit service providers. This trend was illustrated in Ohio in 2009 when Cuyahoga County public officials required two nonprofits, the Cleveland Food Bank and the Hunger Network of Greater Cleveland, to share public funding resources and submit joint proposals.
One reason for scholars' emphasis on public sector, contract-inspired partnerships is the plethora of real-world examples arising from increased public-contracted work performed by nonprofits since the end of the Reagan administration. As a result of the rise in public sector principal agent work with nonprofit service providers, the scholarly literature on nonprofit partnership has covered the impact and efficacy of cross-sector collaboration and public-private partnership much more heavily since the mid-1990s.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsA Note on Quoted MaterialIntroduction: Why This Book? 1. Summing Up, Summing Down: A Review of the Literature on Partnership2. Nonprofit Partnerships: The Gold Standard3. The Point of Partnering4. Good to Great: Recognizing the Signs of High Quality Partnerships5. Nonprofit Partnerships by Sub-Sector6. Grant Makers Partnership Practices7. Toward Nonprofit Theory: Collaboration as a Way of (Work) LifeAppendixIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Collaboration is the life blood of the nonprofit sector. Yet the literature is strangely neglectful of nonprofits' critical roles and perspectives in all kinds of cross-sector partnerships involving business, government and nonprofit organizations. No longer. This richly empirical study by Stuart Mendel and Jeff Brudney shines a bright and broad light on the factors that allow nonprofits and their partners to succeed in their collaborative endeavors."
Collaboration is the life blood of the nonprofit sector. Yet the literature is strangely neglectful of nonprofits' critical roles and perspectives in all kinds of cross-sector partnerships involving business, government and nonprofit organizations. No longer. This richly empirical study by Stuart Mendel and Jeff Brudney shines a bright and broad light on the factors that allow nonprofits and their partners to succeed in their collaborative endeavors.
Collaboration is the lifeblood of the nonprofit sector. Yet the literature is strangely neglectful of nonprofits’ critical roles and perspectives in all kinds of cross-sector partnerships involving business, government and nonprofit organizations. No longer. This richly empirical study by Stuart C. Mendel and Jeffrey L. Brudney shines a bright and broad light on the factors that allow nonprofits and their partners to succeed in their collaborative endeavors.