New Frontiers in Collaboration: 
Get out there and Connect
__________________________________________________________________

By Alexandra Peters

“col·lab·o·rate: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor; to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected.”

Mission-driven organizations distinguish themselves by their mission and raise funds competitively with other organizations in their field.  It may not be easy or natural to cooperate with an organization that competes with yours for funding, but there are many reasons to reconsider your resistance and forge collaborative organizational relationships. Nonprofits often share similar issues, concerns, and challenges; use similar “best practices”; and are under a shared umbrella of working toward a common societal good.

From Isolation and Competition to Collaboration

Business and nonprofit environments are changing.  Nonprofits are shifting out of the mindset of competition and isolation, even if it’s only to remember that there other people doing similar work.  They are increasingly using online interaction and networking to leverage what they have and what they know.  But being independent doesn’t have to preclude cooperation.

In the past decade, a new world of social media has begun to have a huge impact on expanding our organizational reach, lowering costs, and sharing best practices.  Everyone uses email now, but remember 15 years ago when it was brand-new and only a few innovators were using it?  Now we’re in the middle of another shift in connection and collaboration using social media that’s referred to as “Web 2.0”.

Collaboration is especially productive as an act of giving and generosity, since it preserves the organization’s identity while expanding what the organization can accomplish.  Think of John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech:  “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”  Any form of collaboration works best when nonprofits consider what they can offer another organization before seeking out what others can do for them.  Collaboration offers resources for other organizations – ideas or explanations of how their programs or systems work, web links, tools, and descriptions of best practices or lessons learned in the course of their work.

What Exactly IS a Collaboration?

Collaborations are different from alliances (where decision making is shared in some way) or mergers (where two organizations merge their programs and leadership to become one).  They involve no permanent commitment or restructuring, and no shared governance.  They can be as simple as joining up with other organizations in an online group, or as complex as networking with several similar nonprofits to form a collaborative association that shares resources, solves problems, or offers programs together.

How to Get Started

Before committing to a collaborative partnership, each organization should make sure that the organizations’ missions are harmonious and that you are on the same side of the issues they address through their work.  Then start small by connecting with your peers, colleagues, and constituencies to work together on a single project.  If that project is successful and all parties are satisfied with the collaboration, look for another place to work together.  The pay-off in what you organization will gain as well as what you will offer the world is huge.

Ways to Collaborate

Here are some suggestions for collaborating in different ways:

1.     Social media and networking. The remarkable thing about these resources is that they’re still free.  This is an easy way to use powerful tools to share resources and best practices, information and referrals.  It’s also a good way just to get to know your colleagues in the field.  You don’t need to be using all of these tools, but any one of them can make a big difference in community collaboration:

Google Docs is free on Gmail, once you sign up for a free email address.  It allows you to work collaboratively on documents at the same time as other people, who can be located anywhere.  You’ll be working “in the cloud”, which means your information is not stored on anyone’s server so it can be accessed via the Internet from any location, by anyone you allow:  http://www.docs.google.com.

Wikis allow different people to create and contribute to a wiki page of common interest to your community.  Start with these hosting comparisons:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms and http://editthis.iinfo/wiki/Wiki_hosting_comparison_guide.

Twitter has already become an accepted professional tool for connecting to your peers, passing on useful information (“retweets”), and even conferencing (“tweetups”). Use TweepML http://tweepml.org/ to find lists of Tweeters with the same interests as yours to follow.  You’ll find a twitterverse of people talking about your interests and sending useful links and news stories:  http://twitter.com/.

Facebook – No longer just for kids, a presence on Facebook has become a necessity for all businesses to announce themselves and share what they’re doing.  Create a Fan page, but don’t use a Facebook Group, even though it sounds collaborative.  It’s left over from the early days of Facebook and has outdated structures:  http://www.facebook.com.

Skype – This secure international phone system, which is mostly free, now allows up to five video callers to call in and be seen on the screen at once:  http://www.skype.com/.

Second Life – And how about online office space?  Try joining the nonprofit Commons, a nonprofit archipelago sponsored by TechSoup, where the virtual nonprofit community offers a very entertaining way to “work in a cooperative learning environment and foster outreach, education and fundraising”.  It’s not a game – it really does connect you to other people in the nonprofit world, although you all have avatars and of course the office space exists only in Second World.  Nonprofits can apply to be given virtual space without cost:  http://www.nonprofitcommons.org/.

2.     Board collaborations – Boards tend to function in isolation and rarely have interaction with other boards and yet the decisions boards make (merging or closing the organization, hiring a new CEO, expanding or contracting, etc.) are the biggest ones in any nonprofit.  The more interaction boards have with other people working on similar issues the better, because each board will discover how others are thinking and working (often very differently) and can share ideas, resources, and frustrations.

Hold collaborative meetings for some or all members of several boards with specific agendas where boards of different nonprofits can work together on common issues of policy, government changes, funding and planning.

Set up joint ongoing education sessions on topics on governance, ideally with working groups and discussion.  You might consider hiring an outside specialist on board structure to do this and share the cost.

Lean on each other for insight and support.  Get together in structured online or face-to-face meetings just to ask each other:  “How do you do this on your board?”  Create a chat line for board members of nonprofits doing comparable or similar work.

Arrange board tours together.  Tour the programs of organizations doing similar work and sit down and discuss how you can work more together.

3.Group Purchasing

Pool purchasing power when buying goods and services to lower the cost.  Form a cooperative where you buy together.  This is an excellent job for an intern or volunteer, by the way – use them to investigate opportunities.

Think creatively about partnerships with other local nonprofits when buying supplies or investing jointly in equipment.  When a large investment is being considered, look around to see if there is anyone else who could share the costs.

The Nonprofit Purchasing Group. This organization charges on a sliding scale to sign up. Many national vendors participate who accept no commissions or fees themselves and provide members with discounted rates: http://www.nonprofitpurchasinggroup.org/.

4.     Back office collaboration – Explore ways to share space, equipment, or staff.

Think proactively rather than reactively. To avoid problems, plans need to be worked out and each interest and concern addressed well in advance. This doesn’t necessarily involve complex legal structures – it’s more about how each organization prefers to do things, and discussing as fully as possible how you will deal with different working and office styles, hours, and expectations.  There is often an overhead issue in starting up together, but significant ongoing savings can be realized once the systems are working well.

Set up a multi-tenant nonprofit center specially for nonprofits to allow them to share space and resources. Start your own or use the resources and office space of the Nonprofit Centers Network, available all over the US:  http://www.nonprofitcenters.org/.

5.     Risk management alliances are another possible area for collaboration.

Plan jointly for disaster and crisis in order to be able to effectively mobilize the community when a crisis affects you.  This works best when planning for external crises (extreme weather, bombs, and earthquakes) that could affect all of you.  Having a disaster plan shared by a large group of nonprofit means that if disaster hits, you are already prepared to help each other out and ready to deal with the next steps of recovery.  Work with a specialist who can help you as a group to think through the preparation steps you’ll need in place.  Having a group disaster plan in place is far more effective than having many individual organizational plans, with the added benefit of sharing the cost of the risk management professional.

Individual organizations have different internal issues to worry about, and have different paths for resolving internal problems.  Risk management alliances are much trickier when they are dealing with internal crisis, so reserve joint planning for disaster and crises to broad community-based issues.

Collaboration can extend your organization’s reach and provide support and fresh ideas for your mission.  So start small and experiment along the way, but do give collaboration a serious consideration as a way to accomplish more within your existing budget.