How To Build Strong Nonprofit Collaborations

A Path To Lasting Change

Nonprofit organizations play a crucial role in addressing societal challenges and driving positive change. The programs and services they provide are key to ensuring that when a person falls into a state of need, there someone is there, ready to help. However, if we’re truly honest with ourselves, we can admit that the dominant, siloed, programmatic approach to change will never fully address the problems America faces.

We want to create support systems that help move people out of poverty and into a new steady state for their lives. But, social issues are complex. The individual experiencing homelessness, doesn’t experience that issue in isolation. The same can be said for the formerly incarcerated person shifting back into society, the foster child aging out of the system, the single mother trying to find a good school for her children, or the family struggling to make ends meet. The issues faced by each of these individuals cut across various systems, including housing, education, employment, health, and criminal justice. While individual programs have helped millions address the point challenges faced by those in need, it makes sense that many foundations and nonprofits are now shifting their attention towards collaborative support models. These models aim to bring together the power, expertise, and programs of various organizations to address the gaps that have yet to be tackled.

But as organizations turn their attention toward a partnership model, they’re running into new challenges, asking:

“How do we form successful nonprofit collaborations?”

"How can we ensure new social sector collaborations are a priority for all members, while they simultaneously stay focused on their core work?”

“What are nonprofit collaboration examples that we can model our nonprofit partnership after?”

Answering these questions is what this article is about. Over the last decade I’ve worked with governments, foundations, and nonprofits to form and facilitate partnerships that not only succeed, but that have moved the needle on reducing homelessness, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial bias in health research, and more. My team at DC Design and I have learned, first-hand, the most common pitfalls nonprofit collaboratives face when bringing together multiple social sector organizations to work toward a common cause. Let’s explore the key steps to setting up a strong nonprofit collaboration and pull on examples of successful partnerships that DC Design has helped lead.

First things first, establish your goal.

The main purpose of forming a nonprofit collaboration is to accomplish change that an individual organization alone can't accomplish. The purpose is to unite the strengths of different organizations, to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The most successful nonprofit collaborations are focused on building the space, or connective tissue, between organizations. These gaps between organizations are often the spaces where those in need fall through the cracks.

The foundation of our work at DC Design is Community-Centered Design (AKA Human-Centered Design, AKA Design Thinking). This means that my team and I spend much of our time directly talking with Black, brown, and low-income community members about their needs. During our recent work to eliminate Black infant mortality in Cincinnati (alongside an incredible organization called Cradle Cincinnati), mothers talked about their challenges stabilizing their lives ahead of giving birth. One mother explained the difficulty of taking her kid to school across town on two different buses, finding a job, and having to find new housing before the end of the month when her transitional housing program will reevaluate if she can stay or not. She said, “I’m worried I won't be able to find housing in time. I’m stressed about money and my income."

Firming up gaps like these, the ones between nonprofits and that often cut across multiple areas of need should be the goal of most nonprofit collaborations, but collaboratives must also define their specific purpose.

DC Design's Human-Centered Design process uses a concept called Current and End States to help our clients agree on a clear understanding of the status quo, and a mutually agreed on vision for the future: Their purpose.

They should answer the question: “What do we hope to accomplish by working together?” At DC Design, during our project kickoff meetings, we use three distinct structures to help organizations answer this question and settle on one path forward. We call these the “Current State,” which defines the status quo to the best of our current knowledge. The “End State,” which defines the eventual outcome we’re all trying to achieve together for the target population, and the “Project Outcome,” which defines the outcome we expect to achieve by the end of this project. By answering these questions early, hundreds of disagreements in the future can be avoided. It’s worth noting that in our human-centered design methodology, we also check with those most affected by a challenge to ensure the current state, end state, and project outcome that our clients come up with align with what the community really needs.

Second, Map out the Ecosystem

Coming into the problem, you may think you know exactly who should be involved and who shouldn’t, but in our experience, we’ve found that’s rarely the case. The partners are catalysts. They have a vision and dream, but they aren't the whole ecosystem. By mapping out the ecosystem of stakeholder—those affected directly by the challenge the collaborative seeks to address, those aligned with addressing the challenge, those who could be aligned but are currently apathetic, and those who benefit from the status quo and are likely to resist change—nonprofit collaborations can get a better understanding of how to move their work forward and who to engage.

Combining Human-Centered Design with Systems Thinking, DC Design pioneered Multistakeholder Design Thinking, a method of engaging an entire ecosystem in the Human-Centered Design process. This approach leads to more lasting solutions.

We’ve found that this crucial step is often skipped, and leads to big problems down the line. Failing to include and consider the needs of a key stakeholder, for example the sheriff when working on criminal justice reform, or a city council member, or the president of the nonprofit with ties to all the kids you seek to benefit, is a good recipe for facing resistance or vetoes down the line. We’re all human, and when we’re left out, ego can creep in. I’ve seen great projects, consisting of months of work, terminated abruptly all because of a missed stakeholder who could have been included from the outset. A good central facilitator will help partners see the ecosystem as a whole and decide how to engage the various stakeholders affected by the challenge at hand. If your facilitator can’t speak to the importance of this process, they may not be the right one for the work that you’re doing.

Third, Establish a Centralized Leadership Structure

One of the biggest challenges facing social sector collaborations is the fact that every individual nonprofit, foundation, or governmental department has its own internal priorities. When it comes to getting things done, internal, day to day execution always beats out external, elective, or non-urgent responsibilities. While organizations are motivated by their willpower and internal desire to work together at the beginning of a project, that energy fades quickly as the collaborative moves into its second, third, and fourth months. This leads to organizations and leaders missing meetings, and begins to halt all progress.

To counter this, centralized leadership for the collaborative must be established. I’ll repeat this because it’s vital.

To run a successful nonprofit collaborative, you must establish strong centralized leadership.

This doesn't mean one group calls all the shots, but it does mean it's clear who is responsible for moving the process along and ensuring decisions are made. This can be a single organization that's willing to play a bigger role, a collective of three members who will meet regularly to make final decisions, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) backed by a central leadership team, or a strategy and design consulting firm like DC Design who will hold the group accountable and add structure to the work. Regardless of which approach you take, don’t skip this step.

Working with a strategy & design consulting firm like DC Design reduces the burden of shepherding a collaboration forward, helping partners make decisions more easily, remain focused on their core work, and add structure to the social change process.

Social sector leaders are nice, and often don’t want to dominate one another. That collaborative nature is their strength, but when it comes to forming a partnership, a strong voice that can help the group make a final decision, and lead project management is essential. Even if decision-making is to be distributed, you'll still need centralized project management to put decisions forward for the group. Otherwise, decision-making slows down and discontentment and the feeling that everyone is wasting their time grows.

DC Design recently helped a cutting edge nonprofit collaborative with over a dozen members spanning the social sector, Brew City Match in Wisconsin, work through a similar challenge.

DC Design's Troy Mosby works with the Brew City Match Collaborative members to co-design Brew City Match 2.0.

While they had run successful programs in the past, a year of slow decision-making brought on by the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic, had slowed them down substantially. They asked DC Design to help them design version 2.0 of their program. Within 4 months, we had spoken with the community they want to serve; helped the nonprofit collaboration solidify its vision and audience; defined its niche, sectors, membership, desired culture and norms; and designed a new programmatic flow that all partners could agree on. We helped pull in the members at the right time for deep collaboration where it mattered most, but otherwise, kept them out of the weeds. After a short holiday, they launched Brew City Match 2.0 with confidence and positive feedback from the community.

Fourth, Front-load Your Project Management

Having established your strong central leadership structure, the group responsible for final decision-making should lay out a clear project timeline. They should guide participants through a week by week plan that builds consensus around what is going to happen, what will be tackled first, how the group will give input and decide on key decision points, and what the meeting cadence will be.

When DC Design is partnered with a nonprofit collaboration, we prefer bi-weekly or ti-weekly meetings for all partners to check in with one another. Some of these meetings are formal, and some are informal, allowing a natural exchange where DC Design is presenting information during formal check-ins and collecting information during informal check-ins. They also clearly designate when organizational decision-makers need to be in the room, and when they don’t.

DC Design takes project management seriously, ensuring our clients can focus on what they do best. We use a hybrid agile methodology that relies on sprint planning, bi-weekly or tri-weekly meetings, and formal and informal check-ins.

It can’t be understated how important clear project management from the beginning of a project is to its success. Not only does it help each collaborating organization know what is expected from them at the beginning of the project, it also answers the question that most social sector partners have when joining a nonprofit collaborative, “What is required of me and how much time is this going to take?” This is not a cynical question, but a human one. We need to be realistic and confront the fact that everyone involved also has other priorities. If we do, we're in a better position to produce great outcomes together.

Answering this question clearly from the beginning preserves buy-in, allows partners to hold dates in advance on their calendars, and reduces the stress of being involved by allowing partners to contribute their expertise efficiently.

Fifth, Set Norms

Lastly, when thinking about challenges and obstacles that nonprofit collaborations will need to overcome, one should keep in mind that nonprofit collaborations often don't have a natural co-working relationship. This creates challenges as they try to work together on a new initiative. A strong nonprofit collaboration will set norms that all members can agree on. These aren’t fancy, nor necessarily different from what many organizations adhere to internally, but there are an infinite number of norms groups can gravitate toward. Running collaborative members through a norming process allows the norms they value most to rise to the surface, and creates clear expectations and accountability for how the group will act toward one another.

DC Design facilitates the norming process with nonprofit collaborations, ensuring everyone is on the same page about expectations and sidestepping future issues that stem from misaligned expectations.

In our work, we’ve seen norms like, “stay involved,” and “state your objections” make a real difference to how people show up and treat the nonprofit collaboration's mission over time.

One Model that Works: Third Party Facilitated Nonprofit Collaborations

There are a number of keys to forming a successful nonprofit collaboration. While the list I've shared here isn’t exhaustive, each item on it is foundational to creating a new tier of outcome where fewer and fewer underserved people slip through the cracks between social sector providers.

An example of where we’ve seen the model I’ve laid out in this article work is:

When DC Design was hired as the research, strategy, and design firm partner for the Milwaukee Small Business Continuum of Capital project. We worked with three incredible, catalyzing CDFIs—WWBIC, Self-Help Federal Credit Union, and Northwest Side CDC—as well as a committed funder, JPMorgan Chase, to increase the flow of capital to entrepreneurs of color in milwaukee and create a connected ecosystem of service providers that could help entrepreneurs at any stage of their business journey. While the three partner nonprofits were the final decision makers, DC Design served as the central project manager and primary thought partner to the collaborative, helping them to establish the project's overall goals, mapping the ecosystem, establishing a centralized decision-making process, managing the project and setting norms.

MSBCC Partners working to establish the overall project's goals through DC Design's "Current State/End State" approach.

With that foundation laid, we built on top of it. DC Design led the project's community-centered research that surfaced the core issues Black and brown entrepreneurs are grappling with on a day to day basis, worked with the partners to develop a strategy for how to align the needs we uncovered with those of the CDFIs as well, and then designed and developed the MKE BOSS platform, alongside our partner, Volt Studios. Because of the efforts of this nonprofit collaboration, The One-Stop-Shop for Milwaukee’s entrepreneurs of color to find the resources needed to Build, Operate, Scale, and Sustain their small businesses (MKE BOSS), will be launched in the coming months and we couldn’t be more excited.

The Entrepreneurs Homepage for the MKE BOSS platform, "The One-Stop-Shop for Milwaukee’s entrepreneurs of color to find the resources needed to Build, Operate, Scale, and Sustain their small businesses."

We’re extremely proud of the work the MSBCC nonprofit partners have done to catalyze change in their community, and we’re proud of the role we played in helping to make it happen.

If you’re working as an individual organization or to set up a nonprofit collaboration to address social disparities for Black, brown, or low-income individuals in housing, education, employment/wealth generation, health, or criminal justice, reach out to DC Design at info@dcdesignltd.com

If you work at a foundation, nonprofit, or government and would like to assess your organization's readiness to create social change, take our free mindsets quiz here.