Acknowledgments
The board and staff of the Drucker Foundation are grateful to the collaboration partners who made this workbook (and the accompanying video) possible. We thank James E. Austin for The Collaboration Challenge and his long-standing devotion to the social sector and to understanding how it can grow through cross sector alliances. For leading beyond the walls, we thank Frances Hesselbein, chairman of the Drucker Foundation Board of Governors, and long-time practitioner in building productive partnerships. This workbook is the product of many authors. Jim Austin provided the frameworks, cases, lessons, and oversight that are its thoughtful and heartfelt basis. We thank Holly Hartstone, Jill Markowitz, and Gary J. Stern, who crafted a process true to Jim Austin’s work and to nonprofit practice. Sonya Grier provided a review of literature on nonprofit-business collaboration, and other members of the Drucker Foundation Training Team contributed numerous insights. The review and participation of many nonprofit leaders also contributed to the development of the workbook. We thank the hundreds of leaders at the Drucker Foundation conference and at the Peter F. Drucker School of Claremont Graduate University who reviewed the first efforts, and the members of the Milwaukee nonprofit community who reviewed the subsequent draft and workshop and provided the essential voice of the customer. For help with this Milwaukee pilot we thank Leigh Kunde of the Nonprofit Management Center for hosting, Richard Pieper of Pieper Power for financial support, and the many others who assisted. We thank Ken Witty for producing the Meeting the Collaboration Challenge Video. It presents real stories of collaboration success. Our publishing partners at Jossey-Bass joined us in the development and launch of these tools. We are grateful for this ongoing collaboration. Finally, we are grateful to our funders who enabled this dispersed team to collaborate.
Rob JohnstonPresident and CEODrucker Foundation
Lead FundingW. K. Kellogg FoundationAdditional FundingGE FundJohn A. McNeice Jr.ServiceMaster CompanyUnited Way of New York CityUniversity of St. ThomasWashington MutualDrucker Foundation members and funding partners
Using This Workbook and Related Resources
This workbook, its companion videotape, and the Drucker Foundation Website are designed to complement James Austin’s The Collaboration Challenge. Together these resources can help your nonprofit organization further its mission through strategic alliances with businesses. These resources can be used, alone or in combination, to encourage your board, volunteers, and staff to consider carefully whether and how to develop alliances with businesses. Here are brief overviews of these resources.
The Collaboration Challenge
Meeting the Collaboration Challenge Workbook
This workbook provides a step-by-step process for nonprofits to explore and develop alliances with businesses. It is useful both for organizations with limited alliance experience and for organizations that have established alliances. Nonprofit leaders can choose which phases and worksheets are most helpful to their own situation. Additional resources can help leaders explore the topics most important to their work.
Meeting the Collaboration Challenge Video
The video tape is a powerful tool that introduces examples of nonprofit business alliances and demonstrates how the ideas presented in the book and work book are expressed in action. The video illustrates alliances’ benefits and challenges as nonprofit and business leaders explain how their partnerships have developed and evolved.
Drucker Foundation Web Site [drucker.org/collaboration/
The Web site provides this workbook in a downloadable format and presents additional current resources for meeting the collaboration challenge, including information about related workshops and how to subscribe to the monthly Meeting the Collaboration Challenge e-mail notice.
Relationships Between Nonprofit Organizations and Businesses
Process options forBUILDING UNDERSTANDING
Your nonprofit organization’s board of directors and management team may wish to build their understanding about the evolving range of relationships between nonprofits and businesses and the benefits these relationships can provide. This understanding helps the organization respond to opportunity and seek out business partners to develop alliances that further the organization’s mission.
This introductory section can be read to establish a common framework and terminology for discussing nonprofit-business alliances. For greater depth you may decide to read "The Strategic Benefits of Alliances," an introductory chapter in James Austin’s book The Collaboration Challenge. For a lively and accessible introduction to successful nonprofit business alliances, you may wish to view all or part of the companion resource Meeting the Collaboration Challenge Video, which illustrates a range of examples. Some are alliances of small and medium-sized nonprofits and local businesses; others are larger-scale alliances involving national nonprofit initiatives, Fortune 500 companies, and multiple partners.
AppendixE in this workbook contains capsule descriptions of the five alliances presented in the video.The process options for Phases One, Two, and Three tell you which sections of the video best illustrate the relevant aspects of alliance development.
Appendix F in this workbook suggests further resources. This resource list is also available on the Drucker Foundation Web site [drucker.org/collaboration/], where it is periodically updated. This site also provides this workbook in a downloadable format and additional current resources for meeting the collaboration challenge, including information about related workshops.
Relationships between nonprofit organizations and businesses are becoming increasingly complex and strategic. They are migrating from charitable relationships between benevolent donors and grateful recipients to varied alliances that create diverse benefits for both partners and added value for communities. Today there is growing interest in the evolving range of partnerships, alliances, ventures, and collaborations between nonprofit organizations and businesses. These relationships result from opportunities and careful planning. To lead beyond the walls, nonprofit organizations need to be ready both to respond to serendipity and to seek out business partners systematically to develop alliances that further their missions.
The Range of Nonprofit-Business RelationshipsThe types of relationships between businesses and nonprofit organizations are evolving, as is the language that describes them. Most familiar are contributions of money and goods and sponsorships of events, activities, publications, and otherproducts. These relationships provide goodwill for businesses and funds for nonprofitorganizations. Businesses continue to encourage employees to volunteer with nonprofit organizations as board members, as fundraisers, in developing and delivering programs, and by providing pro bono technical expertise. Many nonprofit organizations regularly provide employee services under contract to businesses, in areas including child care, health, education, and job training and readiness.
Cause-related marketing has become increasingly familiar as businesses contribute a portion of revenue generated by specific marketing activities to the nonprofit organizations featured in those campaigns. Businesses and nonprofits are also joining in social marketing projects designed to create social benefits or behavioral change. Nonprofit organizations are arranging licensing and "branding" agreements in which businesses pay to use nonprofits’ names, logos and images to enhance the businesses’ marketing activities and the nonprofits’ visibility and finances. And some nonprofit entrepreneurs are partnering with businesses in social enterprises to generate surplus revenues for nonprofits from creating, testing, distributing, or selling services and products.
Businesses’Benefits
The growth and the variety of relationships between businesses and non profit organizations are compelling evidence that businesses are obtaining benefits beyond the satisfactions of traditional philanthropy. These benefits are real and resource management and the corporate culture, and supporting corporate strategiesthrough community improvement.
A strategic alliance with a nonprofit organization can help generate business by enhancing a company’s reputation, building goodwill, and strengthening its image. Such alliances can also expand a business’s network, markets, and access tokey customer groups. Alliance projects can provide arenas for developing and testingthe business’s products, services, and innovations.
As an expression of corporate values and a source of opportunities for communityservice, a strategic alliance with a nonprofit organization can strengthen human resource management and corporate culture
Alliance activities can:• Enhance employee motivation, morale, loyalty, and retention.• Foster empathy and caring that reinforce a focus on service.• Expand opportunities for employees to practice leadership and management.• Strengthen the organizational "glue" created by common values.• Illuminate individuals’ capabilities, values, and attitudes.• Increase the organization’s ability to attract potential employees.
Finally, community improvement has increasingly become part of corporate strategy. Alliances with nonprofit organizations provide opportunities for businessesto lead beyond the walls. Businesses can fulfill civic responsibilities and strengthen business conditions through positive impact on communities while simultaneously enhancing their images.
Nonprofit Organizations’Assets and Benefits
Nonprofit organizations are recognizing that their own broad range of assets and capabilities produces these benefits for businesses. Strategic alliances depend onnonprofits’ powerful missions and strong public images, access to customers and markets, extensive communication and distribution systems, relationships with community leaders and other influential people, organizational expertise and programs, and other assets.
Through alliances with businesses, nonprofit organizations are realizing abroad range of benefits for their customers as well as for their organizational infrastructure and operations. These benefits come from relationships not only with those who manage businesses’ philanthropic contributions but also with those in marketing, product development, human resources, public relations, and other business units. The benefits nonprofit organizations can realize range from program innovation and delivery to revenues and goods, from people to facilities, and from publicity to information. Nonprofit organizations can increase public awareness of issues and causes and achieve greater organizational visibility through alliances’ public relations and marketing communications. Businesses can also provide experts’ pro bono assistance and access to other businesses and influential people to expand nonprofit organizations’ contacts.Meeting the Challenge
The evolving range of relationships between nonprofit organizations and businessespresents opportunities for mutual benefits and results beyond those anyorganization or any sector could achieve alone. By meeting the collaborationchallenge, nonprofit leaders can realize numerous benefits for their organizationsand the communities they serve.
ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN?
PHASE 1:Prepare Your Nonprofit Organization to Meet the Collaboration Challenge