Effective nonprofit leaders understand this. They know there is only so much their organizations can achieve on their own. There are very real obstacles to nonprofits aggressively scaling the size and reach of their organization. For a start, unlike businesses, nonprofits rarely generate their own income. Scaling a nonprofit requires them to secure more donations and other forms of income. That, in turn, usually requires them to spend a greater proportion of their income on fundraising (as they pursue more difficult-to-obtain funding or more challenging funders or smaller service contracts), reducing the percentage available for their programs.
Given these obstacles, nonprofits should think of scale in terms of impact, not just organization size. And they should look to scale impact through collaboration and systems change rather than organization growth alone. You can grow your impact by mobilizing and influencing others to work to the same ends. Bringing together powerful coalitions, building movements, creating networks and federated structures, and advocating collectively are all ways to scale impact. If your goal is social change, you’ll be much more likely to achieve it if lots of people and organizations are aligned with you and pulling in the same direction than if you proceed alone.
Of course, building networks or coalitions can be hard, as it requires agreement around shared goals and/or tactics. Reaching agreement can often require surrendering a significant degree of control or agreeing to do something differently, and leaders—especially those who are very set in their visions—can struggle with that. So, let’s look at some of the ways collaboration can be achieved through networks. First, some terminology. I’m using “coalition” and “network” interchangeably here, to refer to groups of organizations coming together around a common cause or issue. These groupings can be more or less formal. Another commonly used term is “movement,” though a movement is usually broader and more organic in scope, inclusive of a wider range of constituents, including networks, individuals, organizations, and other groups. Tremendously important for social change, movements are largely beyond the scope of this chapter, so we’ll focus on networks and coalitions.
IDENTIFY SHARED INTERESTS
To build a network, you need a group of organizations to agree to work on a common issue. You may be dedicated to similar causes, or you may have completely different causes or ideologies but shared short- or medium-term interests. The key is to get agreement on specific things you want to do together. For example, in the modern slavery space, many groups regard all sex work as highly exploitative (even if it’s done consensually by an adult) and hence seek to legally abolish the commercial sex industry. Other groups think if adults chose to engage in sex work, their choice is valid and they should receive protections just like workers in any other industry. These are fundamentally different stances. But all these groups are united in their belief that anyone who is forced or coerced into the sex industry, or under the age of eighteen, is experiencing human trafficking and should be helped to get out of that situation. When these groups unify around this shorter-term interest in supporting survivors to exit trafficking situations, they find plenty of opportunities to collaborate.
Or you may have shared endpoints but fundamentally different approaches to achieving them. The challenge here is to find common ground on issues that advance your collective objectives and leverage one another’s strengths to get there.
All of this will be easier if the groups trying to collaborate share similar philosophies and approaches, but it doesn’t need to be so. In fact, some of the most powerful coalitions are those that bring together organizations with fundamentally different philosophies around a shared issue. The child sex trafficking case is one example. US prison reform is another.
CASE STUDY
Unlikely Allies Come Together to Push for Criminal Justice Reform
The Coalition for Public Safety is an effort to reform the US criminal justice system that relies on collaboration across ideologies. In its own words, “In an unprecedented way, we bring together the nation’s most prominent conservative and progressive organizations to pursue an aggressive criminal justice reform effort.”8 Its members include conservative groups like Americans for Tax Reform, Freedom-Works, Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Right On Crime, and more progressive ones such as the American civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress, and the Leadership conference on Civil and Human Rights. Its funders include both Koch Industries and the Ford Foundation, which generally sit on opposing ends of the ideological spectrum.
Although these groups have very different politics, they have all come to a shared conclusion: “that America’s pattern of mass incarceration is bad for the country, terrible for communities, and devastating for individuals,”9 and that it needs fixing. These groups have enough of a shared commitment to making the criminal justice system “smarter, fairer and more cost-effective”10 that they have put aside long-standing differences to collaborate on this particular issue and have achieved significant progress as a result.
Truly powerful collaborations go beyond just having shared interests to develop a shared vision and strategy. They identify and implement shared activities. Some go further still and establish shared measurement practices and advocacy efforts. Robust coalitions often have a “backbone” or “quarterback” organization leading on much of these mechanics of collaboration—a group that is providing technical expertise to a range of groups, channeling funding or acting as a convenor for social movement leaders. Girls Not Brides and Crisis Action (see below) are both backbone organizations. Some are entirely focused on acting as a backbone, while for others, it’s just one part of their identity. Typically, backbone organizations have a few major roles: guiding vision and strategy, supporting aligned activities, establishing shared measurement practices, building public will, and mobilizing funding.11 One of the advantages of a backbone organization is that it helps overcome much of the friction impeding effective collaboration.
Regardless of your approach, collaboration requires leaders to keep their egos in check. It requires a willingness to focus on the cause over the organization’s or leader’s shorter-term interests around control and profile. Given that all organizations have differing objectives and approaches, to a greater or smaller degree, you won’t be able to build successful coalitions if you insist on everything being done your way. Saying “you must collaborate entirely on my terms” (as happens surprisingly often) is an oxymoron. I’m often reminded of President Truman’s aphorism “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” However, this can be hard for nonprofit leaders to accept, as, at the same time as collaborating, they are often also seeking to raise their organization’s profile, demonstrate their impact, and impress donors. Most donors expect the groups they fund to be able to attribute direct impact of their funding, and true collaboration necessitates a willingness to accept complexity and nuance regarding attribution.
All the challenges aside, the time and effort invested in building effective networks—whether on an issue-by-issue basis or on a more long-standing footing—will almost always deliver greater progress on your cause than working in isolation.
CASE STUDY
Operating Behind the Scenes to Build Coalitions to Tackle Armed Conflicts
Nonprofits often seek publicity for their work—media coverage, name recognition, a strong social media presence. These can be effective ways to highlight impact and mobilize others, including funders, to their cause. So how did a nonprofit that consciously avoids publicity and deliberately operates behind the scenes become one of the most impactful conflict prevention organizations of recent decades?
I’m talking about Crisis Action,* a small, highly effective nonprofit, whose board I chaired from 2006 to 2013. It describes itself as “a catalyst and coordinator for organizations working together to protect civilians from armed conflict.” Despite playing a key role in mobilizing impactful coalitions to campaign against conflicts in countries ranging from Myanmar to Yemen to Ukraine, Crisis Action is not a household name. That is by design. The organization sees its role as one to bring together and promote those coalitions and campaigns, and it can do that much more effectively by avoiding the spotlight and directing it onto others.
Crisis Action’s efforts to prevent a potential genocide in the Central African Republic (CAR) illustrate the power of this approach. Following a coup early in 2013, horrific ethnic cleansing spread rapidly throughout CAR, with mass atrocities committed by both Muslim and christian groups. By March, 90 percent of the capital’s Muslim population had been forced from their homes or murdered. Local authorities had no ability to stop the killings. The atrocities prompted calls for international action to prevent a possible genocide.
Crisis Action, working closely with its human rights and humanitarian partners in the country, determined that, without a UN life would be catastrophic. So it began to ring alarm bells with the United Nations and the African union, and in Washington, DC, and European capitals. At the same time, it brought together a powerful interfaith delegation consisting of CAR’s most influential Christian and Muslim leaders.
Crisis Action helped this delegation get access to the international media, including CNN, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and other outlets, while shunning media coverage for its own efforts. It also helped the delegation secure meetings with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President François Hollande, and all fifteen Security Council ambassadors.
These efforts proved effective. Over the course of the next few months, the African Union, the united Nations, and the European union deployed peacekeepers to CAR. The feared genocide didn’t happen, and the violence subsided.
Later, the French foreign minister commented: “Crisis Action offered the CAR religious leaders an international platform at a critical time when their calls for peace needed to be heard. Crisis Action’s collaboration with the faith leaders was of enormous support to the French government’s engagement in CAR.”12
SHARE KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE
Whether or not your organization is actively collaborating in a network, it can support other organizations by sharing relevant knowledge and expertise. Some organizations go further and provide training or support to peer organizations. Do this well and your nonprofit can facilitate cost-sharing and benefit the field as a whole. You can also potentially influence the thinking and strategies of the groups you help to educate, as well as the broader field.
We’ve pursued this approach from the earliest days of the Freedom Fund. We commission a lot of research and publish it all. We also publish a monthly bulletin of others’ key research developments across the field, so that all can benefit from this knowledge. In this spirit, we have also developed an online, publicly accessible resource containing all of our templates and systems for identifying, working with, funding, and evaluating grassroots NGOs. Our objective is to encourage funders to directly support grassroots organizations, and to provide them with the tools and templates to do so. Beyond this, we recognize that many other organizations with fewer resources will benefit from understanding our approach and learnings.*
Some organizations go even further and provide funding to their peer organizations. They understand that this is a powerful way of shifting power and investing in collaborations. The Freedom Fund currently makes grants to over one hundred partner organizations. We have introduced new funding mechanisms, including a fund that provides unrestricted grants to survivor-led organizations and small grants to support inclusive convenings, in order to fill gaps that we’ve observed in the anti-trafficking movement.
Support does not need to be financial. Organizations can invest in coalitions by hosting others on their premises, sharing expertise or insider knowledge, or paying for partner staff from smaller organizations to attend convenings or participate in advocacy meetings. These modest investments can have an outsized impact in strengthening relationships.
OBSTACLES
Effective collaboration is difficult. None of the challenges are insurmountable, although, on occasion, the cost of overcoming obstacles may outweigh the benefits of collaboration. The calculation needs to be made on a case-by-case basis.
Almost invariably, one of the greatest perceived obstacles to better nonprofit collaboration is competition for funding and attention. Given nonprofits are often seeking funding from similar sources, they often hesitate to collaborate with their “competitors.” In my experience, this is generally a shortsighted perspective by nonprofits and one that is rarely welcomed by philanthropists. Effective collaboration can and should grow the funding pie, as it should make you better able to demonstrate progress and impact to donors. Second, donors rarely welcome cutthroat competition for their funding and are apt to look more kindly on organizations that are explicitly collaborative in nature. Collaboration also reduces the pressure on donors to pick a “winner” out of many worthy organizations.
Another common challenge is that, in an effort to build consensus, objectives become so watered down as to be meaningless. For example, if you are advocating to a legislator, you will usually be most effective if you have a clear ask, such as voting in support of a piece of legislation. But if you go to a policymaker simply telling them they need to “do something, urgently” without specifying what—perhaps because your coalition has not been able to agree on what to ask for—then you’ll be markedly less effective.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAR “ASK”
When Gareth Evans, my former boss at International Crisis Group, was foreign minister of Australia, he would often meet with human rights organizations who wanted to lobby him to act in response to an unfolding regional tragedy. In his recounting, they would come and tell him there was a pressing emergency, and he would agree. They would tell him the Australian government needed to do something and he would signal openness to action. But when he asked specifically what they wanted the government to do, more often than not they would say that was for the government to decide, not for them to recommend—likely because they hadn’t agreed upon a clear ask among themselves. As Gareth pointed out, this was a hugely wasted opportunity to advocate for a clear course of action to a receptive interlocutor.
Crisis Action identifies its advocacy “asks” by engaging with all its members to identify robust policy positions that have broad (though usually not uniform) support, and then gives members the option to sign on or pass, effectively creating a coalition of the willing behind a more robust policy position. Part of being a willing collaborator is accepting that not all partners will line up on every ask or campaign, and understanding that they have their own internal stances, dynamics, and priorities to manage.
Another challenge is that many leaders, and their boards, will be more focused on the growth of their organization and its revenue than on impact—especially impact that can’t be directly attributed to their organization. While this is not surprising, it’s a limited perspective and will often be counterproductive over the longer term in regard to foregone relationships and perceptions in the field.
Donors can also be impediments. While many enthusiastically support the idea of nonprofit collaboration, they often don’t design their funding practices to support it. For example, restricted funding and overly interventionist engagement actively undermine collaboration. On the other hand, donors can give a huge boost to collaboration by structuring their funding to supporting networks, backbone organizations, and sharing of resources.
Any nonprofit leader truly dedicated to the purpose of their organization will be focused on achieving the greatest possible impact over shorter-term organizational imperatives. However, the happy reality is that, in most cases, the two are mutually reinforcing, not in conflict. Generosity is generative in the nonprofit space, and effort spent trying to collaborate effectively with peers will usually bear dividends for the cause and your organization.
This concludes the section on partners. I hope these chapters have helped explain the centrality of your partners to everything your organization does. Effective nonprofit leaders embrace this reality. They put the people and communities they serve at the center of everything they do. They build resonant relationships with their funders to fuel their work, and they collaborate with other organizations to scale impact. Done well, working closely with your partners significantly increases the chances of your organization having an outsized impact in pursuit of its purpose.
