8 Things We Learned About Partnerships
Lessons we learned from our Storytelling Circle at our ‘Springboard! 2018’ celebration
On the morning of 7 December 2017, together with over 50 participants from different sectors, Asia P3 Hub had its year-end celebration to reflect on our 2017 journey and look forward to a dynamic and impactful 2018.
As part of the programme, we had a Storytelling Circle where selected partners and champions shared about their experience on working intentionally across the different sectors. This was an opportunity to look back on their successes, the challenges they faced, and to figure out how to strike and develop an “uncommon partnership” and more generally, how we can connect better to make things happen.
- Do not overcomplicate this idea of a partnership. A very formal arrangement isn’t necessarily needed to begin. “It often comes down to individuals who have taken an active interest in something or have started personal relationships and from there, they connected dots and connected people and then it grew.”
- Have the patience to see the partnerships grow. Like any projects that require many stakeholders involved, partnership discussion and pre-implementation take a very long time. This can be months to years of waiting, but the eventual impact is very tangible!
- What is actually needed isn’t as obvious as one would initially think. Be open to strike an uncommon partnership through an unexpected or non-traditional collaboration. Take a step back and focus on where the gaps are and where each partner can add value to create a positive impact or outcome. By adopting a ‘combinatorial’ approach, you share resources in new ways across partners. For example, one NGO partnered with a ship building company who helped them improve the way they run their operations by tweaking their own very robust project management system to suit the NGO’s own needs.
- You can navigate the corporate structure by finding allies within your own organisation. Who might be an expert or have a spare capacity? Try looking at who wrote the sustainability report will help you find your corporate responsibilities champions.
- You can negotiate at equal value even though your resources are not quantifiable in the same way. It all comes down to respecting the 3 core values of a partnership: transparency, equity and mutual benefits. To build that shared-value partnership, establish together and early on that you are working on an equal footing with the resources (knowledge, people, money) that you are each bringing to the table.
- Find the glue that will help your partnership stick and weather negotiations at all stages. Communicate, determine and be very discipline about the (social) change you wish to see. However, KPIs, resources and mutual benefits can be understood differently by each partner. Although we all speak English, we all communicate in different ways and we speak different languages. Spend time to find or create a common platform to connect the partners’ values systems.
- Do regular partnership health checks. Think about managing your partnership, as you do for your own physical and mental health: check in and review the health of the partnership from time to time. Asia P3 Hub offers a Partnership Health Check toolkit to monitor and review those points of change that affect a partnership.
- You can stabilise partnership building in the context of the high turnover rate affecting NGO and corporate organisations in Asia. When people move out of an organisation, there is a risk they take those valued relationships with them. Work towards institutionalising your organisation’s culture and operations, to be more sustainable, disciplined and responsible. Ensuring your partnership continuity can be done by putting systems in place to manage contacts through a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, have handover procedures ready to make a transition seamless and being responsible about regularly updating these systems. On the plus side, a disruption can also lead to a new opportunity: when one person moves out, you are sometimes now able to bring in another stakeholder that was hesitant to join in.
We would like to thank everyone who joined us for the celebration!
For the full report on our ‘Springboard! 2018’, please CLICK HERE.
Full report was written by Asia P3 Hub’s Advisor for Projects and Programmes, Claude Vuille-Lessard.
Claude holds a Master in Public Administration, with 5 years of experience as a project manager, organisational development consultant and volunteer. Originally from Canada and in Singapore since late 2012, she excels as a self-starter and out-of-the box thinker. She has worked to improve corporate social responsibility and address community issues through capacity building, outreach projects and stakeholder engagement. More recently, she has committed to encourage cross-sector partnerships create social impact, particularly through social entrepreneurship, philanthropy and women empowerment.
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