Ingredients of successful collaboration and ecosystem-building in the UK charity sector

Learning and insight from the cohort of Digital Fund cohort of 29 organisations on collaboration and ecosystems — what works, what doesn’t work and challenges. The cohort take part in a designed and facilitated learning journey over the course of their grants with us.

Ecosystems and collaboration: everybody wants more of it, but it’s not always straightforward to make it work in practice. With the Covid-19 pandemic andthe sector’s response, many people have been reporting about unprecedented levels of sector level collaboration between organisations. This makes it an especially good time to take a moment to reflect on what makes a good collaboration, what the essential factors are that are needed to make it work, and how to mitigate things going wrong.

For this month’s theme of the Digital Fund’s learning rhythm is Collaboration and Ecosystems and so we asked our grantholders the following questions:

• Tell us about your collaborations you have been exploring or starting over the past 6 months
• Tell us a story (in a few sentences) of a collaboration you undertook that was really successful. What happened, why did it work so well, and what did you value? What was possible thanks to the collaboration that wouldn’t have been possible before?
• What makes a collaboration a really good experience for you? What are the qualities of the working relationship, and what do you need to make it work well?
• What is holding you back from more cross-sector collaboration and networking? Please list 3 blockers to fostering more collaborations
• If you could receive anything (resources, support, training, time, anything else) that would increase your ability to collaborate with other organisations, what would that be?
• If you and your team were to upskill on collaboration, what would you prioritise? What would you want to learn?

I think part of a good learning and insight process is asking good questions, and so we put a lot of thought and consideration into designing these survey questions each month. We’ve heard from our grantholders that they really appreciate the opportunity to set even just 30 minutes aside each month to go a bit deeper and reflect on their journey with us, and do a bit of sensemaking on their role in the sector.

Learning Webinar on Radical Collaboration and Ecosystems

There’s so much content from the responses this month that we’ll be finding good ways to share this learning and insight with you (the sector) and beyond in the coming months. One of those ways is in the Digital Fund Learning Webinar which took part on 20th July with these brilliant panellists:

• Megan Grey-Griffiths from NCVO
• Renae Mann from Refugee Action
• Lucy Wappett from Children’s Society

The topic of the webinar was “Radical Collaboration and Ecosystems” and referred to references we have made on previous Digital Fund learning events on the level and scope of collaboration and coordination needed in the civil society space to respond effectively to the needs of people and better partition resources and avoid unnecessary competition for resources.

What have we been hearing and learning from grantholders?

Stories of successful collaboration

As part of the learning and reflection process, we heard about a whole range of collaborative approaches, coalitions, networks and case studies. We saw common patterns in what worked, what didn’t, and what could be helpful to accelerate and increase the net amount of collaboration, cooperation and coordinated response across the sector.

Many of our grantholders commented on the fact that Covid-19 had served as an attractor for collaboration — by providing a common purpose and cause everyone could get behind, it was clear collaboration was absolutely necessary during this time and everything else could get worked out to make that possible.

This was reflected in what we heard from Megan from NCVO speaking about the infrastructure coalition NCVO had been leading and was able to mobilise in response to Covid-19.

NCVO is an infrastructure body with a diverse community of over 14,000 member organisations — a third of the voluntary sector workforce in England. They help their membership by providing expert support and advice and keeping them up to date with the news that affects them. Since their entire model is based on the coordination and facilitation of a huge cohort of organisations, NCVO has a lot of experience and stories to tell about collaboration and lessons learned.

Megan told us: “As a leading partner in the infrastructure coalition (a coalition with over 20 other infrastructure bodies — some cross sector, for example ACEVO, Charity Finance Group, Institute of Fundraising, and other sub-sector (for example Voice4Change England, National Voices, Richmond Group) we developed a sector-wide policy, public affairs, media and digital media campaign to raise awareness in government about the need to urgently support charities which had lost much of their income overnight due to social distancing measures.

Known as #EveryDayCounts (which later moved to #NeverMoreNeeded after the initial funding was secured for the sector), the campaign worked well because it united the sector behind one common cause.”

This campaign was hugely important for the sector in pushing the envelope on government support for the sector, showing the power of such coalitions and ecosystem level collaborations. Megan said, “it is generally acknowledged that without such a concerted campaign, the amount of funding provided by the government for the sector would have been lower.”

Collaboration allows shared resources, greater reach and learning

Another project we heard about from Megan at NCVO was a new approach to user research that NCVO has been exploring. Their proposal is to work and partner with a number of local infrastructure organisations and work together with them on collecting user research data. What’s great about this approach is that in the process of working with other organisations, NCVO is able to both learn and expand its reach, while also training and upskilling the partner organisations.

As Megan says, they will “partner with a number of local infrastructure organisations whereby we can train and involve them in user research with us, compensating them financially whilst building their confidence and experience. This will help us to reach more diverse organisations in our user research, especially organisations without an existing understanding of NCVO’s services, organisations further away from London, and representing marginalised groups.”

In this way, the sector can start to build up a whole ecology of organisations that work together at different scales, and local organisations can focus on what is important for their own local context, while larger scale networks and networked organisations can bring more of their birdseye view benefit from the combination of decentralised sensemaking and information, and centralised coordination. In turn, these ‘higher level’ organisations can provide insight, resource and coordination from their birdseye view position. This approach is only possible with good coordination, collaboration and an ecosystem approach.

What are the ingredients needed for a good collaboration?

Time and committed resource to invest in relationships
Many grantholders from across the cohort ranked time very highly on their list of key ingredients for good collaboration — the time that’s needed to invest in building relationships. While we talk about collaboration between organisations, at its heart, it’s about relationships between two or more people.

Without budgeting unstructured time to get to know each other, build trust and get shared context, collaborations can fail because of a lack of synchronisation, resilience in the relationships that can weather challenges, and ‘surprises’ that come later on in the form of different working styles, different priorities, or misunderstandings. People specifically defined this as ‘not just scheduled communication but also checking in and updating on wider work that may be of interest’ (quote from Lucy Wappett).

Only by having invested in these relationships, often on a one-to-one basis, can you truly work in collaboration. (Megan Grey Griffiths)

Other grantholders commented on the value of pre-existing relationships, and how in the face of a crisis, being able to swing quickly into action was invaluable.

Alignment of priorities and shared vision
A good collaboration requires shared infrastructure in terms of well-established goals, a shared vision, and a clear understanding of the positives the collaboration can or will generate for all of the collaborators involved. Having this clear at the beginning of the project or work sprint, and checking in with purpose regularly, can keep everybody focused on the why and not just the how and keep motivating the collaboration forwards.

“Collaboration is excellent when it generates positives for both/several organisations and leads to the possibility of replication or scaling. All with the end goal of providing better services for beneficiaries while also generating learning for individuals and organisations and includes kernels of hope for systematic change.” (Renae Mann, Refugee Action)

Commitment and consistency of people with defined roles
Following on from the above, as part of shared collaboration infrastructure, it’s also necessary to define the who of who is committed to the collaboration, and can consistently show up and tend to the process of building relationships, shared context, and mutual learning.

Defining clear roles for each collaborating organisation, and the people from within those organisations, means that people can relax into the work together and trust that everybody is getting on with their part of the shared project. Lucy Wappett from Children’s Society summarised this as:

“The right people at the right time”

Good communication and leadership skills
Many of our grantholders responded to the question of the key ingredients to a good collaboration with different leadership skills, but the common skill / capacity listed was good communication. This makes sense, and becomes especially important in times when people who are working together are unable to meet regularly in person and communicate in real-time — so nuance has to be well communicated over email, Teams or messages!

It seems inevitable in every collaboration that at some point, tensions, differences in opinion or outright conflicts will arise. Working across organisations means synchronising different work cultures, patterns and rhythms, and this can be hard. Alongside communication here are some of the other leadership qualities that were listed as important: Honesty, integrity, empathy and flexibility.

Contractual and legal frameworks
In some cases, permission to collaborate, with the right legal framework (like NDAs for example) becomes necessary to create the conditions to be able to collaborate freely at all. Drawing up clear contracts before a collaboration can mean that all participating organisations can rest assured that appropriate boundaries have been drawn and everyone can relax into ideas generation and joint projects that follow.

Fun
The human aspect of collaboration was a common theme that emerged from across the surveys: if there’s no chemistry in working together between collaborators, often it can be that the energy needed to make it work outweighs the outcomes. Lucy Wappett from Children’s Society commented that ‘our work is serious stuff’ and ‘if we can work to make our collaborations a fulfilling experience for those involved to have a good experience along the way — that makes us happy”.

What are the blockers that hold back radical collaboration?

Rivalrous dynamics arise due to funding ecosystem
A theme and observation that came up from across our grantholders, and others from the sector on the monthly learning webinar was that oftentimes funding is set up in ways that does not encourage collaboration. Organisations from the sector compete for limited resources — and therefore need to show why they deserve funds more than another organisation tackling the same problem. This discourages orgs (and people) from sharing learning, helping each other, and making approaches and infrastructure open-source.

This begs the question how much funders should have a role to play in coordinating organisations and specifically funding collaborations and ecosystems as opposed to single organisations or projects.

Relationship building takes time and resource
The overwhelming response from grantholders was a need for more time and dedicated resource specifically to relationship building, sharing learning, sharing results, and general collaboration. Renae Mann from Refugee Action said:

“If we want to succeed we can’t collaborate endlessly and maintain our current support package to our existing cohort unless we have more time and capacity to do so.”

This seemed to be specially the case with smaller organisations, who have less capacity and convening power — and are often very focused on delivering services:

“Even if the conditions are right for us to collaborate it can be difficult for smaller organisations to do so as many have little capacity for anything that isn’t directly related to service provision. There needs to be a way of enabling smaller organisations to design delivery and develop practice collaboration.”

Funding needs to focus on core capacity building and not just projects
Furthermore to the point above, funding that is made available to encourage collaboration should focus on building and supporting capacity that goes beyond project outcomes. One grantholder said:

“It comes down to funding core activities as well as focussed/targeted projects or programmes.”

Difficult to quantify benefit of relationship building — and justify it
Relationship building is about building something complex — relationships — and therefore difficult to quantify. The benefit of this activity — namely, more trust, resilience, ability to get things done together — is practically impossible to distil into Key Performance Indicators, which can provide a barrier to justifying something as complex or “warm” as relationships, when compared to something quantifiable like products and services. At the same time, everyone on our learning webinar and across the Digital Fund cohort emphasized the importance of building relationships, something that became extremely clear in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trust
Building trust in a competitive landscape and a sector that lacks resources is hard. Tensions arise, difficult decisions must be made and resources have to be allocated. Grantholders reported the need to ‘listen and ask questions’, and the importance of culture, not just time and resources. The sector as a whole needs to build a culture of transparency, openness and trust, but this in turn is limited by the lack of resources and approach to funding.