Building Transformative Partnerships for Social Enterprises
Whether you’re running a for profit venture or a non profit organization, one of the greatest aspect of running successful projects within an organization is being able to identify the right strategic partners.
No organization has all the resources, expertise and connections to do all the work that needs to be done effectively without involving partners. For smaller organizations, finding the right partner to work with on projects is very key in increasing the impact of the project but also in giving an organization credibility.
So what goes into finding and keeping the right corporate partners?
The ideal situation is to find partners who align with your mission and vision. When you approach an organization that sees value in what you do it makes it easy to collaborate and achieve your project objectives. In most cases these organizations will also have a shared mission and that makes the partnership easy to manage.
There will be cases where the right partner for you does not share in your mission, or they are simply not interested in entering a partnership with you. What do you do? In such cases, it is important to show the potential partner how they can benefit from your partnership indirectly through a mission they care about.
For instance if your company deals with delivering instant medical health care information to people in rural areas and you believe the best partner for you would be the telecommunications company, it maybe hard for you to easily align that partnership if you do not invest time to showing the telecom company how they gain value in the partnership. One way to convince them would be to show them that by offering subsidized phones to customers you serve, you automatically put these customers on their network and they can in turn push other services through the network you already built.
Below are some of the six areas to consider while formulating corporate partnerships;
1) Innovation — Through developing and testing new models, products and processes. Be sure to find a partner who is passionate about your new ideas and who shares a common vision with you. Today’s corporates thrive on Innovation. What new innovation can you develop and work on together to achieve maximum goals for both of you?
2) Capacity Building — Partnerships can also be formed through capacity building by helping organizations improve their ability to make impact.
3) Service Delivery — Providing goods and services together to directly address problems. If your partners share a common vision, think about delivering services together.
4) Advocacy — Through advocacy partnerships can merge in areas of promoting understanding or legislation with beneficial impact.
5) Research — Some partnerships can also be formed through developing knowledge about problems and solutions.
6) Infrastructure — Being able to provide networking and technical support that enable greater impact.
For partnerships to be successful there’s need for focused attention especially to key decision makers and also knowing the different roles and responsibilities each party will undertake.
Communication is a great way of dealing with good partnerships. Build a great communications and feedback channel to allow project deliverables.
