Partnerships intro

Many people think that working in partnership is intuitive; that, as human beings, we are natural collaborators. While to some extent this is true, the reality is that “Effective partnerships do not appear from nowhere [and] require substantial effort.” Paying attention to how you collaborate with others – not just to what you are collaborating on (ie, your activities) – increases your chance of building and maintaining effective partnerships, and therefore of more effectively achieving your goals.

What is Partnership and Why Do We Partner?

Partnership is required to address the world’s most complex, systemic challenges. Recognised as vital by high-level institutions and initiatives, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), partnerships have emerged as important vehicles for bringing together diverse actors, from across multiple sectors and levels of society, to collaborate toward shared ambitions and goals.

Collaborative advantage is the main reason why individuals, organisations and movements partner. It refers to the value generated by bringing together people, perspectives, and other resources from across different sectors and levels of society to catalyse new knowledge, inspire new ideas, and create new solutions. Movements, and the partnerships they create, all have the potential to generate collaborative advantage. This is covered in greater detail later in the section on collaborative advantage below, as well as Tool 5: Identifying Potential Collaborative Advantage.

Who is a partner

There is an important distinction between stakeholders and partners to be aware of before getting into the depths of this Toolkit.

Stakeholder: An individual, organisation or other group within the systems you wish to change and whose interests affect, or are affected by, your movement. Stakeholders can be both internal and external to your movement. This Toolkit is oriented toward external stakeholders who make up the tool from which you would identify a partner.
Partner: A partner is a specific organisation, business, other movement, etc, with whom you work on a joint programme of mutual exchange and common interest to increase your impact (of both the programme and your individual activities). Partners bring resources to the table and are part of the co-design and co-decision-making of the partnership. No other stakeholder categories are strictly a partner.

A range of different relationships with several stakeholders will be required to achieve your vision and mission. This range is likely to map across a spectrum of engagement (Figure 1), from simple monitoring and messaging through to deeper collaboration of projects.

Although partnerships have the potential to create significant value, they should not be entered lightly. They involve significant commitment: they take time to set up and manage well, and they can also involve brand, and other, risks. Often their success rests on people’s skill and knowledge of partnering. Therefore, being strategic about who you are engaging with and why is essential to be resource efficient whilst maximising your Movements impact. Nevertheless, there are certain things you can do to increase your chances of partnership success. This Toolkit will support you on this partnership journey.

The Partnering Cycle

The partnering cycle (Figure 2) represents the key stages and activities that a typical partnership goes through. Focusing on Stage 1 is critical and is the heart of this Toolkit; a partnership that has been set up well in Stage 1 will have a much higher chance of success. The Toolkit also considers what a movement can do prior to scoping and building partnerships with others.

Once the partnership is active you will spend most of the time in Stages 2 and 3. These run in parallel, as reviewing and revising takes place throughout partnership implementation and not just at the end. In this way, the partnership cycle is not linear. Rather, the purpose of the partnership cycle is to help you understand what a partnership might need at any point in time.

Similarly, the processes and activities suggested in this Toolkit are not linear: some may run in parallel; some you may begin early on and come back to once you begin to establish your partnerships, and as your understanding and experience of partnering increases.

How to use this Toolkit

The Toolkit breaks down as follows. As noted above, the suggested activities do not represent a linear process. Instead, you can dip into and out of the Toolkit depending on your needs at any given moment.

Before Partnering

Tool 1: Capacity and Capability Self-assessment

Visualising a movement’s capacities and capabilities is an important step before undertaking a Stakeholder Mapping. This simple, generic checklist sets out the likely capacities and capabilities that will be important to a movement for achieving its goals and can be adapted to fit individual movements

Tool 2: Creating a Stakeholder Map

This tool sets out a 4-step stakeholder mapping, analysis and engagement process. It differentiates between partners and stakeholders (not all stakeholders will become partners)

Tool 3: Checklist for a Partnering Protocol

This template tool provides an outline of an early document for the movement that describes its partnership approach, including the potential partnerships it would like to have with others

Scoping and Building Your Partnerships

Tool 4: Partner Assessment Template

The Partner Assessment Checklist will help movements think through the value, risks and implications of partnering with a specific organisation, network, alliance, etc, and assist in partner selection

Tool 5: Identifying the Potential Collaborative Advantage of Your Partnership

Collaborative advantage is the additional value that can be generated by working together. This simple discussion guide contains examples of the kinds of value partnerships can create. It is intended to support movements and their partners in having this conversation together

Tool 6: Guidance on Developing Partnership Principles

Identifying and agreeing common principles is one of the most critical early actions to take in any partnership. Tool 6 takes you through a process to develop some partnering principles for your partnership, including how to put them into practice

Tool 7: Partnering Agreement Template

This is intended to capture mutual expectations for working together that complements, but is not in itself, a legally enforceable agreement. Your Partnering Agreement will draw on information from your initial Partnering Protocol (Tool 3)

Tool 8: Guidance for Joint Decision-making

It is necessary to clarify decision-making spaces, mandates, processes and behaviours within your movement, and this should be done early on. This tool provides some basic guidance to support you in having these conversations