Scoping & building your partnerships
Undertaking a Partnership Assessment
Whether you are unfamiliar with your potential partners and / or simply wish to better understand a known partner, it can be useful to undertake a Partnership Assessment. This means taking time to understand what the partner will bring to help you assess the benefits and risks involved in working together. It will also help to define what resources your movement and your partners will be able to contribute beyond the financial.
Tool 4: Partner Assessment Checklist provides a checklist for a prospective partnership assessment. It can be updated and adjusted as additional details become available. Parts of it can be extracted and used in external communication about the partnership, and it can also be used as an internal movement communication tool to convince colleagues of the benefits of working with a particular partner.
Once you have completed the Partnership Assessment you will know whether you feel confident to go ahead, realise that more information is required, or decide not to proceed.
Clarifying your Vision, Purpose and Objectives
Adopting a co-creative approach to developing the vision and purpose of your partnership is essential to ensure co-ownership for deliverables and mitigate potential conflict in partner agendas. Doing this together also helps to ensure localised priorities, helps with maintaining buy-in and commitment over time, and provides an opportunity to design inclusive and equitable objectives and outputs for both parties. Click here for information on how to clarify your vision, purpose and objectives.
Identifying Potential Collaborative Advantage
An important early step in any partnership is to have an intentional conversation about the kind of added value you’d like to generate together. Many partnerships miss opportunities for higher-level collaboration due to a lack of clarity about their desired collaborative advantage and ambition, which impedes their ability to foster change and optimise the impact of their work together. When efforts and objectives are aligned, there tend to be fewer misunderstandings and disagreements in approaches to implementation and more efficiency in the optimisation of shared resources.
Tool 5: Identifying the Potential Collaborative Advantage of your Partnership provides ideas about the types of added value you and your partners may want to generate together. It also introduces another key concept in partnership working: ‘mutual benefit’. This refers to the benefits that individual partners may want to achieve for themselves as a result of collaborating on a shared programme of work. If this is clear for each partner from the get-go, then all partners involved can support each other to achieve their individual as well as their collective goals – which will ensure all partners gain value from their participation.
Agreeing the Principles of your Partnership
Partnering across different organisations, sectors, groups, and communities can be challenging due to distinct organisational ways of working, cultural norms and conditions of funding. Therefore, it is crucial to establish shared principles that all those involved agree to strive towards. Principles provide the foundation for collective action: they act as a compass and guide engagement within and across the partnership. This in turn improves decision-making and can support the development of a shared identity – a foundation of successful collaborative working.
There’s no common definition of principles, and the term is often used interchangeably with values. Principles can be flexible and evolve as the partnership evolves. This is particularly important as new partners may join over time.
It is important to understand, and demonstrate, how principles and behaviours help to build the foundation for the programmatic work of your partnership. This means incorporating their measurement into ongoing monitoring exercises and learning reviews.
In general, principles are specific to each partnership and its context. However, the following list provides an example of some common principles and what they might look like in practice:
Transparency: Particularly of budgetary information and decision-making processes. This is critical for trust-building and impacts on the perceived credibility of those involved.
Accountability: Particularly with regard to roles in decision-making as well as mutual follow-through and agreed actions being taken by each respective partner.
Fairness: This is critical if mutual benefit and joint working is to be optimised; in particular, differences in capacity and levels of resourcing that can reinforce power imbalances need to be addressed at the outset; good practice is to give everyone an equal seat at the table.
Humility: Organisations may think their approach is the best approach. In partnerships, it is important to stay open to new ideas and approaches and not insist on being right.
Courage: Particularly with regard to taking tough decisions about who is in, who is out, and who does what. This also extends to wider issues such as testing ‘untried’ innovations, new ways of working, new approaches, etc.
Tool 5: Guidance on Developing Partnering Principles takes you through a 3-step process of how to develop shared principles and behaviours with your partners.
Embed Communication Protocols and Processes across your Partnership
Communication is one of the more challenging areas to get right in any partnership, and typically one of the areas that gets overlooked as assumptions are made that communication will naturally occur. With myriad information flows to manage from potentially multiple partners across different communication cultures and possibly time zones, it is important to establish how each partnership will undertake both its internal and external communication. Some key things to consider are:
Who is responsible for internal communication (including how to record the journey and decisions made)
Unified external communication (use of logos, social media, tone etc)
Which platforms each party will use to communicate within partners and externally
There is no specific tool in this Toolkit addressed to communication. It is mentioned here as something important to remember as you begin your partnership conversations with your partners.
Developing a Partnering Agreement
A Partnering Agreement puts all the above together in setting out the essential defining elements of any significant partnership. It will generally be used between a movement and its significant impact partners to set out their jointly agreed vision, purpose, objectives, guiding principles and approach to working together. Partnering Agreements are a fantastic way of documenting partners’ commitments to each other. They can be used when inducting new colleagues into a movement and its partnership/s and helping them understand your work with partners. They build on your Partnering Protocol (Tool 3).
There will be different forms of agreement related to any significant partnership, where funding and a joint programme of work is involved. These are:
The Partnering Agreement: This is the focus of this Tool; it’s a non-legally binding agreement of intent to capture the value, vision and spirit of your collaboration and enshrine your shared principles of partnership
Contracts: Legally binding agreements, sometimes bi-lateral and usually including financial flows and accountabilities required by funding rules (may be similar to service contracts)
Workplan: Constantly iterating project plan with activities, timelines, clear and measurable outputs / outcomes and performance indicators
Partnering Agreements are live, iterative documents and can be added to and adapted as the understanding of the partners and the partnership develops.
Tool 7: Template Partnering Agreement provides a checklist for a generic partnering agreement that you can adapt to fit your specific partnership/s.
Joint Decision-making
In partnerships, understanding who has the power to make which decision is critical for effective programme activities and for smooth relationships. As a result, a core part of any Partnering Agreement describes how decisions will be made and communicated.
Since inclusive and shared decision-making takes time, it is not efficient or effective in every case. It is thus important to distinguish decision-making areas for autonomous versus collaborative decision-making: for instance, where there may be individual decision-making powers (e.g. operational decisions on an area of work an organisation is responsible for); where there could be shared decision-making; and where decisions can be fully distributed.
Once you’re up and running as a partnership, it will be necessary for you to clarify decision-making spaces, mandates, processes and behaviours within your different governance structures. Read more about decision making here.
Recommended Actions
A plan for how decisions will be made needs to be thought through at the beginning of a partnership when the partners are developing their governance and management structures. This plan should include:
Defining who will be included in what decisions and what types of decisions need to be made at all levels within a partnership.
Determining how important or far reaching the decision is that has to be made and therefore who needs to be included.
Weighing up whether a decision requires a consensus among critical stakeholders to ensure ownership and smooth implementation. If consensus is not possible, agreeing an alternative, such as one-partner-one-vote.
Identifying if there are any decisions that the lead organisation needs to make alone, perhaps due to the sensitive nature of the issue or lack of time to consult if under pressure from the donor.
Tool 8: Guidance for Joint Decision-making identifies key considerations you and your partners need to take into account when it comes to agreeing the decision-making process for your partnership.
Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
Another fundamental for successful partnerships is having clear roles and responsibilities. This is also linked to decision-making and will also form part of your Partnership Agreement.
Having clarity on roles and responsibilities becomes particularly important when working across multiple partners, including across sectors and geographies, where it can be common to experience mismatches in expectation between partners about their respective roles. These mismatches can cause confusion, slow down momentum of the partnership, and erode trust.
Jointly discussing and agreeing a clear, shared understanding of who is doing what, why, where, and when, supports effective participation and increases the efficiency of any partnership, enabling those involved to make optimal use of each other’s unique skills, perspectives and resources. Having conversations about overlapping skill sets, as well as complementary ones, is helpful earlier on in the life of a partnership, rather than later. This increases the likelihood that everyone will feel their particular expertise is valued, which helps to secure commitment and gives confidence that complementarity of the different partners will be optimised.
Key considerations checklist
We’ve carried necessary partnership assessments to help us gain clarity about our major partnership/s
Everyone is clear about the vision, purpose and objectives of our partnership/s; the reason/s we’re working together
We all understand the intended activities of our partnership/s (as defined in our joint Theory of Change) and we’ve discussed and agreed the potential for collaborative advantage
We’ve co-created our partnership principles and behaviours with our partner/s, and have identified how we’re going to put this into practice
Early discussion about internal and external communication protocols have helped us gain clarity on how we will communicate with each other and with the world
We’ve jointly agreed our decision-making processes, and have had conversations to agree our respective roles and responsibilities
We’ve developed a first draft of our Partnering Agreement (which captures much of the information outlined above)
We are working co-creatively as much as possible