The Process of Collaborative Inquiry as a Non-Profit Organization

Collaboration is key in non-profits, and yet few organizations are involved in cross-industry collaboration. Of course there are examples of those non-profits which support other non-profits in acheivement of their program delivery goals, such as the United Way helps out public schools in Canada. In the bigger picture, non-profits require funding and cost savings for sustainability. These collaborations are not the norm.

While the top non-profits have a well established system in place for marketing and increasing donor funding and grants, most mid-to-small sized non-profits, especially those dependent on most of their income from donor funding, often have very tight budgets with administration costs under ten percent of their budget, so these organizations are often just stuck with trying to keep going, maybe even dealing with non-profits donor fatigue and industry competition. These are also the non-profits that may benefit from collaboration.

Collaborative inquiry conducted into the fundraising efforts in schools and non-profits shows that a clear framework must be followed to avoid complications from unplanned and mismanaged collborative efforts that result in loss of trust and funding with donors and with staff.

To increase effectiveness of collaboration in order to improve funding and sustainability in a non-profit organization, first the need of collaboration must be identified, followed by figuring out the participants and stakeholders of the collaboration. The values of the collaborating organizations must align towards a similar goal that will be of benefit to all participating collaborating organizations. Ideally, there will be regular communication between the collaborators as they plan, organize, collect data, implement solutions and receive feedback and share their results.

For example, a full-time private non-profit school for children with specific needs may collaborate with community organizations to run other programs such as sports, art classes, international languages on evenings and weekends to offset the cost of building operations, and as a gesture of paying it forward in the community. It will also be effective in marketing as it will raise the profile of that school with commmunity memebers who may not otherwise have any information on this particular private school. However, there can be issues in this collaboration, such as what if the day school finds the community schools are not respecting the property of the classrooms or the community school feels like a step-child with no priviliges? Each of these situations would have been prevented if there was dialogue in the begining and clear, written contract of the rights and obligations of each collaborating organization.

Ultimately, for non-profits, collaboration is beneficial with the right process. This Glog shares resources related to improving collaboration.