Expansion with Partnerships

The purpose of this newsletter is to find partners and expand your core programs beyond your current ?capabilities. The nonprofit world seethes with structures that don’t fit well with our noble visions. These 10 intel ideas help you advance your frontier amidst the turbulence.

1.??? The Noble Vision

What does your agency need to grow a noble vision and start a new project? Chances are that you don’t know. That’s a great first step! A noble vision is typically a five-year frontier project that requires capacity that the agency currently lacks.

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The noble vision is a great area of strategy for some well-chosen board members and agency leaders to take to an offsite meeting. Ignore all constraints and develop 10 noble visions of your next frontier. Binghamton Heart for Homes did this experiment and chose their noble vision ‘Binghamton has a safe bed tonight for everyone’.

A Board member was surprised by this frontier because the agency is only $4 million in revenue. There’s a huge gap between providing a few beds and taking care of temporary housing for a whole city!

The gap is necessary! Your innovation sets targets to reach the noble vision and discovers what your agency lacks. Cash is usually not the biggest frontier barrier. In addition to cash, Binghamton Hearts found that they needed expertise to claim special state and federal grants. There was an area of housing work where they had no experience or capacity. The noble vision drives you to keep building your agency.

2.??? Frontiers

After you have 10 ideas collected, sift them to get one five-year frontier for which you need capacity. ?Remember that these ideas are not simply an expansion of what you already do. These ideas are calling for capacity that you do not have today. For Windsor Food Bank, adding one more distribution site is not novel. They know how to do this well. Adding a mobile site to reduce community dependence on cheap unhealthy snacks is outside Windsor’s current capacity. It might be on their list.

3.??? List of Partners

Now that you know your frontier target, make a list of partners who have the intellectual property that you need and can’t easily develop for yourself. Endwell Youth works with youthful offenders to prevent recidivism. They notice that most of the youth on probation have no easy income, housing, or GED. Endwell will lose their contract if they don’t improve the success rate, but success depends on multiple factors.? Their only hope is a partnership, so they build a list of 20 potential partners and work through the list to see who is interested and has intellectual property to really change the game.

Build the list with your own knowledge and 990 reports such as the ProPublica site. Avoid partnerships with agencies in financial distress. And remember that agencies financed only by contracts will have little flexibility in the kinds of partnerships they can offer. They often don’t have much intellectual property. Don’t look for quick partners, look for quality partners.

4.??? Intellectual Property

Are you a smaller partner but have unique intellectual property that you can offer in a frontier partnership? Your larger partner may not have the capacity for a noble goal without your help! ?Intellectual property is key to frontier partnerships.

Brooklyn Achievers got a contract to work in a public school where there is gang activity. Brooklyn Achievers has a long history of school-based projects, but protecting students and reducing violence in this school is far beyond the challenges that faced them previously. They need Fast Futures, which is a small nonprofit. Fast Futures only has two programs but they are a frontier partner with ten years of experience in understanding and working with gangs in schools.

5.??? Cultural Intellectual Property

?Kirkwood Kickers places sports programs in stressed schools. Schools with these contracts are in underserved and low-income communities. Kirkwood Kickers hired a program director for East Endwell who happened to speak Lao. Unknown to the Kickers. Lao is spoken at home by half of the students at East Endwell High.

The new program director reaches out to business, community, and religious leaders in the Lao community. That network turned out to be unique for Kirkwood Kickers. With so many connections, the Kickers understood youth issues more and hear of fights or other youth problems before they happened.

Do you have cultural intellectual property that is valuable to partners? Are you overlooking cultural assets of great value to partners?

6.??? Core Competencies

What do you have to offer to a potential partner? In private and public companies, one partner usually has cash, and the other partner has intellectual property. For example, Microsoft is not confident in its gaming expertise, so they bought Zenimax for $7.5 billion.

What can you do if your nonprofit doesn’t have 7.5 billion? Develop core competencies so that someone needs you as a partner. In the previous point, Kirkwood Kickers developed connections in the Lao speaking community that were hard to copy. If you have an agency with strong Core Values and embedded core competencies, it can entice partners who need who you are and what you’ve developed. What are your core competences that may be lacking in a partner?

7.??? Generic Competencies in Politics

While Core Competencies are usually very specific to a sector and agency, nonprofit agencies in general benefit from a strong political network. Many agencies do not realize the power of a political network for funding and contracts.

Can you attend birthday fundraisers of every local politician? Can you do a day of lobbying in the state capitol with a couple of board members? Are your state and federal representatives willing to learn more about your sector of nonprofit work? When this is in place, you have developed a reason to be pursued as a partner.

8.??? Generic Competencies in Intersectional Problems

Most nonprofit work ignores the complexities of the client. We are often not funded for the needs created by the situation that the client faces. Can you create and coordinate a network of partners that can hear and support intersectional client needs? It’s a competence that makes you attractive to other nonprofits that struggle with intersectional problems without capacity for solutions.

9.??? Process Competence

It’s impossible to grow as a nonprofit without insufficient government contracts. Confused? The number of contracts and their inadequate compensation is intentional. Rich people do not want charitably motivated leaders well-funded with time to come up with their own solutions!

The only way to survive these cheese paring contracts is to become expert at any contract type that you accept. Can you build a portfolio of contract types? This competence makes you a valuable partner for many who flounder in contract execution.

10. Acquisitions

The nonprofit world is oversupplied with small and medium size agencies. The private and public companies provide a valuable model here for acquisitions. While nonprofits cannot buy each other, do you see a smaller partner for you to acquire with skills that you lack? An acquisition by merger may lower execution costs and combine intellectual property for 10x results.

I’m Ronald Tompkins, Managing Coach for TurnAround Nonprofit and Executive Coaching.

More information is on my website at TAConsulting.live . Many leaders need team coaching to support them as they lead and change their nonprofit. If you watch this as a board member, you may want to ask your Executive Director to involve the Board and team in coaching. ??You can contact me for Team Coaching at 646 824 4647.

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Thanks for joining me today and I’ll watch for next week!

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