Collaboration Assessment Services

Collaborations often start with great ideas and enthusiasm. Over time, tough questions begin to emerge. Are we making a difference? Can we be more efficient? How do other collaborations work? How do we decide who can and can't be a member? What do we do if one member organization isn't pulling its weight?

Fieldstone Alliance 's collaboration assessment helps your collaboration better understand its strengths and challenges. We analyze your purpose, strategies, structures, protocols, and processes. We compare those with our well-researched "best practices" methodology. We assess key issues such as mutual understanding of purposes and anticipated results, membership and participation, decision-making and power dynamics, written documentation, resource issues, and self-interests of each member. Each assessment typically takes six to eight weeks, depending on scheduling.

About the process
The steps in Fieldstone Alliance's collaboration assessment include

• Start-up—Fieldstone Alliance has a conference call with the key partners to ensure everyone understands the assessment process and expectations. Together, we agree on a timeline and address any other questions.

• Success Factors Survey—The assessment utilizes a specially adapted version of Fieldstone Alliance's tool, Collaboration Factors Inventory as well as our extensive experience assisting collaboratives. Each assessment includes an online survey for collaboration partners and members.

• Document Review—Clearly articulated written documentation on the goals, strategies, structure and processes of a collaboration is a key indicator of success. Fieldstone Alliance reviews and analyzes written collaboration documents and agreements.

• Interviews—Fieldstone Alliance conducts follow-up interviews with key collaboration members to probe deeper into survey responses that were unclear or needed more exploration, and collects more qualitative information about how the collaboration is functioning.

• Summary Report—Fieldstone Alliance writes a report using the results of the survey, interviews, and written documentation that summarizes strengths, challenges, and opportunities for improvement, and suggests recommended next steps for the collaboration.

• Final Presentation—Fieldstone Alliance arranges a meeting or conversation to explain and discuss the findings, recommendations, and next steps with key collaboration members.

Who we work with

• Nonprofit, grantmaking, and community-based collaborations
• Funders who want assessment of collaborations either before or after funding decisions
• Intermediaries, management support organizations, and consultants who want assessment of a collaborative before capacity building work begins
• Multi-sector partnerships working to strengthen communities
• Regional, national, and international networks

Related resources

Select articles
Collaboration Bibliography
A free list of resources dealing with the topic of collaboration. This list is useful to collaborations and collaboration consultants.

Four Keys to Collaboration Success
Four keys that—while not a guarantee to success—are essential to a well-functioning collaboration.

What Makes Collaborations Succeed
Describes The Wilder Collaboration Factors Inventory and how to use it to see if your collaboration has the necessary ingredients to succeed (see Assessment Tool below).

(See a list of all collaboration related articles)

Assessment tool
Collaboration Factors Inventory
Use this tool to help you assess your collaboration's strengths and weaknesses.

Books

        

 

For more information, please contact Sandy Jacobsen at 651.556.4510 or email her at sjacobsen@FieldstoneAlliance.org