Lower Intensity Alliances (Part 1): When Less Is More

Resource
The Fieldstone Nonprofit Guide to Forming Alliances

Contents
Alliances: When less is more
A continuum of partnerships
Choose the path of least resistance
FREE Tool: Sorting out if an alliance is right for you

From Vince Hyman, former Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:

Alliances: When less is more
Many of you know that as Wilder Publishing Center, Fieldstone Alliance published some of the core literature on collaboration: the research text Collaboration: What Makes it Work and the how-to guides Collaboration Handbook and The Nimble Collaboration. We've also published two works by David La Piana on the far end of the continuum, our Nonprofit Mergers Workbooks Parts 1 and 2. And over the past decade, collaboration has become a key tool at the nonprofit workbench, helping many organizations accomplish much more than they could working alone.

But most of you have experienced the reality that collaborations are work. Executed improperly, they can make nonprofit life a living hell—creating extra work and political entanglements that divert precious organizational resources. Only the inexperienced enter into a collaboration without reservations.

This issue of Tools You Can Use, is inspired by our book: Forming Alliances: Working Together to Achieve Mutual Goals by Linda Hoskins and Emil Angelica of Community Consulting Group. As compared to other works on alliances, this book looks at the "lightest" type of alliance—relationships that rely on cooperation or coordination. These often-overlooked working arrangements can be the best choice in many circumstances. But before we explore them in detail, let's look at the overall framework for the ways in which organizations partner.

A continuum of partnerships
We use many words for working together—alliance, collaboration, partnership, and merger among them. Authors Hoskins and Angelica provide an alliance continuum that combines some of the approaches described by David La Piana in his strategic restructuring work with those in the collaboration texts referenced above.

While all the relationships in the continuum are aimed at accomplishing one or more mutually defined goals, the complexity and intensity of the organizations' partnership (and the amount of work involved) increases as you move from left to right on the continuum. The figure below illustrates a continuum of alliances.

Cooperation	Coordination	Collaboration	Merger

At the left end, cooperation involves informal, usually short-term relationships that do not require attention to complementary missions, work styles, and so forth—a loose joint effort based on similar goals. Consider two advocacy organizations whose directors, longtime friends, have had to cut staff. Over coffee, the directors agree to regularly share information about bills legislative committees are working on, thus saving expenses. These two organizations have formed an alliance based on cooperation—sharing information that is known to be useful to one or the other. The relationship is based on shared need and the collegial friendship of the directors. Interaction occurs as needed.

Coordination is often longer term than cooperation and always requires a deeper working relationship, but is still not a formalized operation. Coordinating organizations may seek to achieve economies of scale or better outcomes by aligning plans. They usually behave more formally—for example, diligently ensuring that the organizations have compatible missions early in the relationship. Some general rules are set up to ensure that activities are coordinated well, and some project-specific plans are made together, but the organizations still act independently of each other once the ground rules are established. In the above example, the organizations may deepen their work by coordinating plans to seek support for certain bills. They may meet regularly to divvy up and maximize advocacy activities, share contacts, and revise priorities to enable the joint activities.

Collaboration is the deepest, longest-term relationship prior to two or more organizations actually conducting a mutual strategic restructuring, such as a merger. Collaborations involve formal, long-term relationships among multiple organizations. The collaboration has a "life" of its own, a shared mission (endorsed by but differing from the partners' missions), involves comprehensive planning, formal agreements—and is generally more complex at both structural and relationship levels.

Strategic alliances (as described by David La Piana¹) are forms of strategic restructuring in which organizations consolidate administrative or programmatic functions, long-term. They share decision-making power and formal agreements drive operations.

Mergers, of course, are the most complex of alliances, as they integrate two or more organizations into one entity—the allies become "one." While mergers are becoming more common among nonprofits, they are still the least common along the continuum.

As relationships move from left to right on the continuum, their intensity and complexity increases. More interconnections are required. Usually, more complex relationships are required with more complex issues—that is, difficult outcomes that rely on changes in many variables are going to require the participation of multiple partners, inputs, and approaches, and have higher risk.

Choose the path of least resistance
Organizations sometimes rush to collaborate, perhaps because of external pressures from foundations and government agencies, or sometimes because it is the process they are most familiar with. However, the best path is the simplest one that will accomplish mutual goals. It is a distraction to create organizational relationships that require more work than needed to get the desired outcomes. Often, cooperation and coordination may get the deed done before turning to deeper alliances.

Following are conditions that suggest cooperation, coordination, or collaboration:

Cooperation is a good choice when:

• Exchanging information is all that each of the partnering organizations expects
• A funder or government agency raises the concern that two or more organizations are unaware of what is happing in their mutual areas of interest
• A funder or government agency perceives a duplication of services
• Cooperation rewards all participating organizations equally
• Customers or clients participate in the programming of all potential allies and will directly benefit from the shared information

Coordination is a good choice when:

• The goal is achieving economies of scale for a one- time event or short-term project
• Potential partners share common short-term outcomes or plans
• Shared resources will help potential partners accomplish short-term objectives
• Potential partners need to maintain their individual identities within the context of the event or short-term project

Collaboration is a good choice when:

• The overall service system of which you are a part requires significant changes
• To succeed, all or most of the players involved in the system need to be present
• For sufficient impact, the issue must be addressed at a much larger scale and with more resources than any one organization can muster
• The challenge is complex and requires long-term, multiparty commitment

FREE Tool: Sorting out if an alliance is right for you
This issue's free tool is a set of questions drawn from Worksheet 1 of Forming Alliances: Working Together to Achieve Mutual Goals by Linda Hoskins and Emil Angelica. Use it in combination with the conditions described above to sort out whether an alliance makes sense for your goals.

Keep in mind that all of the actions within the continuum—cooperation, coordination, collaboration, and merger—are means to accomplish your mission. They are tools that any nonprofit should use as needed. Nonprofit leaders are resourceful, continually looking for new ways to do more with less. Cooperation and coordination are two inexpensive ways of working together that can yield excellent results.

(You can copy and paste the following worksheet into a word processing document in order to fill it out.)

Best to all,

Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance

August 23, 2005

¹ The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook, page 6.

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