We’re in this Together: The How and Why of Grantee Collaboration

By Kate Caldecott

The How and Why of Grantee Collaboration

Chances are, there’s more than one service provider in your community that does work you’d like to support. You can choose to fund only one of them. Or you can choose to fund various providers to independently carryout similar projects. Or you can ask service providers to collaborate.

Collaboration offers many advantages. Organisations can come together to share (and thereby stretch) the available resources. They can learn from each other and can use a common evaluation framework that gives grantmakers the ability to compare “apples to apples”. Collaboration builds networks and allows for increased access to your target population. In short, collaboration increases your impact.

None of this is news. At this point, calls for collaboration are ubiquitous. However, there are many different kinds of collaboration. In order to cultivate the kind of collaboration you want to see, you have to begin with the end in mind. Are you building a loose network where everyone working in a broad service area (children and families) comes together to share updates? Or do you want to see a group of non-profit organisations share supervision as they each deliver the same service model to a slightly different target population? Are you hoping that your grant can be the catalyst for collaboration that will continue long after the grant has been acquitted?

There are many strategies you can use to foster collaboration, but before jumping into those, it’s worth acknowledging the challenges.

Image courtesy of Geofunders

Recognize the Challenges of Collaboration

The call for collaboration may encounter resistance. This could stem from any number of factors. Service providers are, after all, in competition for funding. However, it’s worth recognizing that collaboration carries some real challenges. Resistance may stem from organisations wanting to protect their territory, or it may be related to serious, legitimate and tangible concerns.

At very least, it needs to be recognized that collaboration involves costs and risks for service providers. Consider the following scenarios:

• A large, non-profit service provider wants to construct a new facility to serve the community. Potential funders encourage them to develop a multi-agency facility, envisioning a place where the target population can receive multiple services from any one of several providers. The advantages are clear. Clients will find it convenient to be able to access various services in one place. And geographic proximity is likely to encourage greater inter-agency collaboration on an ongoing basis.
  
  However, there is also an increased risk. One of the service providers will have to serve as the lead agency. The building loan will be in their name and if fundraising falls short, they will be left holding the bag. If partner agencies pull out later on down the line, the lead agency may find itself bleeding money while it tries to fill the empty space (not to mention the fact that they now have a large depreciating asset on their books – and this is the kind of expense that grant funds rarely pay for).
  
  
  
• In order to ensure that service providers were truly collaborating on a grant, a funder stipulated that their money needed to be shared between all of the agencies participating in the program. The grant was not particularly large and only paid for a portion of the service provided. One agency was to serve as the lead, managing the funds, submitting reports and liaising with the grantor.
  
  Those tasks take up a good bit of staff time, so of course the lead agency wanted and needed 10% for administration. But the other agencies needed admin too to cover the costs of accounting for their chunk of the money. By insisting that their funding stream be divided among every member of the collaboration, the funder inadvertently made it so more of their money went to admin and less to service delivery.
  
  
• Then there’s the issue of trust. Larger, more established non-profits may view smaller providers as lacking the capacity to carry out complex reporting or as being ill-equipped to follow complex and restrictive funder (especially government funder) guidelines. They may be right.
  
  The smaller providers may view the large, well-established organisations as big fish that swallow up all of the dollars, and that aren’t truly embedded in the community the way smaller, grassroots organisations are. They may be right.
  
  Remember that when service providers resist collaborating, what appears to be petty defensiveness from the outside may actually be based on actual experiences they’ve had working with one another.

What You Can Do?

So, recognizing that collaboration can be challenging, what can you do to make it happen?

• Require it
  The obvious way to encourage service providers to collaborate is to make doing so a requirement of the grant. Many funders do. In fact, you can set up your eligibility criteria so that only collaborations will be considered. Be sure to define what you mean by “collaboration” in your guidelines and be aware that this requirement will make applying for your grant more complicated. You’ll need to build time into your cycle for service providers to get to know and trust one another in order to put together a strong proposal.
  
  
• Pay for it
  In their 2014 Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter report, Geofunders noted that increasingly, service providers view collaboration as an unfunded mandate. If you value collaboration, include travel expenses as an eligible category in your budget. And if you want senior leadership to attend those collaboration meetings, be sure your grant includes an appropriate level of administrative support.
  
  
• Wait for it
  Be patient. If you’re asking service providers to collaborate, you need to adjust your timeframes.  Planning and executing a project together takes longer than doing it solo.  Since you’re asking multiple grantees to invest extra time on the project, consider offering multi-year grants when you’re requiring collaboration.
  
  
• Model it
  Grantmakers can also lead by example. Meet with other funders who are doing similar work in your area. Are your efforts complimentary or duplicated? Do services align or work at cross-purposes? Can you work with other funders to develop common demographic, output and outcome measures for reporting? Small steps like this will serve to ensure that you’re offering the right services, allow for more meaningful data collection and lessen the reporting burden for service providers.
  
  
• Host it
  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, funders – especially local governments, can be the convener, hosting regular meetings of cross-sector stakeholders. Remember that if the goal is collaboration, then these events should not just be held to announce/explain a new grant round. Rather, the network should meet regularly to share updates, articulate challenges and workout a community wide strategy. If you’re having trouble getting people to participate, try some simple incentives like interesting guest speakers and good snacks.

Successful collaborations not only have shared goals, they have good communication techniques, clear roles, and effective facilitators. The more you invest in the infrastructure of the collaboration, the stronger it will be. If you’d like support for creating a strong collaboration in your community, please contact me at Kate@katecaldecott.com.au or 0447 227 598.