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A Practical Approach to Collaboration
By Michael C. Gilbert, April 2005
This article was first published in the April issue of the Nonprofit Online News Journal.
You don't have to agree on a set of aesthetic principles in order to have a good time going to the movies with someone. You just have to agree on a movie. You don't have to agree on fundamental issues of community in order to share an apartment with someone. You just have to agree about how some things will get done around the house. You don't even have to agree completely about child rearing values in order to raise children with someone, to everyone's reasonable satisfaction. You only have to have some minimal boundaries about parental behavior and a respect for a diversity of styles.
So why is it then that so many nonprofit organizations, especially social change and activist organizations, act as though they must agree on all principles and values in order to collaborate successfully?
The great secret of successful collaboration is this: The only agreement you have to have is on what you are all going to do. That's it. You have to agree on actions. You don't have to bring the visions and missions of your organizations into allignment. Usually, you don't even have to bring your strategies into alignment. So long as you can find an operational overlap, you can forge a successful collaboration.
Ironically, it is often those organizations which agree the most, whose visions are already fairly closely aligned, who fall into the trap of pursuing complete agreement as a prerequisite to collaboration. But sometimes these organizations are competing with each other for resources, such as volunteers, funding, and media attention. This competition often translates into one of the following outcomes, in the context of collaboration: They hide their competition altogether and then it emerges as conflict during implementation. Or they transform their competitive issues into endless bickering and delays about vision statements and principles.
Neither of these is a desired outcome and both are the result of not taking a candid and matter-of-fact approach to the issues raised by operational coordination and partnership.
I'm not saying that organizations with opposing agendas find collaboration easy. Nor should they, if they are acting with integrity. But you would be surprised at the number of successful collaborations between various activist organizations and their corporate enemies, using narrow operational goals.
The most interesting collaborations to explore are among those organizations whose visions are orthogonal to each other, that is neither aligned nor opposed. Until the greater emergence of grand coalitions or movements, such as the growing one around alternative globalization, these sorts of collaborations constitute the majority of fruitful opportunities out there.
One of the best historical examples of this approach from my own experience is a campaign that I coordinated over a decade ago for the Northwest Energy Coalition, which at the time was called the Northwest Conservation Act Coalition. The coalition consists of pro-conservation electric utilities, environmental organizations, civic groups, labor unions, and low income advocacy organizations. Just on the face of it, that's a remarkable alliance, isn't it? If similar, equally effective coalitions had emerged in the U.S. political arena in the last decade, we would have a very different government right now.
The campaign goal was to turn out an unprecedented number of citizens to submit public testimony to the Northwest Power Planning Council in favor of conservation and alternative energy sources. Although the coalition staff had some elaborately developed policy recommendations, a very broad diversity of opinions and emphases were embraced by the campaign.
This is what coalition members agreed to do, in the campaign: Each organization would send at least one mailing to its stakeholders by direct mail. The mailing was centrally designed by the coalition staff, but with well defined places for customization and branding, so that the mailing clearly came from the organization that had the relationship with the individual receiving it. The mailing was paid for by the coalition and the easy-to-return reply cards were postage paid as well. These cards provided a multiple choice range of opt in actions to which the activist could make a commitment -- to learn more, to call the council, to write to the council, or to show up at a hearing in their community and testify. The cards all came back to the coalition office, where they were all coded and entered into a database. For each participating organization, the coalition produced a file of activists who came from their list, to be used by that organization for their own list enhancement and volunteer activist development purposes. Thus, if the organization did nothing else (there were many other options), they will have mobilized their stakeholders for the campaign and enhanced their list in the process.
The campaign did a lot of other very interesting things with the activists during the course of the campaign, including some great feedback loops to see if they followed through on commitments, but most of these don't have a bearing on the matter of collaboration.
This campaign is only one example of the principle that I'm exploring -- that collaborators only have to agree on what they are going to do, not on what they believe in. But it's an interesting example because, in the Internet age, it has a lot of implications for low cost, low risk, permission based, high return sharing of resources.
Note how different it would have been if each of these organizations had separately mobilized and coordinated their activists. People are inundated with messages. They have a stronger association with issues and communities, than with organizations. This model respects those realities.
This campaign succeeded because it based its collaborative expectations on the operational details of the organizations' relationship management processes. The Internet age exposes so much more of the guts of our operations. Thus, with access to these guts, we have a chance to forge many new coalitions based upon agreements about action.
I also believe that the more we are able to work together successfully, the more we will begin to see the ways in which we really do agree about vision. The less tightly we hold to our narrow organizational identities, because we have unpacked them in the process of collaborating, the sooner we will forge the movements and coalitions needed to truly save the world from the forces of fear and greed. Every step in that direction counts.
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