The Power (and Pitfalls) of Partnerships

This article is a summary of Episode 53 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

One of the most impactful articles or pieces of thought leadership out there that we consistently refer to in our work is about collective impact coming out of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This is an article written more than 10 years ago now by John Kania and Mark Kramer. And it's all about "Collective Impact" and it's about what are the recipes for delivering collective impact. 

In other words, how can partnerships help you deliver more impact?

We're going to go through the five elements or the five ingredients that John and Mark propose in this article to have a successful collective impact effort. And then we’ll talk about the power of it. We’ll talk about the pitfalls of partnerships and then ultimately, break down a little bit about when you should or shouldn't reach for those partnerships.

This is something that comes up a lot. In our work, a lot of times these partnerships are set up by the time organizations get to us or they're happening behind the scenes. We've been a little bit more involved in some of this as of late. The question is: 

When's the right time to make this move and when should you be building capacity is one worth exploring.

Partnerships come up regularly, probably weekly, honestly. Either we're thinking about partnering with someone in the community to tell an important story in our space, or we're dealing with stakeholders and thinking about how we might partner up to deliver some sort of product or some sort of impact. That's why we're always coming back to this article. It's the single most influential piece of partnership literature out there.

The Five Ingredients for Successful Collective Impact

1. A Common Agenda

John and Mark go through five ingredients for successful collective impact effort. The first is a common agenda. Another way to think about this is it is a common understanding of some of the things that we talk about regularly. It is a shared understanding of the problem. A shared understanding of the circumstances. A shared vision for the change that we want to see. It’s even down to a shared set of steps, an agreement, if you will, about the set of steps necessary to deliver change.

Now, it's probably not a coincidence they started with this one because if this is not true, the partnership is likely to fail from the beginning. There's no chance of a partnership working out.

It's a high volume, low success rate phenomenon. In other words, we're talking with other organizations regularly about potential for partnership. The pitfall is that we sort of trick ourselves into believing that a common agenda exists. You step down the path a little bit and then you realize you really don't have that shared agreement. 

But then social connections start to kick in and then you're thinking, oh, I don't want to back out on this. This is someone I care about or someone whose relationship I need to preserve. And so this certainly is a really risky point. If you’re having partnership conversations all the time, one of the important things to do is to identify when you're not a good fit and you actually don't share an agenda.

So you have to not only be really clear about all of those elements when you're exploring partnerships, but also really honest if it's just not quite lining up. So maybe even just being really upfront with a potential partner: "Hey, I don't know if this is going to be a fit or not, but let's just start to explore it. I can't make any promises yet, but let's go on this path together and see if there is a potential partnership here. But let's be okay with realizing that's maybe not true and still having a good relationship afterwards."

It's of utmost importance that that's how the conversation starts. Otherwise, you may incidentally feel like you've misled the person on the other side of the table — and that's the worst case scenario — especially when you're working in a sector where the network is really strong, people know people. You don't want to earn this reputation as someone who just backs out of agreements all the time. So having that really honest and upfront conversation about, "Hey, I'd love to explore it a little bit, but I can't promise our participation yet."

2. A Shared Measurement System

Another way to think of this is: So we agree on what success looks like and how do we know that that's happening? And do we have the capability as a collective to measure those things. Which honestly is a conversation that should be happening internally also.

If you don't have those measurements for yourself in your own organization, you got to go nail that for yourself — what success looks like and how are you measuring it. But it also is something that you're bringing to the table in a collective impact situation. It's a value add. If you get to the table and you're saying, "Hey folks, here's our vision, here's the problem and the situation, et cetera. Here's how we are measuring success, and we have that data and we can bring that to the table and we can help this whole group measure what's going on." Now, in a collective impact situation, everybody needs to agree that that is a measurement worth including in this effort. All of this is easier said than done.

A lot of people get scared of measurement and evaluation and learning because it's hard. So they just don't. Which is obviously not the right solution. One thing to walk away with here is feeling inspired about this as an opportunity. And one of the potential benefits of any partnership or collective impact effort is if you're not really strong here, you can find a partner who is and do some cross-learning there.

But frankly, measurement, evaluation and learning has not been, until the last five years or so, a strong suit of Cosmic and the work that we do. And we've been working really hard to build out that capacity and that strength. And one of the reasons that it hadn't been built out is that we were scared that maybe we wouldn't like what we saw when we started measuring stuff.

It's a lot easier to just be asking, "Hey, did you like it?" Our recommendation is something we've been building capacity on over time. is that:

You’ve just gotta start, You just got to start with a number, an easy thing to measure, and just build on that foundation.

You don't need to go from, we measure nothing to we have every possible measurement we would ever want and it's perfectly scientifically accurate and stress tested. This is not going to happen. So what are the steps from where you are to where you want to be? Just take that first step and bring that to the table in the partnership.

Simplicity Is King

In a collective impact or partnered environment, simplicity is king. Oftentimes we'll be coming to the table with different micro measurements, and sometimes we have to back up and ask ourselves, what's the umbrella level measurement that captures what we're both measuring here? And so oftentimes it's asking, "Hey, can we all agree on what is the master measurement, even though we're all measuring these sub-components along the way?"

The other important point that relates to measurement that is especially important for partnerships is that everyone actually does have a way that they're going to measure this, whether or not they know it. And sometimes the way that people will measure success does not get shared until the measurement is happening. And then the partnership in this case is being assessed for its effectiveness. 

So the measurement might be: one of the leaders at one of these orgs really wanted this thing to be true, and if that is true, they will be happy. And if it's not, they will not be. And if they don't have the self-awareness to know that's how they're going to subconsciously be measuring the success of this and none of the other partner organizations know that, then there's a high likelihood that it'll fail.

So getting clear on how to measure success, even if it is an umbrella or a macro metric, is so important because it also makes it less emotional and less subjective and more objective around whether this happened or not. Which is good for accountability. But also for just clarity for everyone involved to just know how we're going to measure whether or not this effort is successful. And if that's not true, then it becomes way more murky. There's way more social pressure, there's way higher likelihood of failure or misalignment of expectations. So this step is super important.

Give It Time

In a shared measurement system, it takes time to see some of the results appear. Collective partnered efforts can take years. And so some of the evaluation that is happening from one of the participating organizations is qualitative. And so what's important in that is clarity on what's going to make it feel like it's progressing. But then there's also just communication between the organizations all the time.

And you could start to look at some leading indicators. You could measure leading indicators or even milestone-based measurements. Did we get the stuff done that we know is going to be working towards this mission? It's not a result, but it's a major milestone, a major accomplishment. So there are other ways to measure things objectively that aren't end-state measurements.

Going into a collective effort, actually make that a priority. Define the leading measurements and then the lagging measurements.

3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities

One way to interpret that is your role. The assumption is that each organization is bringing a unique set of skills, talents, audience reach, etc. It's really important at the outset to define what those roles are and how they work together, how they reinforce the ultimate impact that you're having. And so having defined but also differentiated roles becomes really, really important.

Especially the differentiated part, because that's probably the true power of a partnership at the end of the day. Everyone can bring a unique set of strengths and opportunities and resources to the table. Otherwise it's just a scale play. If that's not true, yeah, a partnership might still make sense. Maybe a merger makes more sense at that point. But then it's just people power. And maybe sometimes that's worth it. 

But the way we’ve seen this really makes a bigger impact is when there are unique but complementary strengths that different organizations can bring together to reinforce shortcomings between them.

An example from the Seymour Center: They see their role in their community as being an amplifier or a storyteller. There are scientists doing the science about climate change and climate impacts. There are people, nonprofits, the city, the county doing some of that boots on the ground adaptation work or resilience work. Our role in it is to tell the stories.

And that's just an example of how in this particular case, a clear differentiated role works because their colleagues in the science and in the conservation action side of things, some of them don't have the capacity to do the storytelling. So the Seymour Center is bringing a unique value to the table.

4. Continuous Communication

The assumption here is essentially that collective impact and partnered efforts take time. And a lot of that investment of time is worth it. But there's a level of patience that has to come along with it. 

The other piece is that there has to be communication. There has to be communication between the organizations. The suggestion of milestones that are being hit along the way in combination with these different roles can be the backbone of communication. A collective impact effort will stop or fail if you stop talking to each other and you don't put in the work over enough time.

A lot of times when people think about strategic communications or communications in general, they're thinking about outward communications or marketing, or campaigns, and that's a huge part of the value of communications. But so much of it is also inward — within your own team, but especially between partners. And effective communications is just so important for all of this work to work well. And even some of the things that we talk about a lot about how to do better at communications from an outward perspective are applicable here. How do you frame these communications between partnerships to keep the energy up, to get people to sit up straight and pay attention? It's relevant in this case too.

5. Backbone Support

A way to think of this is ownership. And that can fall into a couple of different buckets. Though there is a collective impact effort underway, a singular organization needs to be the flag bearer — needs to be the torch bearer of that work. They're the ones responsible for calling the meetings and setting the agendas. They're the ones who are responsible for doing the core communicating with the rest of the group. They're seen as the convener and the organizer. 

In some cases there also needs to be a financial backbone organization. Those don't always have to be the same. Sometimes they are. If one organization is suited to take both roles. Oftentimes those are different groups. But ultimately there has to be ownership and there has to be collective buy-in that those are the owners. We need to agree that we have leaders and we're going to follow their lead.

Sometimes this gets tricky. How do you decide who takes that role? How do you get buy-in from all of the organizations involved that, not only are they going to own and be the torch bearer, but that we have to sometimes go along with decisions we disagree with because they are the leading organization. There's never going to be perfect consensus on all of this. This is really smart because a lot of times there isn't a leader clearly identified, or a leading organization clearly identified, and it feels like it just becomes flat hierarchically or completely democratic. Which doesn't always work. 

Within the Seymour Center’s staff, they use a goal setting objective system called objectives and key results. Every result has an owner. And it doesn't necessarily mean that that individual is solely responsible for the work required to deliver the outcome. But they are the one responsible for rallying the resources and the people, making sure that the projects are advancing. They own a certain responsibility that comes with that. And if a number is lagging, that's the person you go to.

In the movie world, this would be the producer. The producer doesn't necessarily do the work, but they make sure the work gets done. And in a collective impact situation, the same thing must exist. 

The other reason for that is this is a human problem in some ways, given that collective impact takes time. Think about all the things that could happen in life over the course of 3, 5, 7 years. Staff is going to turn over. Technology's going to change, the problem's going to change.

And with so many moving parts, there needs to be an organization who's the anchor point. Even the individual who may be the first one leading as the backbone organization — let's just call them Jane for a moment. Let's say Jane is the one doing most of the communicating and the convening, and then Jane moves on to another job. That organization needs to be prepared to move somebody else into that role. Meanwhile, all of the other partnering organizations, there's going to be turnover there. There's going to be changes there. So without that solid pillar holding it all together, these things fall apart.

The Pitfalls of Partnerships

One of the pitfalls of collective impact work in general is just simply messy human social interactions and messy human relationships.

There's going to be ego, there's going to be a concern, especially if there's overlap in roles — who's going to get the credit? Who's going to get the funding? And one of the pitfalls is that real damage can happen between individuals, between teams, between organizations if these collective impact efforts are not handled really clearly, like John and Mark lay out in their article.

When to Pursue Partnerships (And When Not To)

We should answer the question: Why do this? 

What are the situations where exploring some kind of partnership or collective impact move makes sense? And when does it not make sense?

From our point of view, it's worth pursuing when you look at the own scope of influence that your organization has and realize that you cannot deliver on your vision without the participation of other entities in your universe.

And actually exists at the Seymour Center. They tell stories of science and solutions that are relevant to Santa Cruz. But by definition, they can't tell those stories unless science is happening and unless solutions are happening. They’re not the ones doing that stuff. So by definition, they must be in partnership with those organizations to make sure that they are playing their role and doing their part.

Partnerships vs. Capacity Building

So if you're an organization that has a gap that you've identified — that is a requirement to reach your vision, to create the impact that needs to be created — how do you think about partnerships versus capacity building? Why don't you just do all that stuff yourself? That seems logical.

For the Seymour Center, the efforts to build a credible scientific effort and to build expertise to do really difficult environmental planning and execution — that's just impossible in one lifetime for an organization to do that.

And we joke about this a little. Because what we see happen is that leaders identify gaps and their first reaction is — Well, we'll do that too. We have to do that too. And it's out of good faith. They realize that in order for them to reach their mission, this part also has to happen and they're not doing that. So they decide that they better do that also. 

One of the potential benefits of collective impact or a partnership exploration is that it reduces mission and scope creep.

Knowing Where to Draw the Line

It also takes a level of self-awareness to be honest with yourself about what you are uniquely positioned to do and what you are uniquely capable of doing. Then you can look outside of your organization and be honest. Another organization is better at some part. And we can help each other. Why not give that a try? Fame? Ego? More funding? Fair. But at minimum, if it's worth a conversation, start with: "Hey, I've got this idea. I'm not ready to commit, but I want to talk to you about a potential partnership here."

This is oddly an issue that we struggle with at Cosmic at times. Where we draw the line on what we do and what we don't do — especially because we do work holistically with clients and our clients need holistic support. They're not just looking for someone to only do a rebrand and then that's it. The clients that work with us realize that that's not going to be the most effective investment for them. And we can't do everything. We're a small team. We're a really solid team, and we do have a diverse set of skills, and the power of each of our skills coming together is the magic. But we've identified a couple things that not only are we not good at, but we have no plans to get better at, and for those things, we do reach for partnerships.

So for example, we don't do PR. That's not our thing. And there's a Venn diagram between the work that we do and PR. There's some overlap. Another example would be really technical performance marketing, the lever pulling work, we call it. It’s the hyper-optimization of ads and split testing and measurement of those things. That work matters for some organizations and should be executed by a team of experts doing that. 

And sometimes we say, “That needs to be done. Here are some folks that we know that are really good at it. Let's bring them into the loop.” We do that because we don't have the technician on our team who does that super well. And we're not particularly interested in building that skill out. We want to focus more on the strategy side of things at a higher level, the brand building side of things, the communication side of things, and those are very different mindsets and modalities. This rings true even in the way that we think about how we set our scope as an organization.

When NOT to Pursue Partnerships

In settings where partnership opportunities are popping up all the time, organizations are constantly talking about it. The same is true in other sectors and other communities. When you shouldn't pursue collective impact is purely because that's where he social energy is going. You want to be a part of efforts that are in the arena that you work in.

You see those folks that are doing cool work. Certainly there should be some way we can help each other out.

And caring about peers who are EDs at other nonprofits and related orgs — these are friends and you want to be supportive. And that's hard. Sometimes it's hard to just be like, "Hey, you can't count on me for this one. This one's not it." But ultimately that strengthens when you do say, Yes, we think this is a slam dunk fit.

These five steps are a really good accountability exercise. If you can't say ‘hell yes’ to all five of those, then you're not going to be a very good partner. 

Think about group projects back in school where you have someone who said yes to the group project, either electively or they were forced to, and they're just not pulling their weight. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to be that person and it's not helpful to the collective.

Every Partner Should Benefit

One piece that we think is missing from John and Mark's article is that the collective effort should benefit every organization in their own right in some way. As soon as a collective effort is siphoning away time, expertise, resources, and that threatens the health or sustainability of your own organization, that is going to be a real difficult thing to stick with. 

John and Mark don't call that out specifically, but you need to feel like your organization is going to benefit from it, partly because you're accountable to the people you employ and you need to make sure that they're taken care of.

But it's probably never going to be perfectly equal.

We suspect that probably 90% of the time, collective impact efforts probably end up being a project of the backbone organization — the one that’s doing most of the work. And over time, that probably whittles down to more and more responsibility on that backbone organization. That doesn't mean don't do it. But if you are volunteering to be that backbone organization, you need to go in eyes wide open that it could end up in that kind of place.

Build in an Exit Clause

The thing we wonder about all of this is: in the early days, should there be some kind of kill switch or exit clause? Like, "Hey, the partnership was successful," or "This is planned to be a temporary partnership." At some point, maybe the backbone organization does plan to build out some of that capacity on their own, or maybe this part of the problem is now solved, it's time to move on. Sometimes that's a fairytale that gets told in the space that rarely comes true, but does sometimes happen. So is there some kind of natural ending to these or are they just in perpetuity?

In our experience, we’ve never seen anybody do that. It relates to the milestones and the leading indicators brought up earlier — like, "Hey, within this band, if we drop below here, let's kill it." And defining that early on would be a relief. If everybody's in agreement that this is feeling burdensome, it's going to feel good to be done with it after some time. And to have some objective measure versus someone having to make the social call of, "Hey, I don't think this is working anymore. We're done."

We want to thank John Kania and Mark Kramer for writing their Collective Impact article. It's one we've referenced numerous times. We recommend everybody give it a close look and good luck out there on all your collective impact efforts.