When you’re pregnant you search for tips to navigate this new journey. What to Expect When You’re Expecting supposedly gives you a detailed roadmap for popping out a baby. You dream of a beautiful human, adored by friends, top of the class and on track for a Nobel prize. But real humans are complex and unpredictable. That ideal child didn’t read the manual on sleep patterns, has its own preferences about food and tramples on your attempts at gentle parenting.
Leadership expectations for partnerships can be as unrealistic as pregnant parents. Things don’t happen overnight just because you’ve hired someone. Partnerships are complex systems, with many moving parts; if you change one part you change the whole system.
Every complex system has at least 3 main components. Here’s what you need from each component to make partnerships successful.
Purpose
Is your organisation clear on what it’s trying to achieve? I’m talking about a 5-10 year vision, not next year’s budget target. Most non-profits are very good at describing what they do, but less clear on the why. Hiring a partnership manager and telling them to find you a million-dollar partnership without a clear purpose is a sure way to set them up for failure.
Leadership must outline a clear and compelling purpose and direction for the organisation. I don’t mean the lazy ‘double our impact’ or the disingenuous ‘we’d like to make ourselves redundant’ type of statement. It should be something that describes how the world will change and what people will do, be or feel differently as a result. If you can’t articulate your vision for the future, why should a corporate commit to a long term relationship with you? Your partnership manager has nothing to sell apart from your current needs and your funding gap. Not the basis for a compelling commercial offer for corporate partners.
Parts
This covers your people, their roles and responsibilities and the tools to make the system work. Each of these parts are important in their own right and have the potential to derail the system. Leaders often hire partnership managers and expect them to be successful without the other parts to support them. You may have paid for an experienced person and wonder why they haven’t delivered yet. It’s rarely the new hire’s fault alone. Here are the typical reasons:
- You’ve set unrealistic targets and timeframes. ‘Get me a million dollars by the end of the year’ may excite your board, but if you’re starting from scratch it will take 3 years to build a mature program. The first year you’re building the foundations, the second year you’re prospecting and the third year you’re starting to see the first fruits. You are not in control of the timing, the corporate is. You need to work to their budget cycles and decision processes, not yours.
- You have little to offer a corporate partner. Do you have meaningful assets such as deep expertise, a large and engaged audience, a niche following or compelling content? Otherwise, you’re sending your partnership manager out into the corporate world with nothing to sell.
- Your programs, comms, marketing and HR teams are not supporting partnerships and maybe they don’t even know they have to. If leaders haven’t built an internal culture of collaboration, you’ve got no hope of delivering on a corporate partner’s needs.
- You have no clarity on your risk appetite. When a partnership manager proposes an opportunity, it’s no use having an internal fight over whether a corporate is the right fit or not. Personal preferences and values complicate the assessment and worse, everyone thinks they have the right of veto. Put in place an organisational policy and provide clarity for everyone about your risk parameters.
- You haven’t invested in their learning and development. The corporate world changes quickly and even experienced people need to keep sharpening their skills. They need access to new thinking and to places where corporates hang out. Keeping them behind the desk with no budget just holds back their skills and your partnership success.
Relationships
Partnerships are based on deep relationships. They take time to nurture. If you’re looking for long-term, big commitments from corporate partners, then you won’t get them at the first meeting.
Relationships between your internal stakeholders are equally important and have the biggest potential to undo partnership success. If one of the parts is out of sync, it disrupts the whole system. It’s no use proposing a million-dollar partnership if the partnership manager can’t get a program report, finance won’t provide acquittals and the marketing team are too busy to help with promoting the partnership. You create multiple friction points for a partnership manager and potential failure points for a partnership. It’s like proposing a cause marketing partnership when the comms team won’t mention the corporate on social media and the CEO is too busy to turn up to the launch event.
Relationships are the interactions and connections between the parts and the purpose of a system. Change one element and you change your odds for success. A clear purpose without the supporting parts is a wasted opportunity. Well-structured processes and talented people without a clear purpose and direction means they’ll go around in circles trying to succeed until they burnout. A lack of processes and internal cohesion will cause friction and silo wars that destroy external relationships.
Prospective parents try their best to put the basics in place for their child. But they know that it won’t be simple, they have to keep learning, and they’ll need help. Corporate partnerships are often seen as the problem children of the fundraising family. But maybe the problem isn’t them – it’s your organisation.