Private Sector Partnerships for Non-Profits

This guy saw an opportunity in our Jeep...he wouldn't move until we paid a toll of a banana!

Seeing Opportunities (Not Threats)

Finding a Non-profit Partner

Just recently, after listening to a podcast featuring Mallory Eriksson, a successful fundraising consultant, I started to think about her views on the non-profit sector partnering with private sector businesses. There were many interesting ideas and after the podcast, while I boiled a kettle, my thoughts drifted to Game Theory.

I thought about some of the many fundraising meetings I have been to that didn’t feel good. Often, we would present what we did, work that we believed was important, work that was always built around helping those that struggled to help themselves. Armed with passion and the “sword of justice” we would bring all of our powers of persuasion to bear, and often left baffled when our “no-brainer” arguments were met with indifference. The people we were talking to were neither slow on the uptake nor unfeeling dark hearted monsters. They were sharp, intelligent people, they were just like us with families and solid pro-social values and beliefs. So why did our impassioned pleas fall on deaf ears?

I started thinking about “worthy causes” and how I as an individual who has spent much of his life (sometimes at not insignificant personal cost) following my social conscience and trying in my own small way to make the world better. I reflected on how I was sometimes myself irritated at phone calls asking me to donate a small amount of money per month to a worthy cause. I’m not averse in any way to giving, I do regularly, but on my terms. It’s not about the money, it’s about our attitude to being asked for money. We just don’t like it; it makes us feel uncomfortable.

Regardless of how I politely decline the opportunity to pledge some of my salary to a deserving cause, the refusal to give causes me some pain. Not on a logical or rational level, but on a deep level of feelings I have little control over. As I thought about this it occurred to me that the current model that we all recognise for giving is a zero-sum game a sort of adversarial process with a clear winner, and loser, depending on the outcome.

So how do we turn partnering with organisations into a non-zero-sum game: a win-win? Mallory Eriksson summed it up better than I ever could, she described fundraising as “not an ask – but an offer”.

I thought about the transaction required in a win-win scenario, described so succinctly in the “Prisoner Dilemma”. Each part would need to align with the benefits on offer…in other words the change that both partners want to see in the world needs to align in a trusting, reciprocal relationship.

I thought about the current charity model. Most organisations specialise in a problem, i.e. “we do this…we don’t do that”. This comes across even in the way they describe themselves for example, a “homeless charity”, or an organisation who work with addicts, or offenders. Some names are explicit in this; Help the Aged, Save the Children etc. of course there are overlapping needs, but that is a separate matter.

At the organisation I helped to build, we built the operations around a theory of change that can be adapted to fit pretty much all client groups; and we’ve worked with a diverse range of client groups over the past thirteen years, in short we aren’t specialists, we’re adaptable; to paraphrase Bananarama…”it’s not what we do, it’s the way that we do it.”

To use a simple analogy, many charities are like high street shops; you may go to the butchers for your meat, the greengrocers for your vegetables and fruit, the fishmongers for your fish etc. our model is more like a pop-up shop. We are aware of a gap in provision (an empty shop), and we can set up quickly and start operating to kickstart change. We prefer this model because it is agile and reactive. It enables us to move effectively and innovate in some of the super-changeable environments that we work in.

Of course, there’s a place for all operational models, there is no right or wrong way, and super-stable big organisations have much greater reach, capacity, and resources, but unless we can find a way to align with the change that our private sector partners want to see or make them an offer that makes sense to them, we are left with our zero-sum fundraising game.

We already have some experience of this situation of alignment. In the philanthropy sector, we have much experience of charitable foundations; we have always had to align our ask with their priorities, so this idea is not totally uncharted territory.

To add to the inherent challenges of fundraising, due to Covid-19, we are in the most challenging times I have ever experienced, as most donors rush to prioritise post-Covid recovery, leaving behind some of the perennial social problems that the sector has always faced. Many organisations haven’t survived this funding-focus-drift, and acting as consultants, we have witnessed this step-shift first-hand.

But, and this is a nervous but, one of our mantras is that with every challenge comes opportunity. I see this an a potentially exciting shift from the traditional philanthropy model, which is a little unbalanced (by its definition, a little zero-sum), to an environment where the private sector and the non-profit sector can work together in real-life reciprocal collaboration, where charities can make an offer that sustains both parties and uses philosophical and values-driven alignment to drive a social agenda that is free from government policy, free from begging for resources to bring about positive change, and free to develop collaborative solutions that can be agile and innovative.

To quote Steve Jobs, innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.