Planning is now underway for the next calendar year for many social sector organizations. For those of you who have successfully adapted to the countless unforeseen crises presented by COVID-19, reimagining your organization’s future beyond its day-to-day survival is most likely a welcome exercise. In this post, we’ll explore several ways that you can set the tone for more productive conversations around maximizing your community impact by tapping into the collaborative relationships you’ve formed and the resiliency you’ve rediscovered as individuals, organizations, and even at the broader community-wide level.
Sustained Collaboration Defined
Sustained collaboration is typically defined as unifying inter-organizational strategies intended to result in long-term and long-lasting positive change. Sustained collaboration spans a broad spectrum of relationships, including:
Networks and alliances, which encompass coalitions, collaboratives, collective impact initiatives, and movements;
Shared service agreements, which frequently manifest in the form of shared office or retail space and staffing, back-office operations, and can even extend into fiscal arrangements; and
Fully integrated organizations, reflecting more traditional forms of business transactions, such as mergers, joint ventures, and parent organizations with subsidiaries.
Wherever your organization is on its trajectory of developing strategies for sustained collaboration, it’s critical that your focus remain on growth and change for the sake of achieving more impact with fewer resources.
Funders’ Perspectives on Community Investment
Specifically for the nonprofit sector, many funders choose to invest in the entire ecosystem of organizations coming together to tackle a community challenge. It’s not uncommon for multiple funders to join forces to get even more social return on their philanthropic investments. By supporting formal, long-term collaboration among nonprofits, these funders and their communities will go further and faster by working together to achieve meaningful and lasting change.
Why Fostering a Culture of Resiliency Matters
If there’s anything we’ve learned (or been reminded of) over these past eight months, it’s that resiliency is a prerequisite for survival in the social sector. Fortunately, resiliency can be a renewable resource, so long as organizations prioritize it and nurture it by placing high value on relationships, transparent communications, and collaboration. Support systems can take many shapes. From peer-to-peer support and back-office operations to cross-organizational collaboration, resiliency is as much a mindset as it is a daily practice that having the right systems can help to facilitate.
How SureImpact Connects the Entire Social Ecosystem
SureImpact is the cloud-based solution that connects the entire social sector ecosystem by empowering mission-driven organizations to manage, measure, and communicate their unique social impact. For funders, this means demonstrating the degree to which their investments are changing the world. For the individual nonprofit or collaborative, you can capture invaluable insights that can be used to enhance your delivery of mission-critical services, engage your communities, attract new sources of funding, and increase trust among your constituents and funders.
Sustained collaboration, when combined with a culture of resiliency, can position organizations, funders and communities for long-term success. If your nonprofit is embarking on your strategic planning efforts, SureImpact can help position your organization for mission outcome success through sustained collaboration in the months and years to come. For funders, we can help you leverage SureImpact to drive maximum impact across all of your grantees.
Please contact us today to schedule a call or request a demo.
Comments