Yesterday I gave a talk to a group of independent philanthropists: Americans and Europeans with private or family philanthropies who come together periodically for mutual learning and perhaps to build collaborative grantmaking programs. My topic was “collaboration” and included both the grantee-grantee and funder-funder varieties. In discussing the challenges of working together, I was struck by the differences between the two types of collaboration.

For nonprofits, collaboration is often a key to leveraging funding. Funders like collaboration among their grantees; so, by working together, nonprofits can increase their chances of winning a grant. Occasionally nonprofits work together for purely programmatic reasons, but in my experience it is largely a fundraising strategy.

For funders, collaboration is about a different kind of leverage. At one end of spectrum it is about leveraging the knowledge of other, likeminded philanthropists, learning with and from them. At the other end of the spectrum it is about leveraging your money with theirs, making a smaller grant into a bigger one.

One of the greatest challenges of both spheres of collaboration is the same: building relationships.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Foundation effectiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.