We looked back to the way in which our team announced the Prize in 2008 in order to plan the 2011 Prize announcement.  We found that some of the print sources we used in 2008 are long gone and while others are still around, their print readership is now far surpassed by their online readership. Some blogs have also come and gone. Twitter wasn’t even on our radar in early 2008. In two short years, the Prize team has had to rethink and revamp our communications strategy. Luckily, we have great partners in the Williams Group who are helping us navigate those decisions.

More importantly – knowledge and interest in the sector regarding the use of collaboration has changed dramatically.  Lois Savage and Jerry Hirsch at Lodestar were true pioneers in understanding and promoting collaboration as a strategy that could yield bigger, better outcomes. Today, they are at the forefront of a movement.

As we worked with the Foundation Center who has built an amazing new resource on collaboration, we began to surface a  dozen foundations around the country who are fostering collaboration in their own communities. For example, there are nineteen funders in Cleveland who have launched a Human Services Strategic Restructuring Pilot, while in New Jersey, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation is nurturing collaboration among their grantees. Plus, Whitney Johnson at the Anschutz Family Foundation in Denver is playing a pivotal role in creating a Colorado Collaboration Prize, and the Foundation For The Carolinas has built the Community Catalyst Fund to support innovative partnerships, collaboration and strategic mergers.

How exciting is that?

We’ll be working with the Lodestar Foundation and AIM Alliance in reviewing and evaluating the applications for the 2011 Prize that will be accepted between June 1 and July 16.  I can’t wait to see what has been happening out in the sector since the last Prize process.

Like we found while conducting La Piana Consulting’s NonprofitNext research initiative and described in our Convergence report, today’s nonprofit sector leaders are finding innovative ways to achieve their missions through collaboration.  These futurists aren’t just looking at how to combine Organization A plus Organization B.  They are saying, “Why do we need to take on one model or the other or a blend of the two?  Let’s start with the question: how should we organize our programs and operations to have the greatest impact on our mission?”  They are essentially throwing out the old and looking – with great creativity and fearlessness – at entirely new ways to work.

As we approach the 2011 Prize, we have to ask what new ideas have great nonprofits come up with that will help inform the sector and drive the next round of innovation around collaboration?   I can’t wait to see the answer.

Mergers and other forms of strategic restructuring have gotten tremendous attention recently as both a sustainability and opportunity strategy in the midst of an economic downturn and the resulting decline in charitable giving.

One barrier we frequently observe in assisting organizations that are considering strategic restructuring options is the fear of losing your identity. This is an especially significant consideration in the arts sector, where artistic and organizational identity often go hand in hand. But loss of identity is not an inevitable outcome of a merger. An example of this is the pending merger of the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Oakland Youth Orchestra, and the Oakland Symphony Chorus, who have recently decided to combine into a single corporation while maintaining their existing individual identities. This will allow them to consolidate administrative functions – thereby saving money and increasing efficiencies – while maintaining the specific programming and artistic visions that are so important to them. The merger also provides an opportunity to introduce each of their existing audiences to the programming of the other two.

When a merger does transform your identity, it can do so in ways that enable you to meet your mission in in new and more powerful ways.

Consider the example of two organizations currently in merger negotiations. Serving the same geographic area, one has worked on domestic violence issues while the other has worked on child abuse and neglect. These organizations recognized that they serve many of the same families – given the frequent co-occurrence of these issues – and that combining the organizations could enable them to serve these families in a more coordinated and streamlined way. In addition, they recognized a unique opportunity to lead their entire community in better understanding and addressing the interconnectedness of violence that occurs within the family setting, thereby increasing their capacity to address the root causes.

While strategic restructuring is not always the answer, nonprofits facing unprecedented challenges to their business models would do well to consider it not just as a survival strategy, but as a vehicle for meeting – and even transforming – their mission in ways that open up new pathways to achieving social impact.

Although the study does not delve into attendant questions, such as how diversity in leadership impacts a nonprofit’s ability to effectively serve diverse populations, or what confluence of dynamics are behind the underrepresentation of leaders of color in one of the most diverse states in the nation, it is nevertheless valuable in providing basic quantitative benchmarks that seem to be lacking in the nonprofit sector as a whole. In a recent interview for our NonprofitNext research project, Michael Watson of Girl Scouts of the USA observed the dearth of baseline data on nonprofit diversity, both in staff leadership and in the board room. Whereas the corporate sector has long made a point to share demographic information about company leadership – recognizing what this means not only in terms of image but of real impact in the marketplace – the nonprofit sector has yet to be as transparent about its own diversity…or lack thereof, as the case may be.

The Urban Institute study is one small step toward assembling objective data that may enable the sector to better answer the question “How diverse are we?” But this quantitative approach cannot stand alone – only by understanding how diversity supports mission-driven work and helps make the sector more effective, responsive, and resilient does this data become truly meaningful.

Without a broader context, the numbers alone invite oversimplified and reactionary responses the likes of which have plagued us for decades of affirmative action pro/con debates (evident in reader comments on coverage of the report’s release in both the San Jose Mercury News and the Chronicle of Philanthropy) and are even less effective in advancing the dialog today. To help us move beyond the limitations of this “representational diversity” frame, we need to share compelling stories and experiences of how more diverse nonprofits contribute to a more dynamic, successful, and high-performing sector.

All of these were on display at a civic engagement workshop I attended that utilized a very creative format called “FutureLab.” The tone was set when the group of 60 + attendees, gathered in concentric circles in the middle of a huge room, were urged by the facilitator (in a delightfully thick Italian accent) to participate fully. The only two rules were: 1) ignore your cell phones/blackberries, and 2) stay for the entirety of the 90 minute workshop (it ended up lasting 110 and not a single person left).

After listening to three minute, rapid-fire issue overviews by three thought leaders in the field, participants were randomly placed in groups of five and given a white cardboard box, markers, and instructions to design an experiment that would significantly increase civic participation by 2020. New age electronic music and an artist painting on the walls around us helped stimulate an atmosphere of creativity.

While our group was not able – in the time allotted – to fully develop the details of our social experiment, we engaged in deep, passionate conversation about the core principles needed to bring civic participation to life: the creation of physical spaces at the local level to enable people to gather, build trust and relationships, and engage in dialogue about the issues that matter – and bind us together – as a community.

During the entertaining and inspiring report-out at the end, I learned that other groups had been more successful in bringing their experiments to life, including a concept for engaging local theater groups from a small town in central Michigan to write and perform stories of the community successfully addressing the town’s three most pressing community problems.

Formats such as this – that engage the intellect, creativity, and passions of members of our sector in innovative problem solving – are needed now more than ever to help stimulate and circulate the big ideas that will allow us to rescue ourselves from irrelevancy. Innovation often is not supported in our organizations unless there is a sense of urgency, and despite the magnitude of the problems we collectively face, many of us still lack that sense of urgency. What are you prepared to do to stimulate these types of forward-looking interactions inside and outside of your organization?

The discussion kept returning to several seemingly immovable social problems such as hunger and poverty. One compelling theme permeating the remarks of all 8 panelists is embodied in the following comment by Brian Gallagher, President and CEO of the United Way Worldwide: “as long as we are setting institutional goals rather than community or national goals, we will fail.”

In a time when social causes are increasingly being pursued by informal networks and other non-traditional entities, those who lead nonprofit organizations should not assume progress means doing what they have been doing, only better. Rather, they should be looking hard at who else is working in their space and how their efforts are connected – or not.

This type of institution-agnostic approach tends to be far more intuitive to younger generations who have grown up in much more collaborative environments than their more senior colleagues. Are we adequately tapping into this mindset in looking to the future?

One panelist lamented the dearth of venues for collective planning and execution around solving social problems; instead collaboration and coordination tends to happen on much more of a fragmented and opportunistic basis. I hope that conversations and workshops at this conference bear some fruitful ideas and generate momentum towards this movement-building approach to addressing our most pervasive social problems.

The NonprofitNext initiative has enabled us to meet many pioneers, people who are reinventing the nonprofit sector as we watch. They are young and older, working within the sector and outside of its official borders. They are in large cities and small towns across the country. They think differently about leadership and organizational life, technology, civic engagement, and the very concept of nonprofit. In our new report you can read some of their stories. But this is not a “final report” from a static project. It is rather a call to engagement in inventing the future, together.

The release of the report is being launched at Independent Sector’s annual conference this week in Detroit. Jim Canales, President of the James Irvine Foundation, will announce it in his plenary session. Heather Gowdy and Alex Hildebrand, two of my colleagues who are leading the way on this effort, will be on site, blogging about the conference, IS’s FutureLab project, and other interesting events.