There are many important ways that nonprofit organizations can leverage the potential to collaborate, but one powerful strategy that is too often overlooked is to form a long-term, durable partnership through a strategic alliance or restructuring. Strategic partnerships can open whole new worlds of opportunity for serving your mission. They can broaden your reach, expand the range of your programs or services, and help you find more efficient ways to support your organization’s important work. 

This resource is a discussion guide for boards about these topics with cases studies.

How to you pull people from different sectors together to build an unknown outcome in 3 days? Started with seeing tweets from France and then wanting to get involved in something I didn’t really know what it was. It is something you have to experience to appreciate. I went to MuseoMix in France 2012 and even though didn’t understand language, knew the framework was something that could really remix and shake up museums!

The key idea was allowing other sectors to have input. For our first year, it was a little complicated getting a community but I called in favors from friends and paid them with cake and smiles. I knew they would get something out of it. Up until our first day, there was confusion but with the framework that allows for growth with some guidance the community was able to achieve a level of re-thinking they did not think would be possible. Since then we have done another MuseomixUK and rebranded to Open Community Lab to branch out to health care and other sectors.

Video of Mar DIXON (Open Community Lab and MuseomixUK, UK) at the Conference Marketing de las Artes in Madrid 2016. 

Behind the ongoing programmatic and financial stresses being felt by nonprofit organizations at a time of economic uncertainty lays a vast territory of change in the sector as a whole. This means practitioners of all stripes unlearning a lot of things we have taken for granted, surfacing new assumptions to drive new thinking, and doing things differently across the board. Organizational innovation is challenging in a resource-strapped sector, but is now essential if field leaders are to successfully re-orient themselves to this new era. Fortunately, innovation can be systematized as a new organizational discipline, one that brings our best thinking together across traditional organizational and sector boundaries, and helps us make competitive use of our creative assets. Organizations across many countries are beginning to see that daring to risk a new approach can reveal new pathways to relevance and sustainability.

Video of the Conference Marketing de las Artes in Madrid 2016.