Daan Utsav: Collaborate To Multiply Impact

This #DaanUtsav, BloombergQuint brings you a series of first-person accounts of how different organisations across India are making interventions at scale, or in depth, and bringing about significant transformation.

I have been a venture capitalist and an early-stage investor; my experience has been that smaller companies attract investments when they come together. In 2001, I began impact-investing, and subsequently, my philanthropy stemmed from the main impetus to solve a key problem. Many times, when multiple NGOs are working in the same domain, the impact can be significantly less due to duplication of efforts. I, therefore, wanted to find ways for organisations to collaborate and sustain their collective work in an area.

For me, collaboration means long-term partnerships between non-profits working towards meeting a common objective over time.

In the social sector, people work with a lot of passion toward serving the under-served, but they work in isolation or independently. Collaboration is something that must be promoted among non-profit leaders as a viable and optimum alternative to achieve substantial impact. The desire to work together may be there, but ‘how to’ is not always clear. Leaders must surpass challenges like lack of trust; absence of synergy in values and inadequate organisational readiness.

For an organisation to be partnership-ready, the leadership needs to be prepared. Leaders should begin by creating an environment conducive to collaboration within the organisation, among teams to beat the ‘silo’ mentality. Leaders need to build internal capacity and ensure people know how to manage partnerships and relationships.

When creating a strategy, non-profits should assess the feasibility of using partnerships to sustain, scale, and strengthen their programmes, and adopt a partnership lens to increase efficiency and reduce duplication of effort. It is essential to acknowledge the value that an organisation brings to solving an issue and recognise the complementary roles that other organisations can play in achieving the same goal.

For donors, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Evidence of successful partnerships is what will inspire funders to invest money in collaborative action.

Sahayog Foundation works as a partnership builder, a backbone organisation to the partnering non-profits, to facilitate collaboration build capacities of organisations so that they can partner more effectively. Through this, we want to demonstrate the strength, benefits, and evidence that long-term partnerships can create collective impact. We work in creating different scenarios that promote collective action. This includes:

• Helping organisations scale their solutions through like-minded partners
• Ensuring multiple stakeholders come together to ideate solutions for a particular geography or issue
• Creating platforms and publications that build capacity on ‘how to’ collaborate successfully

Most importantly, we have been able to codify and develop a framework to measure the readiness to partner, the criteria for partnership, and the strength and success of partnerships.

The following factors should be in place before any two or more organisations engage in a partnership:

• Goals of what the partners want to achieve and a definition of success criteria
• Roles outlined for each partner based on strengths
• Talent or personnel dedicated to contributing to discussions on behalf of their organisation
• Models to scale or strengthen a programme and create collective impact
• Reviewing through M&E systems to ensure data transparency and make sure the outcomes set by partners to achieve are met

While the recent pandemic has demonstrated that collaborative action can be successful, and the impact achieved together, this should not remain a short-term answer. Calamities may bring people together, but our purpose is to start a movement that will encourage organisations to collaborate and convince philanthropists to allocate money towards collaboratives.

While my approach is still evolving, I am clear about going the route of building collaborations among non-profits to scale impact. I also firmly believe that technology can act as an effective enabler for partnerships, shared learnings, and collaborations and am working towards setting up a shared services platform that would provide support to all collaborations happening in the sector.

This is an experiment that I believe both the non-profits and funders need to invest in.

In the current scenario, smaller organisations may marginally survive or even vanish due to the paucity of funds. There is no scepticism that they want to do public good and therefore, it is in their interest to come together; share resources and offer greater value to the people they serve.

There is no doubt in my mind that ‘one-plus-one’ when done right can become three or more!

Pravin Gandhi is Co-Founder and Managing Trustee, Sahayog Foundation.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.