When building a partnership with other organizations, engaging the right participants is crucial to facilitating a process that’s mutually beneficial.

Your organization knows the key community players who are doing the same work, whose work is adjacent to yours, or whose work is in another areas but they can champion your work.

A facilitator may not be responsible for generating buy-in for your organization’s call to action, but they can support you in identifying the right organizations for your partnership.

Here’s how you can choose your community partners wisely, with support from your meeting facilitator:

It would be easy for me to come up with a list of dream client organizations and partners to work with? But I would also need to examine my list to understand WHY I would want to work with them.

When I’m working with the client organization to plan the meeting agenda and logistics, I would inquire about the following to determine how they plan to identify organizations to invite:

  • Partnership scope: What is the overall purpose of this partnership? What is your vision and how will this partnership help you arrive there?
  • Start and end date: They need to know how long this partnership will last! The anticipated length of time can always change, but knowing upfront if a partnership will be ongoing versus a specific period of time can influence their participation.
  • Target audience: Who are the key organizations that you believe should be involved in this partnership discussion? This clarifies the partnership scope and ensures that relevant parties are included in the discussion.
  • Selection criteria: By asking about the criteria for selecting organizations, a facilitator can support you in developing a clear rationale behind the invite list. This might include factors such as alignment of missions, geographic proximity, organization size, areas of expertise, cultural backgrounds and perspectives, or previous collaboration history.
  • Niche down: Speaking of areas of expertise, a partnership works best when each player knows their position. This means that, everyone is addressing the vision from a specific perspective. An example of this can be addressing gender based violence from a policy, social services, mental health, economic, and law enforcement perspective. This partnership will include at least one organization that can address gender based violence from one of these perspectives.
  • Existing Relationships: Identifying existing relationships can leverage pre-existing rapport in order to facilitate smoother collaboration and increase the likelihood of engagement from those organizations. A caveat: Just because you have a pre-existing relationship doesn’t mean they are the best organization for this partnership.

Key takeaway

Choosing your community partners wisely requires clarifying and honing in on the right partners. By addressing these considerations during the planning phase, your organization (along with your meeting facilitator) can tailor your partnership approach to maximize its effectiveness and impact.

Next, we’ll dive into making the ask to get your ideal community partners involved.

Raise Your Voice: What criteria do you consider when inviting organizations to partner with your organization? Share below in the comments section.

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