How to collaborate with other charities

What does collaboration in the charity sector mean for you?

And there’s informal and formal - lots of different ways of making that work. There’s formal types of arrangements and partnerships where it's about funding, about specific programme impacts - incredibly exciting and again that can be at a local level or national level.

And lastly - and more often - there’s lots of informal collaboration where it’s about just signposting, sharing information, sharing skills, sharing knowledge. And that can be at a local level, a national level, or an international level.

So how are we seeing charities collaborating and what can we learn from their success? I think the learning bit is going to have to come, we aren’t seeing lots of case studies and evidence of real collaboration with charities in terms of their work and their programming aspects. 

What we are certainly seeing is a huge amount of collaboration and outreach, information sharing, knowledge, best practice, learning around how to run your organisation in a lockdown scenario. 

Whether that’s employees working from home, what technology is free and available to use, how to adapt your outreach to communities. So that learning is coming out hugely - and it’s global which is fascinating. 

We’re certainly seeing funders wanting more collaboration. I think the big thing there that we’re going to have to take onboard is to constantly remind ourselves not to only concentrate on the potential of funding at a very difficult time, but really think about our beneficiaries and our mission and how those two things match up. So difficult choices and possibly the idea of saying no to money at the moment.

And lastly, I think what we are seeing is a huge amount of collaboration on the fundraising side, so the 2.6 challenge (which replaced the London Marathon), Giving Tuesday Now - lots of different initiatives where fundraisers of different organisations up and down the country are coming together to collaborate to boost unrestricted funding, which is fantastic and greatly needed.