Partnerships
When organising a campaign, you need your partners and networks to be able to expand skills, resources, share knowledge, practices, and help you achieve better results. By working together, you can complement one another and build something innovative and successful that one may not have otherwise been able to do.
What is a Partnership?
A partnership can be defined as either a long-term or short-term commitment to agreed objectives based on shared values, aims and strategies. Good partnership is characterised by joint planning, transparency and accountability on both sides, openness and sensitivity to the other’s needs, expertise and experience, and (to a certain extent) jointly achieved results. It is based on mutual respect, trust and goodwill.
You may work with different types of partners to achieve its strategic objectives, from grassroots collectives of bloggers, national level NGOs, INGOs and governments to media and corporate partners. To distinguish between the variety of partners, they can be divided into the following categories:
- Strategic Partner – A partner with the same vision and values to work together on the same goal.
- Implementing Partner – A partner that will help you implement parts of your campaign without necessarily sharing the same long-term goals.
- Distribution Partner – A partner that will help share/disseminate your content to your audience or stakeholders. Generally these are more traditional media sources. They also do not need to share the same values or goals.
You may decide to partner with organisations that need support to develop their capacities. If that is the case, then the partnership agreement should reflect that.
Why are Partnerships Important?
Partnering is a mechanism to reach your strategic objectives. In addition, partnerships can provide:
- A stronger support base: the bigger your voice and your support base the more reason for the decision-makers to listen to you.
- Access to more resources: by working together, you can share resources and responsibilities.
- Access to new skills: by working with another team, you can bring in a variety of skills and can divide tasks based on who is good at what.
- Access to new networks: by leveraging a partner’s reach, you can improve your own reach and gain better/more ways to engage your target audience.
For a Step-by-Step Process on how to set up a partnership, click the link below.
Exercise: When assessing which partners to use, part of the process consists of institutional landscape mapping to identify relevant actors in each country. This helps to clarify who is doing what and who is important to engage with if you want to bring about change: Now, identify relevant partners in your context. Who could be important to engage with to obtain your objectives? When you identify those actors, and have collected information on them, it is time to assess the partner. What kind of influence do they have? Do they promote your values? When you look at the partner you have chosen for this exercise again, can you identify potential risks of the potential partnership? Write down at least 2 potential risks.
