Companies can be a critical partner in collective impact work. However, working with companies can pose unique challenges, from understanding how to initiate these partnerships to understanding how to best partner to sustain these relationships over time.
To learn more about how collaboratives can engage and partner with the private sector to advance social change work, we talk with Nikhil Bumb, Managing Director at the social change consulting firm FSG.
In this conversation, we discuss the multiple ways that nonprofits and companies can collaborate, from reaching out through corporate philanthropy to building deep, cross-sector partnerships. We also explore some of the unique advantages and challenges associated with partnering with companies, including the importance of:
- Challenging preconceived notions about what it means to work in the nonprofit or private sector;
- Understanding each partner’s strengths, resources, and limitations;
- Strengthening relationships by fostering a culture of mutual understanding, shared learning, and transparency;
- Moving beyond transactional relationships to establish a shared mission and values alignment.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
- FSG
- Report: The Promise of Partnerships
- Blog: Partnering for Change, Committing to Learning
- Blog: What Business Leaders Wish NGOs Knew about Transformative Partnerships
- Podcast: Shifting from Competition to Partnership in Private Sector Collaboration
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode we’re discussing how collaboratives can partner with companies to advance on their social change goals. To dive into the many facets of this topic, we’re talking with our colleague Nikhil Bumb, who serves as Managing Director at FSG. Nikhil is my go-to expert on all things related to building corporate partnerships, and we are delighted to share his guidance here.
In this conversation, we go over the multiple ways that nonprofits and companies can collaborate, from reaching out through corporate philanthropy to building deep, cross-sector partnerships. We also explore some of the unique advantages and challenges associated with partnering with companies, including the importance of fostering a cultural of mutual understanding, shared learning, and transparency.
Interviewing Nikhil is the Collective Impact Forum’s Director of Programs and Partnerships Courtney W. Robertson. Let’s tune in.
Courtney W. Robertson: Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast. My name is Courtney W. Robertson, director of programs and partnerships with the Collective Impact Forum, and I’m your host.
This episode features a conversation about partnering with companies in collaborative work. Joining me is my colleague from FSG Consulting, Nikhil Bumb, managing director. Thanks for joining, Nikhil.
So, Nikhil, if we could start by just having you introduce yourself and your role with FSG and share with us a bit about what drew you to working with companies in particular.
Nikhil Bumb: Thank you, Courtney. Thank you all for having me here. Hi, everyone. My name is Nikhil Bumb and I’m a managing director, as Courtney said, with FSG in our consulting practice here in the U.S. A lot of my work is working with companies on their variety of social impact strategies, whether that’s through their philanthropic work, their corporate giving and social responsibility work, citizenship work, or even through more of their work that may be sort of directly product, services, things that are in the core business, all under the auspices of how companies are fulfilling their purpose, what really defines them, what is their motive and their reason for being beyond just creating profits.
In terms of how I got to this work, I’ll start the story a little bit further back. My parents are both immigrants from India and they come from very rural small towns in northwest India, from farming families. They migrated here in the late ’70s and ’80s and sort of my way and pathway of coming to working with companies was—I actually started in the private sector, so I’m an engineer by training and a lot of my engineering work focused on medical applications. That led me to starting my career working with life science companies, a place where I thought there would naturally feel a lot of impact being in the health care space. I think also, for me, coming from an engineering background a lot of what an engineering discipline is it’s a systems discipline. It tells you how to problem solve. It tells you how to take things apart and put them back together to work a little bit better in service of whatever that system is supposed to be doing.
I think for me the pivot came about 12 years ago. Being in the life science industry what I sort of found was that it didn’t quite feel yet that many of the companies I was working with were really trying to solve some of the hardest health care challenges in what they were doing. And I thought there was an opportunity to do so from the business model. I’ll be honest, I had, I think, was craving to feel more of that impact of being in the health care industry. I had a mental model around like doing that and shifting completely to a more traditional nonprofit role might actually not be what I wanted to do. I held a lot of misconceptions about what nonprofit work was. So the idea was what can companies do to create change and that’s sort of what I’ve been focusing on for the last 12 years, the last eight of which have been at FSG.
Courtney W. Robertson: Speaking of companies, and again, we’re talking about this in the context of working with sort of your multisector place-based partnerships, so those localized partnerships that are focusing on a specific issue or specific set of issues within their community and are bringing together folks from government, from the private sector, from the nonprofit sector, from community, etc., to come together and problem solve around the specific issue.
Curious, from your vantage point, why and how can companies be a good partner for collaboratives particularly as you think about these social change efforts and some of the things you’ve named around social responsibility, corporate social responsibility, fulfilling purpose, etc.
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah. I think that this gets back to how we think about why a company exists. So for any company there is generally, I’d say for the most part, nine times out of ten, a purpose that’s beyond profits. Some may be more explicit about how they talk about it. Some may be more implicit, but they recognize inherently that there is something bigger that they are trying to do in service of the world. It may be advancing the world around innovation. It may be understanding how to provide better sanitation products, right, but they are looking at something that has an inherent societal component. They recognize that they’re part of society.
I think that’s sort of why a company can be a good partner, but the sort of flip of it sort of how do you think about it, I think then you have to find what is that shared mission that you as a company have with a collaborative or even one partner, whether it’s one nonprofit or the government or a set of partners, what is that shared mission and how does that relate to each other. I think a misstep we often see is that companies or partners sort of try to partner for the sake of partnering and not because of recognizing a common shared purpose, a common mission that they’re both trying to address.
Courtney W. Robertson: I loved that. I loved this purpose beyond profit because I think oftentimes when we think of companies or we think about the private sector people automatically think like they’re just in it for the money. But to your point, it’s understanding and recognizing we’re all a part of society. We are hopefully providing a good or a service that makes folks’ lives easier or that addresses a particular need or a challenge. And then this idea of like shared mission. That’s what I talk about a lot when I talk to folks about partnerships. I’m like are your values aligned around are you partnering for the right reasons in that regard. So like understanding each other’s values and do those values align or do they at least reinforce or sharpen each other so that you can work together effectively.
So I’m curious, Nikhil, what are the types of partnerships or engages that you’ve seen companies participate in in your work?
Nikhil Bumb: It’s a great question, Courtney. I think there’s quite a range here of how we’ve seen companies partner. That range, on the hand, will start where we’re looking at a very specific and narrow problem in terms of what the company and partnership is trying to do, ultimately to something at the other end of the spectrum is taking much more of a systems lens often at an interrelated set of problems.
On one hand it’s very narrow. On the other hand it’s a series of problems that are all connected to each other and they’re recognizing that there’s more of a systems piece. And to the point that you just made which is that this is a big reason of why companies want to partner is while they recognize that they have more resources traditionally than the social sector to address issues, they still feel limited that they can address some of these issues because they are systemic and they are in a part of the broader ecosystem and that ecosystem is not just the private sector. They need to work with the public sector and the social sector. There’s a big range like I was talking about.
Let’s start from the lefthand side of where it really looks like in terms of very specific narrow partnership. On that side I’d say that the most traditional type of partnership you’ll see is that company is acting like a donor. They’re cutting a check. They’re here to provide resources, which is really necessary as we know, but they’re not really doing anything else. That’s maybe the most rudimentary form of a partnership that we’ll see with companies.
Then as we sort of progress a little bit then I’d say what we call maybe like a joint project, and that really is sort of a short-term, often it’s a one-off partnership. It might be a pilot around a specific innovation or a specific program. It is collaborative. The company wants to have more than just dollars in terms of what they’re contributing. They might want to learn from it. They may want to actually be part of the implementation, so there’s some role for both the company and whether it’s one or multiple partners, but it’s very short term, again, one-off, a very specific problem.
And I’ll say that from there we move into maybe a series of projects. That might be like a joint programming around a particular issue or thematic area. That, again, will often therefore go beyond just one partner. It’ll be a set of partners. Then I think we start to move more into that systems lens. And that’s where these last two, I think, are quite interesting and probably very relevant for the Collective Impact Forum audience.
The first is an alliance, and this is where you’ll see a group of organizations. There may be one or more companies at the table, but several partners at the table, and it’s essentially a platform for ongoing collaboration, ongoing discussion around a very specific issue or maybe a set of related issues. We generally see at least three partners at the table, sometimes typically more than five often, actually. Many times those are cross-sector partners so you’ll at least see some nonprofits and community organizations as well as one or more companies. Great ones often have government at the table in some degree, but the objective here is mostly to align on some sort of issue, maybe in the collective impact language, some sort of common agenda, and then hopefully activate. But this is mostly secondary, activate specific investments, but those are often—they could be joint investments, but they’re sort of a subset of the group that will then do a program together around that issue and it may no longer be sort of the responsibility of the alliance.
I think that’s what maybe differentiates it from the final piece which really looks more like collective impact or cross-sector collaboration where everyone’s at the table together aligning on a common agenda. It’s really the collaboration or the collaborative itself is the one that’s driving how change happens as opposed to being a place for discussion and then independent activity may happen with subsets. I think that’s the range we see.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thanks for offering that range. I really appreciate that, and I’m curious, Nikhil, with the alliance piece, if you could give a concrete example around what that might look like, because I can imagine folks potentially comparing like the alliance with sort of like your, as you talked about, sort of the more cross-sector collective impact type of partnership. So just to make that distinction between the two, what would be an example of an alliance?
Nikhil Bumb: It’s a great question and sometimes, to be honest, it’s a little bit of a blurry line between what’s an alliance and what’s more of a collaborative or a collective impact issue. But one thing that I often find helpful to refer to is I think the sustainability space is a good way to think about it or I often think about that because you hear about these various sustainability alliances or roundtables that come together.
For example, in Bolivia there is a sustainability roundtable that has a bunch of different workstreams. One is related to regulations. One’s related to finance. One’s related to a variety of issues. But the idea is that folks are getting together to talk about how do we advance sustainability in Bolivia. And there are companies at the table. There are also some nonprofit partners at the table. And they’re all bringing a variety of perspectives and experiences together in order to talk about, hey, what’s the current state and where we would we like to go, where do we need to see some activities.
So the finance workstream talks about, hey, we don’t have enough different types of investment capital right now that are advancing sustainability priorities. The regulations talk about, hey, here’s the way the regulations are getting in the way, or what kind of regulations could be there. It’s more about advancing specific knowledge and ideas but not necessarily they don’t see the responsibility to we actually need to go activate on those.
Now they may want to incentivize activity on those and so then you may see that specific one or multiple of those folks who have a seat at that roundtable go then work on those regulatory pieces, go work on trying to change the way they do their own investment capital in sustainability, but it’s not sort of the mandate to actually do the activity, if that makes sense, versus the collaborative would be ones that actually, hey, no, it’s yes we want to talk about it and we’re going to go try to push for that regulatory change.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thank you for that distinction. You took the words out of my mouth. I was going to say they sort of—that’s an opportunity to maybe set up what a longer-term sort of collaborative or initiative that’s leveraging collective impact could look like. You have a group of folks who are identifying what sort of the challenges and opportunities are and then you could pass it on to folks to actually activate those and do something with them. So thank you for that. I appreciate it.
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, absolutely. That’s often the pathway we see, right? Like something starts as an alliance, starts as a roundtable and then it moves on to actually activation and more of that, and what gets really exciting, I think, where you see an opportunity here, is in the FSG language around like in inclusive markets or market systems, that’s where you start to see.
And I think, getting back to an earlier question you had around why would companies want to be at the table is it’s an opportunity for them to contribute of, hey, we know we’re part of the system and these are the things that need to shift in the market or in the private sector in order to create more favorable conditions for the outcomes we’re looking for, whether that’s inclusion of populations that have typically been excluded from participating in this, or more equitable outcomes around health care or around education. So how do you actually then think about shifting those pieces, because again, the private sector holds so many resources it’s important to talk about shifting the market system as well.
Courtney W. Robertson: And Nikhil, are you finding that a lot of companies—this is of course within the context of companies you’ve worked with, are they leading with that mindset or is there work they’re having to do to sort of get to that point of thinking about their role in solving, I guess, societal issues?
Nikhil Bumb: I love this question because there’s never one right pathway for this or one common pathway we see. So some come in with that perspective and it can be, again, due to sort of their why, their purpose, either they see that as their role or individually that’s what motivates them, but for many it’s also their own learning journey. They may start saying actually, hey, we want to solve this one really specific issue and as we worked on that we learned X, Y, Z, we’ve learned that there’s actually a deeper systemic issue here. We learned that beyond—we knew it was systemic, but we learned new parts about where the system is holding the problem. So that’s why they want to do it and so they get to that point later.
For some, it’s a little bit of both. They recognize that there’s an issue but to be honest, there’s also a very—there is somewhat of a self-serving motive too. They actually recognize that it is in their benefit to be able to shift these market systems because it may unlock more opportunity for them. Companies often and in some ways, rightfully so, get a bad rep for being extractive or for not prioritizing some of these deeper sort of disparities, inequities that we are seeing and how they’re solving those. And the flipside is we hear from companies, some of these mindsets around, well, it’s not my job to solve poverty. It’s not my—this problem is much bigger than me. Or it feels sort of destabilizing to try to actually address some of these really deep issues, and we wish we could but it’s out of our control. What they recognize is, yes, we would love to serve, bring their products, sanitation products, to people who can’t traditionally afford them to people who they are necessarily designed for. They’d like to bring them into the process.
But there are some factors that are in their control and some factors that are out of their control that are holding them back from doing so. Or even if they design the product that will meet the needs of an underserved population, it’s not just enough to have designed that product. They have to be able to get people to the product. They have to get the product to the people. There’s other pieces. You may not have the electrical infrastructure in a market to support maintaining the product, or there might not be servicing.
So I do a lot of work in health care or with health care organizations and a very common problem is that you see that companies may have donated products that they have or brought products and services to newer markets say, for example, more developing countries where the electrical infrastructure is totally different. This product may not have been designed to withstand power outages on a regular basis. Or even if it has been designed in that way, if the product breaks down, if a large piece of a medical device breaks down, is there actually somebody in the country who can repair it, who has that knowledge. Those are factors that are outside of their control that sometimes prevent companies from feeling like they can actually do anything about these issues and therefore even trying.
But when they work as part of a multisectoral collaborative they see that, hey, there are other people who have, that is more in their grasp, more in their reach, and it actually makes sense to jointly invest in addressing this and building that local repair and maintenance capacity in addressing the electrical infrastructure issues because it will both solve other pieces of the problem for those partners whether they are public sector, social sector, and it will also be in the benefit of the company. I think that just goes back to finding that shared mission, that common purpose.
Courtney W. Robertson: I appreciate that. I appreciate you specifically uplifting—because across all of our sectors and all of our work done limitations to what we can do which is why it’s really important to partner because if there’s a space or a place where I can’t necessarily enter, perhaps there are other folks or organizations who can do that so that we’re kind of covering each other and covering all bases so I appreciate you sort of driving that point around companies in particular.
Nikhil Bumb: Just to add to that, right, actually I think this is a place where maybe I’m anticipating you might go here but if I had to challenge both folks, both companies and those who they are partnering with to sort of push themselves maybe and challenge some of their own mindsets around this, it is exactly this, right? Like get more clarity on the why and be honest with yourself of what that is. So you named something, Courtney, that I think we see folks on both sides of that partnership or all sides of that partnership struggle to name which is admit there are things that you can’t do and how can this partnership help you do that.
So if I look at it from the perspective of the company, often things that they get out of a partnership or they might want to consider partnering is those things, right, like access to whether it’s communities or parts of the systems that they don’t have access to right now. They don’t have the relationships. They don’t have the legitimacy with those groups. They may also lack some of the lived experience. They will also lack certain areas of expertise and skillsets. Maybe they don’t understand the depth of these issues so there’s a lot that they don’t have despite much that they do have.
And then on the flipside of that, if we look at it from the other side, what is it that folks might get, collaboratives might get or a nonprofit might get from partnering with the company. You know the first, probably the most obvious one is resources, dollars, but not just dollars, also network, other types of resources that they have. Second is there are capabilities. It could be data. It could be innovation. And then third is scale. Companies again have access to or ability to scale because of the business models that they are in.
Courtney W. Robertson: I love that. That’s actually a really good segue into the next question that I had which is what are some ways that companies that partnered that may not be as commonly known or like as common in practice for them.
So I’m thinking—and this is probably a more common thing but I’m thinking specifically about my time working in Memphis and one of our big partners in the collaborative was International Paper. When you think International Paper and education, they are probably providing some things directly to the school district but one of the ways that we were able to partner with them was that they had an international belting like Lean Six Sigma belting program and so they actually allowed our entire staff from the backbone organization and a lot of our key partners from both the district and some of our other partners to go through their manufacturing excellence like belting process, like all the way through getting a yellow belt so going through three layers of this belting program which to them cost them thousands upon thousands of dollars but that was a way that they were able to invest in our capability and also partner with us in a way that sharpened our work.
So I’m curious, Nikhil, what are some ways that companies have either partnered or could partner that you may have not seen that are less known if you will?
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, this is great because the known ones are providing money, provide data, provide products, right? Those are the very obvious ones. The less known ones are actually ones around those skills and capabilities that they may be able to transfer. That’s the capacity-building aspect around—in your example, Lean Six Sigma in particular.
The other piece is connecting. I think we often underplay the network effect of being in partnership with a company. Who do they know, and to be honest this is—even the flip of it holds. Who does the set of the collaborative, who do they know as well, and that connecting can go a couple steps further. It can just be making a connection to somebody. It can be convening a set of folks who may not otherwise traditionally convene, and then a really powerful even further step of that is catalyzing.
So oftentimes—and you see this with funders too. Everyone is looking for the first funder to get in the room and then we’ll sign on. We really believe that this is an important issue but come back to us once you have your first funder. It’s sort of the same with companies. Whether that’s the company showing up to partner as a purely a donor or to actually be an implementing partner, oftentimes you see the same thing of, well, who do you already have signed into this, and so they can really catalyze others and it sort of provides that legitimacy as well.
Then there’s the ideation and cocreation. We see that a lot like it can actually just by having a diversity of perspectives and different sectors in the room lead to better thought partnership and better ideas.
Then the final is to be a learning partner. This actually works all around, right? So companies can be there to basically listen and to learn and to provide their perspectives from the group and so I think those are the ways that sometimes we don’t give enough credit to but in each of those there are things that the company can provide.
Getting back to something we talked about earlier, Courtney, it’s a two-way street, right? So there’s also things that the company can get in those very same ways from being a part of that partnership. That’s actually one of the biggest mindsets we like to challenge, is that this isn’t a one-way street. Companies shouldn’t look to only get things out of a partnership and partnership shouldn’t only look to get something out of a company, that actually they both need to be honest about what that is.
Courtney W. Robertson: I love that and this might be a bit set up for a question that I’m just going to go to around what have been some of the challenges you’ve seen in partnering from both ends? So for companies wanting to partner with collaboratives and for collaboratives wanting to partner with companies, what have been some of those challenges, whether they’ve been anticipated or unanticipated?
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, you know what’s interesting is actually the challenges end up being the same from both sides, and it’s not really that—you know, you might think that companies are going to think that the partnership challenges are going to be around X, Y, Z, and then for the partners it’s going to be around A, B, C, and they are totally different challenges. It actually ends up being exactly the same and so some of the ones that come up most frequently, I think the anticipated ones as folks know that there are going to be different working styles and there might be some frictions in terms of how that works. Different working styles, different motivations, how does that show up, what’s the risk in the pieces. Particularly we think about communication and timelines is one where those frictions often show up the most. Folks are operating on very different paces or different levels of urgency around an issue, and do those match or do those not, and there’s often challenge around that.
I think some of the unanticipated ones is actually one there are reputational risks and sensitivities on both sides or all sides of the partnership and a collaborative. So every organization at the table has different pieces that they are concerned about. For a nonprofit it may be, hey, what will it look like to some of my partners, other partners on other work, if they know that I have this company that’s a funder for me or that’s at the table as well or if I go to the government to try to push for policy change, will they believe me if they know that a large part of my funding has come from a company, right? We see that, and that also changes. The same partner—so we’ve seen for example large development organizations like UNICEF in some of their geographies. In some countries they can go to push for policy change with a company at the table and in the conversation and in the room with then when they meet with government.
In other countries it’s a total nonstarter. They can’t even show up with a company in the room let alone make it known that actually they’ve been collaborating with a company even to think about the ideas that they are presenting. So that may look—and it can be the same partner that they’re working with, the same corporate partner they’re working with in both geographies. So those reputational risks, those sensitivities are often unanticipated, and then what it leads to is some of those frictions in working styles, the pieces around timing, around communication that become really important to dedicate that kind of time to, one, just have open and honest communication, and two, to dedicate time for learning and realignment.
So that can lead to a variety of conversations that each of the partners need to have internally within their teams and their organizations, perhaps with other stakeholders in their organization, and time for the partners to talk together and say, hey, this is what’s coming up for us, this is what’s working, this is what’s not working, what can we do better, how can we still achieve our mission but recognize that these are all the things that we’re all holding and the risks and the sensitivities and the objectives and get to a better place in the end.
Courtney W. Robertson: How do people do that, all those things you just named? I ask that because I’m thinking it’s simple saying it like just do this thing but what does that look like in practice for even a company to, I guess approach it in that way but more specifically thinking about a collaborative workgroup. How do they approach a company who has, to your point, more resources, more power, more influence, etc., how do you hold those types because essentially these are conversations around both expectations and accountability to each other so how do you approach that?
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, at its core, Courtney, what we see is—and this isn’t always language that resonates super well in the private sector, I’ll say this, but at its core what it is about what is the mindset with which everyone is approaching the partnership.
What we highly recommend and this sometimes feels counterintuitive but for everyone getting into the partnership, no matter what kind of an organization you are, private sector, for-profit, not-for-profit, government, is to come to the table with a couple of things in mind. One, sort of no hidden agenda. Put it all out there on the table. This is what we’re trying to do, this is what’s important for us, does this align, does this not align, what parts align, what parts are nonnegotiable, what parts can be adjusted of the parts that may be, you know, that we’re not seeing perfectly eye to eye together.
The second is in that mindset is also then part of that is get in the other’s shoes. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, put aside any of those preconceived notions you may have or even make explicit, hey, I think that you may be doing this just because you want to sell more of your products or you may be doing this because you really want to be able to get access to this other partner that we have, right? Let the other person also then tell you or let the other partner tell you if that’s true or not true. Part of that is then also asking what do you need. So put yourself in the other person’s shoes, ask explicitly what do you need, and then don’t leave anything off. No hidden agenda, and then have a conversation around that. That’s sort of the fun mental mindset and that’s, to be honest, one of the hardest things we see.
But here are some of the actual now steps that we can put into place to start getting at that mindset shift. The first is up front when you have those initial conversations even before you agree to a partnership, one is have that clarity on your why, and then second, if there is enough alignment on the why to move forward, establish a vision for that collaboration. So what is the level of collaboration you’re going to do? Are you just going to sort of exchange resources? Are you going to jointly go after some programming? What is the level of that collaboration? What are the different roles and responsibilities as well as limitations for each of the partners at the table, and then what’s the scope? These are the things that this collaboration will touch and these are the things this collaboration won’t touch. We will do joint programming. We will not do joint communications, things like that.
Once you’ve established that, then come back to it and continue through with it. So establish a plan for learning. That’s the piece, right? Often when we talk about learning for a collaboration, there’s three things we generally recommend that folks are looking at. One is learn about the levers. What are the different places we’re collaborating, how is that working or not working? Second is what’s the collaboration health? How healthy is your partnership? Third is what’s the value of the collaboration? Are you actually getting the value that you thought you would get out of this collaboration because if not, something probably needs to change. It’s not worth the investment everyone is making or is this no longer a valuable partnership.
Courtney W. Robertson: Absolutely. Thank you for that. What you just shared might touch on this next—may have touched on this next question a bit but in case you want to add anything else to it, I’m curious as you think about readiness to partner, what are those considerations particularly for a collaborative wanting to then come in and work with a company? What does readiness look like for them, and it sounds like some of the things you’ve articulated is understanding your—coming in being clear about your why, your nonnegotiables, those types of things but what else would you add to that list, Nikhil, if anything?
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, one is capacity, right? Partnership requires capacity. I think we all—we can probably all three of us on this call think about all the times we’ve entered a partnership or relationship where you thought, hey, this is just going to be easy. We’re going to add this on to our plate that we already do and it will be easy-peasy but actually it requires capacity. Do you have capacity to partner? Second, what are your relationships like and how do you approach relationship building? This is all building of course on the clarity around your why. Then, third, is there also in addition to just the capacity to partner, the willingness to learn, to challenge those mindsets, to be flexible and adapt along the way so I think that is some of what we think about in terms of what those readiness factors might be. If those are in place, then the other thing that we often talk about is understanding the incentives for the various folks at the table.
So know that if X, Y, Z happens, then the company is more likely to be wanting to scale, to go to a new geography, to launch a second partnership, to invest more money. If these things don’t happen, then the company might need to reconsider what are those incentives. And on the flipside for the collaborative, what will make this—what are the incentives that drive decision making? Who controls that power? Where does that decision making sit and what adds up to that? So I think those are some of the pieces that can then make for a better—one, demonstrate more readiness to partner but also make for a better partnership because then you can really think again to that two-way street about how are each side of this equation actually helping address something that—and unlock something for the other that isn’t currently being met.
Courtney W. Robertson: I love those, especially that capacity to partner because I think, to your point, we kind of jump in or we assume that things will just work themselves out as we go through the process without really thinking about what does this look like, what is it going to take on our end, what is going to take on the other end, right? What are the tradeoffs that we may have to make in negotiating this partnership so I appreciate that.
So I’m ready. I’ve thought through all these things. We’ve talked through all these things as a collaborative, how do we then approach companies? What’s the entry point? Is it reaching out to—they have, you know, a corporate foundation, do we just reach out to those folks? Is it Nikhil knows somebody so we go through that? I know it’s probably a combination of all those things but what is sort of the approach for doing that?
Nikhil Bumb: Great question, Courtney. As you suspect and as you alluded to, there is no one right answer to how to do this. There are a bunch of different ways that collaboratives or independent organizations can reach out to a company. If you have no idea, no contact at the company what we often would say is a good place to start is most companies has either a corporate citizenship, a philanthropy, a CSR which is corporate social responsibility or some sort of social impact team, maybe an independent foundation associated with their company. That’s a good place to start. Sometimes they may also have a community engagement or public affairs team, and every company calls these teams slightly different things, names, and so we would recommend starting there. They often have a contact us or they have a grant application, an RFP that they might put out. That’ a good way to just start to form a relationship and reach out by that.
What can also happen is maybe I’ll offer two other ways although, like I said, there are several but maybe two other ways that can be quite helpful. If you already have some idea around, hey, this is the piece that we think we could work on together, and we both know what you would offer to us by being part of this and what you might get by being part of this, then bringing that part in as well. So based on that, actually trying to then get connected to the relevant part of the organization.
Again, the entry point might be if you don’t have a direct access to, say, the supply chain group or a particular business unit, a particular product team, a particular function that you think is the right one to bring in, then it may need to start with the public affairs, the social impact, the corporate citizenship team but putting that more out there in terms of, hey, this is what we’d like your role to be. This is what we think you might get from getting out there. Also we would like to speak to somebody on the product team. We’d like to speak to somebody on the marketing team. Can you make the introduction?
I think perhaps what we see is another very common route, the third route, is going via some sort of intermediary. So who is somebody who knows the company, and I don’t mean just individuals. It certainly can be an individual but I often mean like who is an intermediary organization who knows the company but is also known to you and can essentially vouch for you. So I think about this at FSG. We often play this role. We work with those funders, private philanthropy. We work with some nonprofits and we work with companies. We know who those folks are. We often facilitate those introductions not as part of some sort of formal agreement and we’re being paid to, just because we believe it’s part of our mission, right? We advise, that’s our consulting work. We think, that’s our sort of research and learning work, and we do, that’s our programmatic work but we also connect and that’s sort of the fourth thing that we do, and that’s not necessarily like a written role and responsibility.
Before FSG, I was working with an organization, an NGO called TechnoServe, who you all have had on your podcast before. They often also play—they are an NGO but they often play an intermediary role as well. They are known to communities. They are known to more grassroots organizations, and they are also known to companies so often they can play that role of facilitating an introduction as well so those are some examples of what an intermediary might look like.
Courtney W. Robertson: Thank you for those, and really, to your point, to underscore this like tapping into your network is really important to make those connections. Nikhil, is there anything that either I didn’t ask and you’re like I think this is really worth noting or sharing for the audience before we wrap our time together?
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, I would say two things. One is—we got to this but I’ll maybe just say it more explicitly, Courtney. Two things, one is challenge the mindsets and that’s on both sides, right? So companies hold a lot of preconceived notions about nonprofits. They are largely here because they just want our money or they’re using us to get to X, Y, Z. They don’t understand what we do. They don’t understand business. Challenge those. You will actually see that many nonprofits don’t operate with those mental models or don’t operate in the ways those perceived notions might portray them to be, and the flipside, right?
Also for nonprofit partners, challenge your mindsets around what a company is there do to, that they’re only out—like companies are evil, they’re only out here to gain more profit. That’s not to say that some aren’t but many are not, and they actually are quite interested in addressing some of these problems and are genuinely motivated to solve these issues but maybe don’t know how or don’t have access to some of the communities and the lived experience.
So one, just challenge those mindsets. I think that’s been one of my greatest things. I shared that even when I entered the space from a more traditional private sector role. I had a lot of preconceived notions about what doing impact work meant and working for a nonprofit meant, and it meant that when I dipped my toes into it, I started from the private sector ones, right? I worked inside companies on social issues. I worked at a big consulting organization, at Deloitte, on their social impact practice before I came to FSG because I thought it meant something very different to be at a nonprofit than it actually is, and the reality is it’s actually quite similar.
So one is challenge your mindset, and the second is invest that time in learning how the partnership is going because this is new, especially if you’re operating in a different way than just cutting a check. Invest that time in learning and adjust along the way, and that can’t be underscored enough especially if you want to scale the work and really amplify the impact.
Courtney W. Robertson: I appreciate that and what I would add to what you’ve shared, Nikhil, is one also based on where your collaborative is so if you’re a new collaborative, that presents a different opportunity to engage a company in a very different way, and at the early parts of it. If you’re a more mature collaborative, it might be a different approach you may have to take, right? Quite frankly, you may have more data, impact data, and more to show around your work.
Then the other thing I would offer is we have to put ourselves out there. Again, a company may not be aware of the work that’s happening so this becomes your chance to put that in front of them so what does that look like and what do you want that to look like so that they can support the work that you’re doing but oftentimes companies just may not know because we all can’t know about all of the moving pieces that are happening within our back yard.
Nikhil Bumb: Yeah, and on the flipside, I’ll offer one more example, Courtney. A couple of years ago I was working with a company and a large international NGO who had only to that date worked with companies in a way where they were at that first part of that spectrum, cutting a check. They were purely a donor, and they had a lot of trepidation about entering a joint partnership together, and then once they did, and they didn’t necessarily—there were some rocky starts and stops but as they continued to invest in that learning along the way and worked through some of those hard moments, do the things that we talked about, put it all on the table, understand each other’s incentives, do those things, they actually found that they were going much further in the work and getting deeper in the impact, and they actually scaled the level of effort and how important that programmatic area was for the overall international NGO.
The other thing the NGO said was also we didn’t know we could partner with companies in this way and because we did this first one when we learned about it, we’ve now actually launched two more partnerships that are beyond just sort of the traditional donor model with two other companies. So that’s a catalyst piece, right? People just need the first one to start.
Courtney W. Robertson: I love those examples. Thank you. So Nikhil how can folks follow your work at FSG?
Nikhil Bumb: Well, reach out to us. You can find our website, fsg.org. Great way to see all of our resources. Also we have a whole dedicated page to work with companies and their corporate social impact work. And then I love getting reached out to on LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn. Also you can reach me by email, it’s nikhilbumb@fsg.org.
Courtney W. Robertson: Nikhil, I want to thank you so much for this conversation today and hope—not hopefully, I know that this is going to be helpful for folks. Just thinking about my time both being a partner in a collaborative and then also supporting a collaborative, I think bringing companies to the table is one of our biggest challenges. It was easy to get the nonprofit, even surprisingly easy to get government folks to the table, etc., but I think oftentimes there was just sort of a lack of understanding of how to really partner with companies, to your point, beyond the funding piece so I appreciate you offering sort of a wider view for folks about what that could look like so thank you so much for the time, talent, expertise that you have, and thank you all so much for your continued support of the Collective Impact Forum podcast.
Nikhil Bumb: Thanks, Courtney.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
