Coalition Building and Partnership Development

The ability to collaborate effectively with diverse partners is a critical leadership skill, whether you are building or strengthening a coalition, engaging with the communities most affected by the issues you address, or partnering with other nonprofit organizations to advance a shared goal. Partners can contribute essential skills, relationships, and resources to your efforts; they also bring credibility and support to your programs, and increase the impact and reach of your work, by ensuring that key stakeholders have a voice in decision-making.

While the benefits are clear, partnership work is inherently challenging. Using real-world examples from collaborative efforts in the nonprofit field, this interactive course will demonstrate best practices for effective partnerships, allow you to practice playing a role in managing conflict with partners, and provide useful tools that you can apply to clarify partner roles, track progress, and collaborate successfully.

Key Concepts

• The benefits and challenges of working with partners 
• Defining the purpose and scope of the partnership 
• Choosing the right structure for the partnership or coalition 
• Identifying and engaging key partners 
• Utilizing best practices for effective collaboration and shared decision-making 
• Ensuring mutual benefit for partners 
• Managing conflict and building trust 
• Hosting inclusive and collaborative meetings 
• Applying simple tools to communicate, stay organized, and hold partners accountable

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Identify the benefits and challenges of working with partners to achieve goals.
• Recognize best practices for effective partnerships.
• Explain how to establish and maintain collaborative processes for partner communication and interaction.
• Apply a sample tool to assign tasks and keep partners organized.

Audience

Nonprofit professionals tasked with leading or supporting external partnership efforts.