Over the past eighteen months, the question our clients bring to us has changed. It used to be some version of “who should we partner with, and how should we govern it?” Now it is closer to “how do we partner when there is no budget for partnership?” A few ask, more bluntly, whether they should be partnering at all.
Here is what I have come to believe after two decades in this field, and what the last eighteen months have made harder to avoid: most partnership strategy was designed for abundance. Predictable funding cycles, expanding corporate budgets, a stable policy framework. Those were the operating conditions the standard playbook assumed.
The reality is that we are no longer in an era of abundance. Bilateral aid budgets contracted sharply, corporate sustainability teams have been cut or absorbed into other functions, and the multilateral institutions are in crisis.
Many partnerships built on those assumptions are now coming apart. The ones with staying power usually trace back to a handful of design choices made early that built in flexibility, shared value, and honest communication.
How organizations are responding to an era of uncertainty.
I see organizations responding in three broad ways.
The first is retrenchment. Partnership work gets classified as discretionary and cut early, often ahead of program spend. Partnership costs show up on a P&L or budget as staff time, travel, and convening, all of which read as expendable overhead. The trouble is that partnership is the mechanism by which constrained organizations accomplish things they cannot afford to do alone, so cutting it tends to deepen the underlying problem.
The second is performative. Announce something, post on LinkedIn , issue a joint release, hold a signing event. This is cheap, visible, and satisfies a board. It also produces very little. It is partnership in name only and saves face without saving outcomes. The performative path might appease a board member, but it produces very little, it isa face-saving measure that does nothing to save outcomes.
A smaller group is taking a third path. These organizations treat partnership as core competency for reaching their objectives, and they are rethinking how their approach. What they have in common is that they have stopped treating the cost of coordination as free. When budgets were growing, the time it took to align three institutions with different calendars, incentives, and approval chains was absorbed without anyone pricing it. Today it is the first line a CFO questions. The organizations doing well have made that cost smaller, made it visible, and tied it clearly to a result.
Our team has distilled what we have learned from more than 350 partnerships into A Practitioner’s Guide to Cross-Sector Partnerships. The guide walks through the full partnership lifecycle, from deciding whether to partner at all through closing a partnership well.
Here are five key lessons from partnerships that are succeeding in a time of uncertainty.
1. Give the partnership a job
When money was easier, partnerships could be vague. "Strategic collaboration" was a common description and a catchall. But a partnership with no defined function cannot prove its worth or its efficacy.
Organizations getting this right can summarize what their partnership accomplishes in one sentence. Access to a distribution channel. A technical capability that would take years to build internally. Cost sharing for greater reach. Political cover for a policy position.
If your team cannot articulate that sentence, your partnership will drift.
2. Go narrower and deeper
Holding a broad portfolio of partnerships is a common strategy, not dissimilar to how VCs invest in startups. Some work, some don’t, and the variance is absorbed across the portfolio, yielding a net positive contribution to organizational goals.
When staff capacity is a binding constraint, ten partnerships managed at ten percent effort each produce almost nothing. Three managed properly can produce results.
The organizations weathering this period well have made deliberate cuts, including having difficult conversations to exit partnerships that are less aligned or not yielding results.
3. Front-load uncomfortable conversations
Every cross-sector partnership contains structural disagreements. Corporate partners work on quarterly and annual cycles while foundations and implementers work on three to five year horizons. Definitions of success differ. Risk tolerance differs, sometimes enormously.
For years the convention has been to lead with shared values and tackle misalignments down the road when they become more acute problems. A partnership that discovers in month eighteen that the parties meant different things by "scale" has already spent eighteen months of scarce capacity, and in eras of penny-pinching, this can be disastrous. The opportunity cost alone is hard to justify. Naming and these differences in the first month is the highest-return conversation a new partnership can have.
4. Build in market viability from day one
Philanthropic and donor capital does two things: de-risks early activity, and bridges the gap before returns provide runway.
I saw this clearly in our work in Ghana to advance sustainable fisheries management. From the beginning of our work, we identified private sources of funding to continue the work after the initial catalytic funding from the US government ended. When the program wound down, partners carried the work forward under their own authority and budgets because they had a business incentive to do so. That outcome was designed years in advance.
5. Measure to catch problems early
Most monitoring and evaluation systems are built to report upward. They tell funders what happened, on a schedule funders set, in categories funders chose. These types of systems often fail to raise red flags early. Partners find that the key goals were not met and the partnership failed—but only months after it ends, far too late to course correct.
MEL built for adaptive management asks a different question: what would provide early warning if things are not going according to plan? You need to agree with partners in advance on what “bad news” looks like and how it will be handled. This builds trust and durability at the same time.
What a decade of successful collaboration looks like
When partnerships hew to these lessons, we've seen how they can deliver impact over many years. One of the best examples of this is TRANSFORM, a collaboration between Unilever, EY and the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO UK). Started in 2015, TRANSFORM has reached more than 20mln people across 19 countries by funding and impact enterprises to grow their businesses. Over the 11 years of TRANSFORM, the partnership experienced many twists and turns – changes in the UK government, changes in Unilever strategy and a rapidly evolving social enterprise landscape. Yet the partnership succeeded precisely because it adhered to the five key lessons I outlined above. After 11 years, TRANSFORM is winding down – having delivered excellent value to partners and meaningful impact around the world.
Ignore at your own peril
Partnerships are not rocket science. None of the five lessons should come as surprise to anyone working the field.
What has changed is the consequence of ignoring them. In an abundant environment, a vaguely defined partnership with fragmented attention and a reporting-oriented MEL system could limp along for years without consequence. That environment is gone. The same partnership now fails and takes scarce capacity down with it.
The organizations I am most optimistic about are treating this period as a growth opportunity rather than a setback. Constraint makes you crystallize alignment around partnership goals and metrics. With that clarity as a guiding star, partnerships can function as true projects which provide value to shareholders, stakeholders, and employees alike.
We have spent much of this year pulling together lessons learned across more than 350 partnerships into this definitive and comprehensive guide.
If you need help thinking through how to assess and build partnerships, or how to right-size your partnership portfolio, we are here to help.
Steve Schmida is the founder and CEO of Resonance and the author of Partner with Purpose.
