Research Friday: Ten Types of Collaboration (an alternate view)
 |
| posted by Craig Van Korlaar, CNP, Consultant and Project Manager Create Etc. |
Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing series, we invite a nonprofit scholar, student, or professional to highlight current research reports or studies and discuss how they can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice.
Models of Collaboration, by professor Mark Hager and Tyler Curry, identifies and describes types of nonprofit collaborations from an analysis of the 177 nominations submitted in 2009 for the prestigious Collaboration Prize. Recently, Professor Gordon Shockley and I reviewed and re-coded the nominations. We noticed that a great deal did not fit neatly into any one model outlined in Models of Collaboration. Instead, they were often blends that involved different levels of partnership and sharing. From this, we developed an alternative list of ten types of collaboration, organized by increasing levels of integration, and which can be combined to make hybrids.
PARTNERSHIPS
The left side of the spectrum represents partnerships. By definition, these are formal agreements between two or more organizations that wish to work together to achieve a goal. In their purest form, they involve little to no direct sharing of overhead, though some efficiencies might be seen in the long term. There are four types of partnerships, as originally laid out by Hager and Curry.
