Managing and Leading Nonprofit Organizations

11Strategic Alliances

Up to this point we have spent time together thinking about strategies for developing your skills as a nonprofit leader, ways in which to help your employees and your team develop, as well as strategies for building systems and organizational culture that will help to achieve your agency's mission. Much of the discourse at this point has been inward‐focused, which is quite appropriate given the magnitude of what needs to be mastered in order to be effective as a nonprofit manager and leader. We turn now in a purposeful way to a more external lens on nonprofit leadership and management to explore the important topic area of strategic alliances.

A strategic alliance is any agreement between two or more organizations that is designed to help strengthen each party. Alliances, as we will discuss, cover the gamut from informal shared collaborative efforts to highly structured and legally executed agreements. As a nonprofit leader it is important for you to first understand the various forms of strategic alliance that are present and then develop the skills necessary to optimize the use of alliances to support and advance the mission of your nonprofit organization.

In my more than four decades of experience in nonprofit leadership and management, I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to nonprofit strategic alliances. Given this, I share my experience, where the bumps have been encountered as well as what worked particularly well, in the hope ...