Structuring Incentives for Nonprofit Collaboration

A new competition sponsored by Chase Community Giving and run via Facebook is creating new incentives for nonprofit collaboration. This is new, and important to recognize why.

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Let me start by saying, I am a failed builder of collaboration tools for nonprofit organizations.

Over the last year, my company Assetmap has been experimenting with how to use web interfaces to increase collaboration among Ugandan community development organizations.

The idea was simple - different organizations are good at different things, and presumably if we could give them better information about who was good at what, collaboration would explode.

What we found was that the information gap was only one barrier to nonprofit collaboration, and that more than anything, competitive request for proposal processes and scarce resources created active structural dis-incentives for groups to come together.

Since then, our project has shifted to reflect the new reality, and instead of talking about "facilitating collaboration" we now are thinking about how to create ecosystems in which collaboration can thrive if it wants to.

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My problem with much of the conversation about collaboration in the nonprofit space is that it feels like it focuses on collaboration as the end in and of itself, rather than as a means to the end of more effective, efficient change. Similarly, it fails to recognize the extremely high cost of partnership in terms of getting different organizational cultures and priorities to mesh together.

I have thought for a while that for the nonprofit sector to really collaborate effectively, there needed to be more funders creating incentives to pay the time and effort costs to make partnership work.

A new contest hosted by Chase Bank on Facebook might be doing just that. The contest is putting a serious amount of money - $5 million total - up for grabs. The way it works is a simple voting mechanism where you become a fan of Chase and then have 20 votes to distribute to whichever organization you'd like.

Each of the top 100 vote getters receives at least $25,000, with the top overall vote getter winning a cool million.

Fascinatingly, the combination of 1) a high number of "winners" and 2) a high number of votes has created a situation where it makes more sense for groups to collaborate and create coalitions than to mobilize for themselves alone.

ThinkImpact founder Saul Garlick wrote about his organizations' strategy on the Huffington Post, saying that "My favorite part is that this contest promotes organizational cooperation. By allowing for 20 votes and 100 different winners at $25K, all the young nonprofits I work with are getting into the game. It’s brilliant. We are promoting each other’s work. We are encouraging folks to support causes we believe in, and we don’t feel that there is any zero sum game involved."

This is one of the first examples I've seen where it made sense - not just in word but in deed - for groups to come together based on the constraints of a real opportunity, and it will be interesting to see what pans out.