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  • Module 2 Discussion: Risks of Partnering

    With smaller organizations, a risk I have noticed is loss of autonomy. The more money and influence the other has over a smaller organization, the easier it is to get lost in the division between the two groups. It is important the the two groups retain their autonomy because they may have goals in common but also might have different end goals.

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  • With smaller organizations, a risk I have noticed is loss of autonomy. The more money and influence the other has over a smaller organization, the easier it is to get lost in the division between the two groups. It is important the the two groups retain their autonomy because they may have goals in common but also might have different end goals.

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  • I work with a large international non-profit organization. For us, the risk of reputational loss is very important to mitigate and manage. As a result, the organization trains and retrains staff AND ITS STAKEHOLDERS to comply with it's code of conduct. The organization values transparency, integrity and honesty, which are all key in building trust in any successful partnership. Should we face potential threat of reputational loss, the organization immediately metes out the penalty to staff involved, if it an external stakeholder, the organization always prefers to settle out of court, at worst via arbitration.

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  • I quite agree that smaller organization face the risk of losing autonomy. That's why it's important that they are fully established with a team and a set of policies that guides their decision making.

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  • The potential risks mentioned earlier are common, which risk makes the highest damage depends on size and value of the organization. For me, reputational risk poses the biggest challenge for humanitarian and development organization because once you lose trust from the people it will take time to restore that trust again.

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  • @ Thank you for raising valid and relevant issues. This is a common challenge many organizations faced. Considering the power imbalance between parties in partnership and the challenges it creates the Global Humanitarian Platform on 12 July 2007 endorsed Principles of Partnership - a Statement of Commitment. One of the principles they stated was Equality.

    Equality requires mutual respect between members of the partnership irrespective of size and power. The participants must respect each other's mandates, obligations and independence and recognize each other's constraints and commitments. Mutual respect must not preclude organizations from engaging in constructive dissent.

  • I think the negotiation and establishment of TOR before agreed to have Partnering. Thus, each organisation will respect TOR and will not influence.

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  • Being an international organisation, the reputation and credibility are more important than anything. The appropriate penalty to staff is required and suggested.

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  • that is why it is important to have a strong constitution and codes of conduct in place

  • loss of autonomy is quiet prevalence because everything an organization does is driven by money or funding

  • in fact, transparency and integrity are essential to guarantee community acceptability of your project in the long run

  • for my organization, the most prevalent risk is conflict of interest. this usually happens due to differences in yearly operating calendars, differences in standards, differences in expectations and so on. the best was to manage conflict of interest is to ensure that the documents like strategic plans, project charters, yearly operating plans are on sync.

  • how does one ensure that in case a partnership fails, they don't close any doors for future partnerships on any future projects?

  • in instances where the partner has damaged another partners reputation, what can be done to bounce back, and gain public trust again?

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  • i think the more complicated a partnership is, the higher the chances that there might be so many risks involved...

  • especially having a constitution and a strategic plan

  • terms of reference are actually vital as they stipulate expectations and responsibilities for all the parties involved

  • each and every partnership will have risks. the goal must be to go for the one with the least risks

  • in fact, the small NGOs may never bounce back especially if they lose the little money they had before the partnership if it does not work as planned

  • I quite agree that smaller organization face the risk of losing autonomy. That's why it's important that they are fully established with a team and a set of policies that guides their decision making.

  • The disadvantage of a small organization entering into a partnership is the risk f losing its focus and freedom and it might lose direction as well.Hence, end up getting mixed up and not achieving its goal.

  • I definely agree that training capacitated staff to understand organizational goals and risks is very important for preventing loss of reputation but also conflict of interest.

  • I have worked several organizations with different capacities, what we noted was that some staff committed conflict of interest with suppliers and sexual exploitations with beneficiaries and they then were dismissed, so, the organization decided to train staff on the job and bylaws/code of conducts of the organization that minimized committing gross misconducts and improved organizational reputation.

  • The most important risk that my organization is likely to identify and mitigate is Implementation challenges.
    It is important that we partner with an organization that honors to the terms of service delivery where our partnership is concerned.

  • I totally agree with you.

  • To make sure I am taking time to build trust, I will discuss potential conflicts with my partners and possible ways to solve them if they arise.

  • One risk my organization encountered in some of the projects we carried out was loss of autonomy, especially with important funders as they would always want you to adapt your data template to theirs. This meant that for every potential huge funder, one will have to change data template.

    We entered into negotiations and thought our harmonization of data tools where we do not have to change our template but could capture additional data using a separate too that to meet the funder's demand.

  • For a private academic institution, the most important risk is loss of reputation. We have enrolled students from other African countries. In addition to that, we have partnerships with large organization who provide scholarships and other source of business for the institution. Being a well known institution that is entrusted to impart knowledge in the young generation, a scandalous event will be a big loss since we will lose a lot of trust from our partners. Parents and guardians will no longer want to their student s to be enrolled in our campus; we will lose donors thus cannot provide scholarships; We will not be point of reference for capacity building for government agencies and private businesses. In addition to this, one of our main core values is ethical practices.

    We mitigate this risk by avoiding partnerships that are not in alignment with our goals. Also, we stick to professionalism through the whole period of partnership. We have a legal team in place that ensures all legal practices are in place before and during the partnership

  • Training staff to understand and identify potential risks. Also, discussing potential risks with potential partners and how to manage them before forming the partnership

  • How does settlement with external organization through arbitration mitigate the impact?

  • I agree with the notion that small start up tends to be embarked by loss of autonomy as a common partnership risk is valid, but as highlighted by the case study of Unai, getting to have an established guidelines and constitution as an organization and consciousness effort of going in line with the mandate of the organization is a major point for consideration. In this regard, it can be advised that organization should not because of prominence and greed for set intention loose track of their value and mandate when engaging in a partnership[p agreement.

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  • It takes time to find and build relationship that leads partnership. Very often, maintaining the partnership is more difficult than starting one.

  • For me I have seen the risk involved with implementation challenges; i.e. issues with culture, leadership styles and systems of organization. There are organization which enters partnership without even any understanding of what is expected of their organization in the partnership. The leaders may not even be implementing acording to any plan, they do what comes.. i mean some organization really mediocre leadership

  • It is really important to have strict code of conduct and highly established firm. so, nothing can go wrong and it may also be safe.

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  • I think that's a very critical point and also where co creation of programs and projects can be a solution.

    Also goin into funding partnership without having a clear goal of the donor organization. This can strain the relationship or be misinterpreted or seen as being incapable of executing or holding on to agreements .

  • The risk of partnering with larger organizations and having them dictate how service delivery needs to be done is real. The donation sometime get tempting and one ends up selling their organizations' values to the devil. As said, it is great to have an organization however small they are to set up bare minimum standard deviation to the norm to make sure they don't lose their dreams just to get funding.

  • My experience with risk have been misappropriation of project implementation fund that resulted to lost of reputation and trust with the funding donor. And secondly conflict of interest from the funder end that led to selection of wrong partners with low capacity and experience.

  • We can identify The conflict of interest risk then manage it with a clear agreement, a shared partnership vision and a roadmap.

  • I agree with you because once an organization image is tarnished it takes time to rebuild it.

  • One of the biggest risk I have come across in partnership is implementation challenge. Most often the partnering organization have a different timeline and method of implementation from ours. This causes a serious delay as we will have to adjust and understand each other before moving forward.

  • This is true. Because the funder tends to be in more control of the business. The small organization can lose autonomy quite fast due to this.

  • i do agree with having a constitution before getting a business partner otherwise it will be difficult to stick to the end goals .

  • While working on project proposals I realized how difficult it can become to remain in your lane by carefully weighing potential opportunities and partnerships against the organizations mission and vision. At times one starts a proposal because of the donor, the amount of funding, previous history with this donor or aparent ease of the proposal requirements rather than weighing whether the opportunity aligns with the organizations vision and mission. A major risk with this is the real effort becomes looking for common factors which merge the interests of the partners and making it work.

  • Another major reason why reputation poses are greater risk for NGOs is because there is very high competition among them as a result market saturation and a poor reputation can quickly resort to reduced funding or loyalty by partners.

  • My organisation take conflict of interest very seriously. When ever its purpose, primary mission or vision is attempted to be tampered with, staff or partner, my organisation addresses the attempt by reminding the perpetrator or its core values, mission, vision and interests. No individual should be bigger than his organisation and no partner whomsoever, should be so powerful as to disrupt the interest or vision of the organisation. except of such interest or vision is proven to have negative effect on the true course of the organisation.

  • Honestly, it is imperative for every enterprise to guard against loss of autonomy when going into partnership of any sort. No doubt a number of factors can tilt the balance in favour of one of the parties thereby undermining the autonomy of the other nevertheless one's autonomy can still be retained iif the necessary checks have been put in place.

  • The most important risk for my organization to identify with is loss of reputation and to avoid this due diligence is being made before going into partnership with any organization. Again, it has always been the norm for my organization to spell out clearly the terms and conditions as well as document every process involved before sealing the partnership agreement. More so, there is a legal unit to help out in ensuring things don't go awry in the arrangement.

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  • Among all of these partnership risks, I think that Loss of Autonomy is the most threatening one for my organization. Since, my organization is a grassroots organization in the health and nutrition sector seeking to partner with well-established NGOs, we expect that these NGOs will exert significant influence on our organization. This may come in the form of data collection sources, interpretation and use or just the scope of the work we're allowed (by way of funding) to perform.

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  • One of the risks we have at our organization is the conflict of interest. While we genuinely want to regulator non profits, government local authority administrators prefer to receive kickbacks from these non profits when they have cut corners

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  • Small organizations have really less autonomy when it comes to partnering

  • For me working with larger partners has been a challenge due to loss of autonomy. This comes when your organization is not fully established to enter into a partnership and ending up losing all the control you had over your company. The larger partners like CISCO would want the small partners to adhere to their way of doing things. This posses a bigger challenge to my organization since we divert from our normal working ways and try to adapt the CISCO way as they have already established architecture to conducting trainings. Since they approve for accreditation of certificate course we have to play by their rules and loss some of our rules.

  • This is a nice approach to take it when dealing with suspicious companies who could have hidden their bad reputation information from you so that they can attract you to entering into partner with them and later finding out their bad reputation.

  • All the Risks levels are great and is something I don't wish it happened to my organization, but in the same time,I think the Risk most likely to managed is "Conflict of Interest Risk" it's very easy to manage compare to other risks levels. Although,my organization hasn't experience any of those risk in terms of partnership with another organization or agencies.

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  • Every organization have their way of doing things documented in their organization structure. These could be their leadership structure or culture. Partnering with big and well established international organization, you risk having been absorbed as the larger organization would like you to employ their organization structures. This is loss of autonomy since you loss control of how your organization does things and employ your partner's way of conducting business. To avoid this you can choose who to partner with and the level of your partner as well as define your roles in the beginning.

  • To some point I would agree with you since conflicting interest can be resolved by proper communication and agreements set.

  • Absolutely - that's why is critical to flesh out policies and have frameworks in place.

  • I am currently working for a non-profit which manages the implementation of scholarship programme. At the moment, we are partnering with another scholarship provider which holds interest in funding students from Indonesia to study in the Netherlands. However, it took almost a year to set up an agreement that is acceptable for both parties due to changes in the leadership of the organisation we are partnering with. Even more than that, we are also facing another challenge in terms of implementing the joint scholarship programme since it involves matching our timelines and selection processes that are rigorous, on which we finally apply some measures of flexibility to accommodate the needs of both parties. I find the Implementation Challenges as the most difficult risk in my project.

  • I have noticed a risk of lack of autonomy with in ones organization operates mostly in small organizations that partner with international Organizations, they don,t have power and decisions are normally dictated by these big organizations which makes partnership bad.

  • In many ways, a partnership between several organizations is like a marriage between two people. Both partnerships and marriages require negotiation, compromise, and teamwork. When partnerships and marriages work well, all of the participants win. However, just like marriages, partnerships have the potential to be difficult, expensive, and occasionally unsuccessful. So, just as you would not enter a marriage without some information about your new spouse, you should not enter a partnership without carefully assessing your new partner.

    We have good news and bad news about assessing potential partners.

    The good news? Once you have completed the stakeholder mapping process that we discussed in the last section, you will have already started the process of assessment.

    The bad news? This process is ongoing. In fact, an effective partnerships team will continue to assess the value of a partnership throughout the lifetime of the partnership.

    In this section, we will explore some of the things you should assess before you enter a partnership.

  • In my experience, reputational loss was one of exposed risk as the partner was in blame of become involved in activity that was not allowed by authority. Proper agreement covering all those issues like breach of agreement/exit/end/ termination of agreements is important and useful. However, thorough assessment/vetting process will be helpful to avoid such risks.

  • Autonomy is one major risk of partnering.
    But also i work on a project that has two major institutions, and the challenge is that the project is time bound, but the processes to acquire funds and materials is very tedious and takes months to execute which negatively affects the work done.

  • I agree that one of the risk smaller organizations face is the loss of autonomy,but if the resources are complimentary, this could be a mitigation to that risk.

  • I have also experienced conflict of interest, but in a different way, in that organizational goals may not align and also have had a situation where one of the key members of the partnership, shared the partnership goals with another organization that she partnered with. This organization not only used the results of the project my organization funded in their report without consulting us, but they also incorporated the goals of the original partnership into theirs and did not ask us to be a part of their potential partnership with other actors.

  • Yes i agree with loss of autonomy, we have noted that when partners have more money than the small organization they want to have overall control of projects. I also believe implementation challenges is another risk, the funder often will push for things to be done on their time table and this could lead to the organization being fund having to do poor quality work due to the pressure of possibly losing funds.

  • It includes strategies to achieved the goals and objectives

  • Frankly speaking I agree that staff capacity building and orientation on organizational goals and risks is very important for preventing loss of reputation but also conflict of interest.

  • It includes strategies to achieved the goals and objectives

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  • Its important to maintain the autonomy of an organisation in partnerships. I think this can be achieved by ensuring that a clear strategic vision and mission of the organisation is clearly laid that maintains the operations of an institution.

    To make sure that I am taking time to build trust with my partners I will share with them progressive processes that are being made on the project.

    The partnership created a 6 person steering committee which demonstrated value in providing transparent communication. Principles not respected are commitment and accountability as well as trust and relationship. The partnership should be able to communicate and ensure that mutual benefit is thoroughly achieved for both partnerships.

    I would approach the school by explaining what our vision and mission is in promoting adult education. Further I would explain what we are looking to achieve as an institution. I would further request the school to also share what they do and request if they are able to see any areas of alignment with us. Finally I would explain what we have on offer and allow the institution to think about it and see if it something that would interest them.

  • Being that we partner with NGOs and looking forward to international agencies, the risk of autonomy and loss of reputation is very important why because we are building a new belief system in our society hence our reputation has to be prompt and firm also we cannot afford to lose control of what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it.

  • My organization's risk is that of difference in our culture (modes of operation) and Financial Year

  • I agree that one of the risk smaller organizations face is the loss of autonomy,but if the resources are complimentary, this could be a mitigation to that risk.

  • In a partnership to scale up production in a processing project. We have identified a technical partner who is in the private sector. However the same partner has a production line in the same business we want to venture into. We anticipate a conflict of interest on the technical partner side because he has products similar to the ones we are planning to produce. However this partner is ideal since they have the capacity and know-how in this kind of production.

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  • I am working with a large international non-profit organization. Loss of reputation is the main risk for my organization. So my organization has clear and specific business rules for the partnership. My organization values accountability, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness and joint co-creation activities when partnering with any organization. If any loss of reputation threats are incurs due to the partnership then immediately take action as per the contingency plan of the organization.

  • I am working with a large international non-profit organization. Loss of reputation is the main risk for my organization. So my organization has clear and specific business rules for the partnership. My organization values accountability, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness and joint co-creation activities when partnering with any organization. If any loss of reputation threats are incurs due to the partnership then immediately take action as per the contingency plan of the organization.

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  • I am working with a large international non-profit organization. Loss of reputation is the main risk for my organization. So my organization has clear and specific business rules for the partnership. My organization values accountability, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness and joint co-creation activities when partnering with any organization. If any loss of reputation threats are incurs due to the partnership then immediately take action as per the contingency plan of the organization.

  • In my experience the smaller organisation or entity in the partnership suffers the most especially in the aspect of loss of identity and autonomy hence the wisdom of getting a constituted mode of operation before entering a partnership resonates deeply with me

  • I've also had experience with this , I think an effective way to tackle it would be to have a consensus on an M.O.U at the onset of the partnerships where roles and functions are clearly defined

  • Reputation is very crucial especially with our organization which works with communities directly.

  • Loss of reputation risk is manageable since our organization trains and retains staffs.

  • I would say reputational risk poses the greatest challenge. My organisation is a nonprofit government parastatal. Already, people do not readily trust the government. And once we lose the trust of the people, it will be difficult to gain their trust again.

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  • I have come across this kind of risk, a good code of ethics that is professionally trained on and distributed is particularly important. I am doing this course because I would like to start a partnership with a betting company to reduce illegal betting and match manipulation through training and education of players, referees and administrators

  • One notable risk that my organization must identify, manage and mitigate is loss of reputation as some organizations support beneficiaries that are not environmentally friendly which might affect our implementation.

  • This is true. I think your organization would have to exorcise itself from the government to gain public trust. Also, people, largely your beneficiaries as the case may be, might think your organization does not have the autonomy to self govern.

  • I share same though, I see two risks such as Loss of identity and loss of autonomy

  • As small organisation who work at health, we lose our reputation because the governement like to demonstrate the achievement of project is always from Governement and they forgot to demonstrate a relationship and logo also.

  • I totally agree with you because we have a same problem in the past to manage the risk of partnerships. Lose an autonomy, an visibility are the high risks that we have encountered.

  • The smaller organisation or entity in the partnership suffers the most especially in the aspect of loss of identity and autonomy hence the wisdom of getting a constituted mode of operation before entering a partnership resonates deeply with me

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  • The smaller organisation or entity in the partnership suffers the most especially in the aspect of loss of identity and autonomy hence the wisdom of getting a constituted mode of operation before entering a partnership resonates deeply with me

  • I agree, I think if you don't do the early work of scoping and building the partnership you may deviate from the original mission. Each member of the partnership needs to have clear goals and assess where those goals align, and where they may differ.

  • would be conflict of interest because large companies are for monetary value gain whereas we are upto environmental gains

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  • As a well know International Organization, our reputation is the greatest risk in partnering. We mitigate that by an in depth assessment and review of the potential partner.

  • As a well know International Organization, our reputation is the greatest risk in partnering. We mitigate that by an in depth assessment and review of the potential partner.

  • Yeah you are absolutely right about this but i fill for small companies or organization i feel there should be standard of operation which would have been stated before the partnership takes place and i feel things need to be documented and signed incase there is any dispute in future

  • I believe one of the greater risk is loss of reputation, If the company losses it reputation on what they stand for. they tend to loose other partners and also very difficult to partner with other organizations in the future.

  • Before venturing into any partnership you should truly check the risks

  • This is interesting to note because we have some organizations that has the upper influence.

  • To build my trust with any partner organization, i must do a background check about the organization. More so, if I know someone within the organization, that is seen as advantage for me to work closely with and can be my contact person.

  • Resources drain. As a student/youth organization that is based on a nonprofit principals, I cant deny the fact that our locals organizations are mostly limited in their resources, such as human resources, funding, etc. Therefore, i think a failed relationship would damage the most in that area

  • From our working experience, the major risks we encountered in partnering were conflict of interest and loss of autonomy. This happened when we partnered with the government counterpart in the security project. While we targeted our efforts to achieving project outcome and impact, our partners were moving in the opposite direction focusing on getting the DSAs. Because the security officers were in charge of all issues related to security in the project, they sometimes threatened to stop the project if we would not give them fund for providing technical support. To secure the project we gave them fund to help them provide technical support. Consequently, we realized there was over-budgeting due to investing more money on one project output due to fear of our project being burnt by security officers who had strong power to change our course. This led to fund which eventually led to failure to support other project outputs due to lack of fund.

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