02 Think Shared Value Simply speaking, shared value is the practice of creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. One of the things I did differently when I started thinking about relationships, was to move beyond the transactional benefits that they may bring. We need to look at our relationships with fresh eyes and understand them, their organisation goals and vision, to explore how you could support these and add value. One of the exercises I enjoy doing is researching partnership prospects before making contact, jotting down a few ways I could add value to a possible partnership. This provides a good footing before the engagement starts. 03 Think Bigger Do not limit your organisation to a set number of partners. The more aligned partners that are identified to support your business, NPO or project, the more this will enable open innovation, sharing of risks and resources for the BIG BANG impact we all want. Be brave and courageous in your business, cause, and goals, and open it up to the possibilities of working together to make it a reality. Working with multiple partners, of course comes with risks and challenges. However, through good partnership building, these can be avoided and overcome early in the partnership stages. More on this in a future blog.
This is what we are trying to promote at ThinkLink, the simple magic of multi- stakeholder partnerships to deliver extraordinary results towards the sustainable development goals. 01 Think Partnerships Yes, when I said simple, I meant it. the word Partnership barely exists in most corporate vocabularies. We encourage organisations, start- ups, corporates, key relationship brokers to just lip-serviced within many of these organisations; shaky in its intentions and hardly seen as a powerful growth strategy to be included in its fabric. One of the main reasons that can be cited for this is that “most of us work in environments that encourage a sense of competition and separation, rather than collaboration and cooperation” (The SDG Partnership Guidebook, 2020). "Most of us work in environments that encourage a sense of competition and separation, rather than collaboration and cooperation” (The SDG Partnership Guidebook, 2020). In my experience working with these organisations, one of the things I noticed that needs shape-shifting is our language, and how this serves as a barrier to our ability to expand and solve the problems we are so passionate about. Whilst they have their perspective on point and know the depth of problems they are trying to solve, their ability to build relationships that matter is where the difficulties lie. Sadly, the idea of partnership is include the word partnerships within the culture of your organisation. Take the time to understand the meaning of partnerships, define it for yourself, think about what you need to do to become partnership ready, include it into your strategy documents and relationship meetings. This simple and effective tip will set a a new way of thinking and viewing relationships, impact, and possibilities. Try it and see how many more opportunities open for you
So, there you go, our three simple steps to begin your partnership journey today!
As a closing remark, remember, all the ideas, people, technology, institutions, and resources already exist within the matrix, waiting to be unlocked to support your mission, and the task is how you choose to engage them, and combine them in new and innovative ways. Keep thinking about partnerships, keep practicing how you might add value to them and do not limit yourself and the scale of possibilities that exist. We hope this piece was helpful to you! We look forward to sharing more content to help you grow in your partnership journey.
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