What first comes to mind when you think of funder collaboration?
I sometimes get asked whether the Funders Collaborative Hub is mainly focused on grant-makers pooling their resources together.
Pooled funds can offer lots of benefits, whether it’s tackling an issue at scale, distributing grants more efficiently or working with partners who bring a particular area of expertise.
But formal mechanisms like this are just the tip of the iceberg of funder collaboration.
Our latest analysis of the Hub’s data explores seven different ways that funders are working to achieve more together.
Exploring the Hub
The Funders Collaborative Hub now features more than 140 funder collaboration opportunities.
As the amount of information being shared on the Hub grows, we want to make sure it’s quick and easy for funders to find opportunities that are relevant to their interests.
That’s why we’ve recently made some improvements to our collaboration opportunity search page.
Alongside a free-text search option, you can now filter opportunities by:
- Issue – funders are collaborating on more than 40 different issues, from ‘Advice’ to ‘Young people’
- Location – there are collaborations working in every UK nation and region, as well as internationally
- Stage of collaboration – the Hub includes information about existing collaborations, emerging opportunities to collaborate, and learning shared by past collaborations
- Activities – with this new filter you can see the practical ways that funders are working together, from information-sharing to pooled funds.
How are funders currently collaborating?
Our ‘Activities’ filter provides a new dataset that we hope will offer some useful insights into the overall landscape of funder collaboration.
These are the seven ways that funders are collaborating.
1. Aligning processes
A small number of existing collaborations include work to align processes between funders. You can find them here.
Although few in number, this type of collaboration can be powerful – as shown by the growing influence of the DEI Data Standard. By creating a shared framework to collect and analyse diversity, equity and inclusion data, this collaboration is helping grant-makers to identify and target funding to address structural inequalities. All the documentation for the DEI Data Standard is hosted on the Funders Collaborative Hub, where it has been viewed more than 5,600 times in the last 12 months.
2. Co-ordinating funding
When several funders share an interest in tackling a particular issue, it isn’t always necessary to formally pool their funding. Sometimes, informal ways of co-ordinating who funds what can achieve similar benefits, while keeping governance arrangements simple.
That’s what a group of youth funders have set out to do, to strengthen infrastructure support in the youth sector. Their collaboration enables the funders to collectively consider the infrastructure functions needed by the sector, and align their efforts to support these.
You can explore all existing collaborations that are co-ordinating funding here.
Lots of funders have ambitions for systemic change, but few can hope to achieve this on their own.
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3. Joint research
If you’re thinking about commissioning some research to inform your work as a funder, there are likely to be others who have similar questions they want to explore.
By working together, funders can not only increase the resources available to produce high-quality research, they can help to ensure that it meets the needs of a wider range of stakeholders.
One recent example comes from a group of funders who were interested in exploring the routes to power and influence for small and grassroots women’s organisations. Another is some work in Scotland to investigate how attitudes and practices relating to charities’ reserves might affect the sector’s resilience.
The recommendations of joint research can also provide a starting point for funders to explore potential opportunities for further collaboration.
These existing collaborations all include an element of joint research.
4. Pooled funding
As we’ve seen, there’s a lot more to funder collaboration than pooled funding, but it can certainly be one useful tool in the toolbox.
As with any tool, it’s vital to understand whether it’s the right one for the job. How will it help you to achieve the impact you’re trying to have as funders?
The Gannochy Trust and Perth and Kinross Council saw that by each separately funding similar work, they were inadvertently fuelling a climate of competition, rather than collaboration between service providers, as well as adding to the administration involved. That’s why they decided to create a single fund through their Strategic Youth Work Partnership, sharing the costs 50:50.
This is just one of more than 20 existing pooled funds currently featured on the Hub.
5. Influencing policy and practice
Lots of funders have ambitions for systemic change, but few can hope to achieve this on their own. Shifting the dial on any important issue usually requires long-term strategic alliances, where funders (often in partnership with other types of organisations) can align both funding and non-financial resources towards a shared mission.
There are currently more than 30 existing collaborations on the Hub that include work to influence policy or practice. Farming the Future is a collaboration that is taking a strategic and experimental approach to using funders’ collective power to build a better food and farming system, by pooling knowledge and networks as well as funding.
In addition to influencing outwards, funders are collaborating to drive change within the funding sector itself. For example, the Grant Givers' Movement seeks ‘to challenge the status quo on issues such as where endowments are invested, where power lies, systems change and the role of philanthropy in tackling some of society’s most pressing problems’.
6. Peer learning
Peer learning is a common focus for funder collaborations. With more than 50 examples on the Hub, it can take many different forms and often takes place alongside other types of collaborative activity.
The Participatory Grantmaking Community connects hundreds of practitioners around the world, while LocalMotion is an action learning partnership between six funders and six local communities.
The Hub is helping many of these collaborations to share their learning more widely too, through our collection of case studies.
7. Information-sharing
More than half of the existing collaborations on the Hub involve information-sharing. For some, such as East Midlands Funders Forum, this is the main role they set out to play.
Regional funder forums and issue-based networks like those convened by ACF can offer an accessible entry point for funders who want to understand how their work fits into the wider landscape.
Many of the more formal and strategic collaborations between funders might never have come about if it wasn’t for the relationships and insights developed through these informal networks. For example, following discussions at an ACF network meeting, three funders worked together to commission research mapping the UK women and girls sector and its funding.
What do you want to collaborate on?
If this blog has made you think of some ways that collaboration – in any of its forms – could help you further your aims as a funder, why not add a collaboration opportunity to the Hub?
