The value of a partnership agreement can’t be overstated. Just taking the time to talk through the various parts of an agreement can do wonders for your working relationship with your carefully-selected implementing partner. And when it’s written down, the agreement will remind you both of what you wanted to do together and how – a really important thing when staff turnover is regular.
Elements of a Partnership Agreement
1. Who We Are
Explain who each agency is, highlighting its purpose, mission, vision, and values. It’s important to identify and stress the common aspects of your visions and values. This doesn’t need to be long, but it should be adequate to remind you both of why you’re working together, as well as to explain to any outsiders (i.e. donors) what it is that is bringing you together.
2. What We Want to Do
Usually you will have a project plan that you can refer to in this section with a line, “For more details, please see Project X Documents“. But it’s nice to highlight in the agreement itself the big-picture aspects of the project plans: its goal and objectives (or its impact and outcomes). You may also wish to include are a brief description of the sector in which you will be working. The point is to create a user-friendly document with enough information to make it work on its own without overwhelming the reader with details that they can find elsewhere.
3. Representation
The beauty of a partnership agreement is that it brings out the hidden assumptions that you may have about working together. One of those common assumptions is that the top executive of your partnering agency will be actively involved in running the partnership, when that may not be your partner’s plan. This is a chance to talk about who from each agency can and should be the partnership representative. The representative should have enough authority to make relevant decisions on behalf of his or her agency, as it’s incredibly irritating to be regularly meeting with someone who continually has to check in with his or her superiors to move forward.
Generally, if you have a VP, director, or manager handling the partnership representation for your agency, expect your partner to have someone from a similar organizational level representing their organization.
4. Information Exchange
There are lots of questions to answer in this section. How often will you meet face-to-face? Who will conduct monitoring visits and when? How often do you expect to hear from your partner representative informally? What about reports – you be asking your partner to prepare them for you, vice-versa, or will you be preparing them jointly? Who is responsible for preparing consolidated reports for donors? How will you create and share lessons learned with each other?
I like to come away with a meeting and reporting schedule that includes the person responsible for each.
5. Decision-Making
Decision-making can be one of the thorniest areas of a partnership, but talking about it ahead of time and putting down your ideas in writing will help to avoid many of the common pitfalls.
First of all, decide who has the responsibility for making individual decisions. Obviously at some level, individuals are going to need to be as free as possible to make decisions based on what they are experiencing on the ground.
Then talk about how you will go about making joint decisions. Sometimes voting works as long as you’ve decided ahead of time who from each agency can vote. Consensus can be a powerful way of arriving at a decision between partners, but it does take time. Make sure you talk about your expectations and arrive at a process that you can both live with.
Finally, talk about how you will resolve any conflicts that come up. Will one agency be the final authority on issues that absolutely cannot be resolved? How will you handle the unfortunate circumstance where one of you wishes to terminate the agreement? What kind of notice will you expect to give and receive? It may not be pleasant to think about, but it’s better to do so when you are on amicable terms rather than when a conflict is colouring your perceptions of each other.
6. Resources
Another sticky area of partnerships is that of resourcing, or who is putting what into the pot. Talk about any personnel you expect your agency and your partner to dedicate to your joint venture. Discuss financial resources and how they will be handled. And while you are talking about personnel and money, consider including some ideas on how they will be managed in the project. Will one agency be responsible for overseeing the personnel working on the project? Who will they report to? What financial accountability standards will be maintained? (Check your donors’ financial accountability expectations here, which you’ll want to address.)
7. Duration
Set a date for the partnership to start, and another for it to end. Talk about how you may amend the agreement. Often this is quite simple: if one of the agencies wishes to make an amendment to the agreement, they let the other know and set up a meeting to discuss it.
8. Signatures
Once you’ve discussed these elements and written down your own approach to handling them, it’s time to sign your agreement. Try to get the highest signing authority possible for each agency, as well as the signature of the person who will be directly responsible for the partnership and/or project.
Developing a partnership agreement can take longer than we expect, but it’s well-worth the effort.
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Related
Finding a project partner
Partnering with a bigger organization
Partnering with a smaller organization
Filed under: partnership | Tagged: partnership, partnership agreement
