Shedding light on how to support impactful, transformational collaboration

There is increasing appetite among Philanthropic funders to leverage the power of partnership to contribute to more effective, efficient, innovative, and transformational change. However, we are still learning how best funders can encourage, support, and fund collaboration. 

Porticus is one of the Foundations that is experimenting with and examining its approach to funding and supporting collaboration. In the last five years it has invested significantly in training its staff in partnership brokering, and encouraging collaboration between grantees by funding groups of grantees to work together in ‘programmes’. Given these significant investments, Porticus sought the help of TPI to reflect on the extra value that this partnering approach has brought and how that added value can be increased. 

This report presents the findings of TPI’s analysis across 14 Porticus programmes. From this analysis, the report identified four specific enablers of successful collaboration funded by philanthropy – these should be of interest to all funders keen to support effective collaboartion. These key enablers are linked to the important role of Programme Managers and Learning Partners; the need for thoughtful, iterative design for collaboration; allocation of dedicated resources to support the operational requirements of collaboration; and supportive institutional strategy and processes for programme approvals. 

The report also identifies the critical importance of strong partnership Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) approaches, highlighting the specific ways in which MEL approaches could be further developed to support and measure successful collaboration.