Partnership Pitfalls in Nonprofit Organizations

Case Study: Avoiding Partnership Pitfalls On its official website, La Piana Consulting identifies its core mission as improving leadership and management practices within the nonprofit sector so that nonprofits can change the world. As noted in the Andreasen & Kotler (2007), La Piana is motivated by his belief that nonprofits function best when they are run like for-profit organizations.

Strategic planning, business planning, corporate restructuring, change management, and governance are all examples of services La Piana’s firm provides to nonprofits that have been, until now, traditionally associated with for-profit entities.

Some of La Piana’s client firms include Habitat for Humanity, which it enabled to engage in organization-wide restructuring to the NAACP, which La Piana assisted in enabling the organization to refine its vision and mission statement, centered around the core tenants of “Economic Sustainability, Education, Health, Public Safety and Criminal Justice, and Voting Rights and Political Representation” (“NAACP,” 2018, par.1).

What is particularly noteworthy about this phrasing is the fact that it is clear that La Pina ensured that the organization stayed true to its original values but created a new, more concise, and future-focused agenda to lead the historic civil rights group into the future. Commensurate with its belief that nonprofits must be run like a business, La Piana also stressed that the NAACP must engage in benchmarking, ensuring that the newly-defined values had specific quality standards to achieve.

“For each goal, the NAACP identified specific indicators it will use to gauge its progress over time using U.S. government data…stated as a measure of equity” (“NAACP,” 2018, par.1). A common roadblock that nonprofits run into is that many of the goals that they have set for themselves are intangible.

But by using measures such as the number of African-Americans to graduate college versus the general United States population, there is at least some way to quantify the NAACP’s desire to achieve greater racial equality in America. La Piana’s work with organizations also includes facilitating the merger between the Women’s Center of San Joaquin County (the Women’s Center) and Family and Youth Services of San Joaquin County (FAYS).

It is conventional wisdom in the business world that mergers often fail because of clashing organizational cultures and values. In the case of this particular merger, the efforts were successful but only because of La Piana’s intervention to create structural bridges between complementary organizational actors and to ensure that synergies were generated by the merger in a positive manner. Once again, viewing the nonprofit as a business was deemed critical.

There was a need to redefine a new, yet common purpose that could satisfy members of both formerly separate organizations.

This is not to say that the fact that the organizations were nonprofits were ignored, in fact the Women’s Center praised La Piana because it recognized the fact that, “All our staff and volunteers are thirsty to learn about our new expanded scope of services, and we’re taking time to make sure that they have the training and case management support they need” (“A Cross-Disciplinary Partnership,” 2018, par.7).

Volunteer service workers may need a different type of orientation in their new duties and standard operating procedures versus seasoned professional veterans. Thus firms such as La.