Strategic Restructuring: Alliances, Partnerships and Mergers

What is Strategic Restructuring?

According to La Piana Consulting, “Strategic restructuring occurs when two or more independent organizations establish an ongoing relationship to increase the administrative efficiency and/or further the programmatic mission of one or more of the participating organizations through shared, transferred, or combined services, resources, or programs. Strategic restructuring ranges from alliances like jointly managed programs and consolidated administrative functions to organizational integrations, like full-scale mergers. Strategic restructuring is a tool available to nonprofit organizations interested in meeting environmental challenges, addressing organizational problems, strengthening services, and better accomplishing their mission.”  

Online Tools, How-to Guides and Practical Resources

Steps for Considering and Creating an Alliance, The Fieldstone Alliance
www.fieldstonealliance.org/client/tools_you_can_use/07-22-09_forming_alliances.cfm
Is an alliance right for your organization? Who should you recruit and how? This gives you an overview of the steps for considering and creating an alliance at the lower intensity end of the partnership continuum—coordination and collaboration. The information is abbreviated from Chapter 2 of the book, Forming Alliances: Working Together to Achieve Mutual Goals by Linda Hoskins and Emil Angelica.

The Collaboration Challenge, Leader to Leader Institute
www.druckerfoundation.com/tools/collab_challenge/challenge.html
The Leader to Leader Institute offers several tools to help nonprofit organizations further their missions through strategic alliances with other organizations. These resources can be used, alone or in combination, to encourage your board, volunteers, and staff to consider carefully whether and how to develop alliances.

Collaboration Factors Inventory: Assessing Your Collaboration's Strengths and Weaknesses
www.fieldstonealliance.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=43
This inventory is a practical tool for discovering how your collaboration is doing on the twenty factors that research has shown influence success (see Collaboration: What Makes It Work).  It takes about fifteen minutes to complete. It can be distributed to a small group of leaders in the collaborative, during a general meeting, or via mail to all members for the most complete picture. You can tally your score manually or online.  The tool includes complete instructions for administering, scoring, and interpreting the results, plus a definition of collaboration and descriptions of the twenty success factors.

Are You a Good Candidate for a Merger?
www.fieldstonealliance.org/client/tools_you_can_use/08-24-09_merger_self-assess.cfm
To improve services and ensure survival, nonprofits are increasingly considering alliance options, including merger. But, before going down this path, it’s important to assess your organization’s readiness and suitability as a potential partner. This article from Fieldstone Alliance’s “Nonprofit Tools You Can Use” can help you consider the most critical questions.

Learn More About Strategic Restructuring

Strategic Restructuring, La Piana Associates
www.lapiana.org/Strategic-Restructuring/
Every organization strives to anticipate or respond proactively to market challenges and opportunities. Strategic restructuring refers to a continuum of collaborative partnerships, from informal partnerships and joint programming to mergers and shared back-office administration. La Piana Consulting, through its foundation-sponsored Strategic Solutions project, was the nation's first resource on all aspects of nonprofit strategic restructuring.  More than a decade later, the economic landscape is forcing many nonprofit organizations to consider strategic restructuring for the first time. For lasting success, nonprofit mergers should not be approached as a last ditch survival tactic during an economic downturn but a strategic opportunity for compatible organizations to join forces for greater social impact.

Fieldstone Alliance Nonprofit Guide to Forming Alliances: Working Together to Achieve Mutual Goals
www.fieldstonealliance.org/productdetails.cfm?SKU=069466
Hoskins, Linda and Angelica, Emil. Don’t waste time on complex partnerships when simpler alliances can be more effective. In Forming Alliances, authors Hoskins and Angelica help you understand and strategically form alliances that work at a lower level of intensity. This concise guide will help you:

• Recognize the wide range of ways that you can work with others
• Decide what kind of alliance you should create given your circumstances and needs
• Plan and start an alliance
• Strengthen an existing alliance

Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Ed.
www.fieldstonealliance.org/productdetails.cfm?SKU=069326
Mattessich, Paul, Murray-Close, Marta, and Monsey, Barbara. Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Edition. What makes the difference between a collaboration's failure or success? Collaboration: What Makes It Work, Second Edition answers this question with an up-to-date and in-depth review of collaboration research. This new edition also includes The Wilder Collaboration Factors Inventory.
New tools not included in the first edition:

• The Collaboration Factors Inventory, a practical tool for assessing how your collaboration is doing on the twenty success factors, along with instructions on interpretation
• Examples of how organizations have used the inventory and a case study illustrating how one collaboration assessed itself and used the results to take action to improve its success
• New ideas for using the factors based on examples of how others used the first edition

Collaboration Handbook: Creating, Sustaining, and Enjoying the Journey
www.fieldstonealliance.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=4
Winer, Michael and Ray, Karen. Here's how to overcome obstacles to create a successful collaboration! Whether you're working on homelessness or building a rural farm cooperative, the Collaboration Handbook tells you what to expect and how to meet challenges in a way that strengthens your group and the results you're after. You'll learn how (and why) to:

• Find and attract the right people
• Build trust among diverse groups
• Change conflict into cooperation
• Select the best structure for your collaboration
• Keep people involved, enthusiastic, and motivated
• Energize your supporters with a powerful collaborative vision
• Deepen the roots of collaboration for lasting success

The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook: The Leader’s Guide to Considering, Negotiating, and Executing a Merger
www.lapiana.org/Research-Publications/Publications/Books/
La Piana, David. The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook Part I: The Leader's Guide to Considering, Negotiating, and Executing a Merger shows that merger is not a last ditch survival move but an important strategic tool for organizations focused on doing their best for their community. From assessing reasons and readiness, to finding a partner, to negotiating the best path, to budgeting and implementation, The Workbook Part I guides you through the maze of options with a steady hand. Based on experience with more than sixty mergers, this handbook is the perfect starting point for any nonprofit exploring a possible merger—and a basic resource for all nonprofit managers.

The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook Part II: Unifying the Organization after a Merger
www.lapiana.org/Research-Publications/Publications/Books/
La Piana Associates. The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook, Part II: Unifying the Organization after a Merger can help take you the rest of the way clearly, manageably, and planfully. Using a practical, hands-on approach, supplemented by numerous examples from La Piana Associates' research and experience, the Workbook Part II addresses how to effectively integrate organizations that have merged.  Written for the nonprofit leader, this book helps organizations create a comprehensive plan to achieve integration — bringing together people, programs, processes, and systems from two (or more) organizations into a single, unified whole. It addresses large strategic issues, as well as small practical ones — providing a roadmap to successful post-merger integration.  Included with the book is a free CD-ROM which provides a detailed template for an integration plan, as well as sample integration plans, worksheets, checklists, tips and quotes from leaders of merged organizations, all of which will help organizations in implementing their own merger integration process.

Nonprofit Mergers and Alliances: A Strategic Planning Guide
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471180882?v=glance&s=books
McLaughlin, Thomas. This award-winning book is a clear, practical, step-by-step guide to the merger process--from preliminary considerations to actual implementation for nonprofit organizations. With more and more nonprofits considering a merger, this is a book to have on one’s bookshelf ready for the day a merger or alliance opportunity presents itself.

© Public Health Institute, Center for Civic Partnerships 2010

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