In approximately one year, the two national organizations and their respective affiliates built a list of one million new pro-choice supporters, educated those supporters about reproductive choice, built technological capacity of local affiliates to communicate with newly identified supporters, created opportunities for local affiliates to work in partnership with each other, and made the list of new supporters available and accessible to NARAL and PPFA affiliates and to others. The lessons they shared in how they handled their partnership and what they learned about collaborating have value for any organization engaged in a collaborative project.

The partners divided the project workload along two major conceptual lines. Since NARAL had more organizing expertise, the partners agreed NARAL should take the lead on building the "Choice ID" database. NARAL hired the list management vendor, a direct mail expert and telemarketers. PPFA had more affiliates, and thus a significant interest in training and capacity building, so they hired the consultants to conduct affliate technology assessments and build a database to house the names. This clear division of labor kept the project from having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Give Everyone a Place at the Table

Three primary committees drove the project: a managing committee, a direct mail committee and a technology committee. Each committee included national and affiliate representation from both organizations, along with the funder and consultants. All parties agreed that having representation on all committees kept lines of communication open and informed the project from all necessary perspectives.

While it may have felt like a set of painful prenuptial agreements, the partners developed policies that made this “marriage” work. For instance, since both organizations had invested years of time and money in developing their constituent base, “trading member lists” was neither comfortable nor necessary. The partners agreed that a neutral third party vendor should compare NARAL and PPFA national and affiliate lists against the voter files, a process that allowed each partner to keep private the names on their original lists of members, activists and donors.

The partners took additional fairness measures both to make the organizations comfortable and to make the project work. The direct mail pieces were jointly created. Recipients were given the option to mail a reply card, call an 800 number or visit the Pro-Choice Voice Web site (www.prochoicevoice.org/about). Respondants were divided equally between the two organizations so both groups could build their constituent base without bombarding the same respondent with direct mail from both the national organizations and their local affiliates.

Policies were also put in place so communication with the newly identified pro-choice citizens could be coordinated over the long term. Notification provisions in a “list user agreement” help partners continue to coordinate their message campaigns so they don’t overlap efforts. List use policies also encourage collaboration to save costs and reach more people. Lisa Horowitz, NARAL’s Director of Constituency Development, admitted that it was a “headache sometimes making these agreements,” but a necessary consequence of having “a shared commodity.”

The $8 million in grants surely contributed to this program’s success. Funding was sufficient to both build capacity and support implementation. Sufficient resources also impacted cooperation around message development. Both parties agree that having experts, particularly on the direct mail strategy, added significant value to the partnership, both because those consultants brought so much expertise and because they presented new, concrete data. Had both organizations not had money for focus groups and polling, staff at both organizations concurred, there could have been more fodder for disagreement about message development.

As successful as this collaboration was, the partners do not think they did everything right. Here’s a short compilation of reflections they had after the initial project was over:

1. Dedicate a manager to oversee a collaborative project.

   Each organization had people tasked to lead the project, but those people had substantive other jobs to do. Staff considered that they might have needed a full time manager dedicated to this project.

2. Discuss how to handle conflict over jointly hired consultants.

   Divvying up the work into two frameworks (identifying pro-choice supporters and building affiliate technology capacity) had many advantages, but it also meant that in each instance, only one group had the management helm in negotiating with their respective vendors. When issues arose about timelines and deliverables, the group not in charge of that contract had no venue to impact the vendor relationship. Before entering a similar arrangement, the partners said they might prepare strategies for how to deal with vendor problems.

3. Bring project participants together to acknowledge the meaning of the partnership and the project.

   NARAL and PPFA brought all stakeholders in for a meeting midway through the project. The staff we interviewed were across-the-board effusive about the impact of having brought everyone into a face-to-face environment where each could acknowledge what a formidable task they had taken on together. Providing a forum in which participants could articulate an appreciation of each other’s strengths, both in terms of contributions to the partnership and the choice movement brought immeasurable value.

4. Look forward to what partnership can bring.

   PPFA’s Watts said that it is not uncommon for organizations to enter partnerships with a “let’s make lemonade out of lemons” attitude. She thinks PPFA was probably a bit cautious going in, but has come full circle and now “looks for opportunities to [partner].” Her experience, combined with the other lessons described here, implies that the attitudes organizations bring into and hold onto during a partnership have significant impacts—both positive and negative—on the success of a project.

As if it were not enough to meet all their explicit goals, project organizers said that the positive impacts on their organizations far surpassed their expectations. Both organizations received supplemental funding from the Turner Foundation and new funding from other foundations to continue their collaborative work; they enhanced their expertise about direct mail, databases, and technology capacity building; and they emerged with improved relationships between nationals and affiliates, between the two national organizations, and between NARAL and PPFA affiliates in the states. More specifically, the two organizations experienced these impacts:

• New Funding

  The Turner Foundation provided a new 3-year grant that will enhance the capacity of more local affiliates of each organization. The partners also received funding from additional sources for related projects, including an Organizational Effectiveness grant from the Packard Foundation to build “Tools for Choice,”a training extranet for staff of national and local affiliates of both organizations.

• Enhanced Expertise

  Because this project was so multifaceted, and because all teams had full representation, everyone learned more -- about direct mail, about databases, about capacity building, about contracting with consultants.

  Working with consultants apparently was chock full of lessons for staff of the national organizations, who in hindsight now realize that outsourcing technology support presented as many problems as it solved. PPFA’s Watts said that in other ventures, they will consider more closely the value of bringing such expertise in-house, both to deliver better direct service than a consultant could, and to keep their hand on the pulse of the affiliates’ needs and challenges

  Watts added that it is not often that affiliates have the resources to work with expert consultants;PCV gave local affiliates the opportunity to learn both content expertise, and more about the process of working relationships with consultants.

• Insights Into Their Own Organization

  Working so closely with another organization exposed staff to new ways of working that made them think more creatively about how to get tasks done in their own agency. PPFA’s McDonough said the project’s pace was so demanding, it required PPFA to function in ways it had never performed before. The intra-agency coordination that PCV required helped PPFA departments communicate and collaborate more efficiently and has helped them define more effective cross-teams for other projects.

  Cecile Richards, project manager at the Turner Foundation, thought the project brought about significant shifts for how some Planned Parenthood affiliates viewed the connection between advocacy and direct service. Quoting an affiliate in Georgia, Richards recalled a Planned Parenthood Executive Director saying, “At the beginning of this project, I didn’t know what we would do with an organizer, now I can’t imagine not having one.”

• Improved Relationships

  Both groups reported having stronger relationships with their affiliates, enhanced relationships between national organizations and improved relationships between NARAL and PPFA affiliates in the states.

  When we interviewed Watts, she commented that on her way to work that very morning, she was thinking about how PPFA should mobilize its field network to respond to legislation about to be introduced on Capitol Hill: “I thought: I have to call Lisa [at NARAL] so we can figure out how to coordinate this at the grassroots level. ”This effort has nothing to do with the PCV project, she explained, but the project changed the way they work together. She wants there to be a sustained impact – “What if I left, what if Lisa left? I want us to establish communication between our two groups as a normal practice.”

All people interviewed for this article communicated that the project was challenging, sometimes painfully so. Turner Foundation’s Cecile Richards summarized a perhaps obvious, but nevertheless poignant truth that undoubtedly contributed to PCV’s success:

“[NARAL and PPFA] had to be willing to give things up for the partnership to work, for the project to work. They could not take sole credit. They could not each control the project. They had to put project goals above the funding-driven institutional predisposition to say ‘look what our organization can do’… I give them a tremendous amount of credit.”

The Benton Foundation would like to thank Cecile Richards at the Turner Foundation, Debra Erenberg and Lisa Horowitz at the NARAL Foundation, and Dot McDonough and Connie Watts at PPFA for sharing what they learned with other aspiring and practicing collaborators.

Lisa Silverberg is an organizational development consultant to the nonprofit sector. She has significant expertise in strategic communications technology planning and implementation.