My successful "failed" collaboration

“Growth and comfort do not co-exist.” This quote from former IBM CEO Ginny Rometti comes to mind when I think about collaboration. It’s rarely comfortable - and when it is, we should worry whether we’re achieving anything meaningful.

Certainly, in my experience of collaboration, the parts that have been least comfortable have been the most transformational and impactful. 

In early 2022, I shared an emerging collaboration opportunity on the Funders Collaborative Hub. The act of sharing it was not comfortable. I felt insecure: what if no one wants to work on the issue with me? I felt exposed: is someone else already doing this, better? And I felt anxious: do I have what it takes to see this through?  

And now, several months on, I have just asked the Hub to take the opportunity down, because I think my idea wasn’t quite right (more on this below). This elicited a whole new range of uncomfortable emotions.

From my conversations with colleagues, both within the foundation I work for and in other foundations, I know this kind of self-doubt is not unusual - and my theory is that it is holding back a lot of people with transformational ideas from putting themselves out there. Add intersectionality and the specific additional barriers faced by people because of their gender, sexuality, class and/or race, and I suspect that we’re missing out on the most revolutionary ideas.

For those people, I wanted to share this story of a collaboration that didn’t meet my original aims, but ended up having value that I didn’t anticipate.

For some context, my collaboration idea focused on funder processes. The intention was to identify some other funders to test how we can coordinate forms, due diligence and ‘funder plus’ offerings. The aim was to streamline the experience for applicants and grantees, and ultimately to improve the impact of our funding.

Here's what I shared on the Hub:

I quickly found that my first fear - the insecurity that no one would want to work on this issue - was ill-founded. I received a really strong response from people.

However, my second fear - that others were doing this (better) - had some foundation. I learnt this through the generosity of those potential collaborators who shared sector knowledge that helped me learn about other initiatives that have synergies with these ideas. 

For example, a number of Violence Against Women & Girls funders, have, led by Hannah Hoare at The Blue Thread, implemented a simple ‘front-door’ form to allow applicants to flag funding needs to all of the funders in the group, in one go. Or Lightning Reach, a collaborative platform developed with the Association of Charitable Organisations and others, enabling people in financial hardship to apply to multiple funders in one form. There are also commercial offerings like Brevio, which aim to streamline the application process by matching funders with funding needs.