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The key to a successful project is to articulate clear goals and activities that maximize the strengths of each partner to achieve an objective that each institution could not achieve on its own.
—Andy Ackerman, Executive Director, Children's Museum of Manhattan
Get Started helps you answer these questions by exploring the benefits partnering could bring you. The toolkit exercise helps you articulate your goals clearly. The asset tool helps you identify your organization's pertinent assets and constraints. The checklist helps you know if your organization has the right mindset for collaboration.
What You Should Know
There are many reasons to partner. The best ones are to satisfy a mutual need or to bring the best resources together to solve a problem. Technology advances and changes in the skills required to succeed in today's workplace impact the ways that we meet 21st-century learners' needs. Public broadcasters, museums, and libraries are all better equipped to meet this challenge and demonstrate our value as essential learning organizations by working together—now and into the future.
Successful partnerships yield long-lasting benefits to you, your organization, and your community. What kinds of outcomes can they achieve? Past collaborations among public broadcasters, libraries, and museums have:
- improved the quality and effectiveness of products, services, and learning opportunities through shared ideas and expertise
- engaged new audiences or reached larger ones by sharing capacity, infrastructure, and resources
- enhanced community relations, gained prestige, and changed the way that communities perceived their organizations—due, in part, to the positive results of a combined effort and new approach
- increased the perceived value of organizations to potential funders—the result of pooling assets and promoting successes
- grown and developed as organizations as they pursued new ideas, new perspectives, and new methods
The organizational benefits sound attractive, but what difference have these partnerships made to individuals in the organizations? Consider what folks like you have to say about the power of collaboration:
I was interested in the number of things that could grow out of this collaboration, grow out of the knowledge of what each one of the partners could do and had the expertise to do. That was part of the excitement about collaboration—this notion that I organized the exhibition within a certain conceptual framework and then the library and WPSX reconsidered my approach and cut across the grain in a new way.
—Glenn Willumson, former senior curator at the Palmer Museum of Art
The strength our partnership has is that we have different and complementary resources that can be used together to do good that we couldn't do alone. It's like somebody handed us a puzzle, and [the Witte] brought this piece and we brought that piece and the puzzle is now all filled out.
—Charles Vaughn, senior VP at KLRN
You take three equals and you kind of sew them together and ask them to work it out. The process of working it out has been fascinating, occasionally frustrating and very rewarding. The anticipation of its success really motivates everyone.
—William Joyce, Penn State University Library special collections head
What You Should Do
We suggest you begin your partnership effort by looking within. Are you ready to partner? What do you hope collaboration will help you achieve? Now is the time to reflect on your organization's mission, goals, and priorities and envision what you hope to achieve through partnering. The following tools will help.
When is the last time you took a good look at your mission statement? Successful partnerships revolve around well-established goals in each partner organization. The process of partnering is not typically a good time to look outside existing priorities. To prepare yourself for partnering, consider your organization's mission, goals, and priorities. This tool will help you bring these into focus.
 Identify Goals and Priorities
What do you have to offer a potential partner? Understanding what your organization brings to the table and what constraints you may experience in achieving an intended goal, prepares you to find partners you can work with. It also helps you choose projects where collaboration will help you have greater impact.
This tool will help you identify skills, knowledge, resources, and other assets that you bring to attract potential partners.
Asset Identification
Partnering takes commitment and a willingness among partners to work together to achieve an agreed upon goal. Even the most ideal partnerships experience turmoil. Working together can be especially difficult when partner cultures clash. Having the right mindset and expectations when you enter a partnership can help realize success. Results from this tool will help you decide if partnership makes sense for your organization right now, or if you need to develop your skills and attitudes to strengthen a future partnership.
Am I Ready to Partner Guide
Click here to view a complete list of partnering resources.
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