The effectiveness of working together is greater than working in isolation!
Why does it matter ?
External collaborations and partnerships are fundamental steps to increase opportunities and strengthen the local anchoring of your Fab City Hub. Establishing collaborations with local actors, especially with political representatives, is essential to ensure the resilience of your Fab City Hub in the long term.
Partnerships are vital to building trust and sharing values among partners. You could start by engaging with two main actors, for example, one representing the private sector and the other the local public administration, and define the vision and objectives of your Fab City Hub with them.
The reasons for partnerships are multiple and can be summarized as follows:
providing access to resources such as data, funding, and expertise
providing access to larger networks of stakeholders, including other government officials, community leaders, and industry experts
strengthening your credibility and increasing your capacity to influence policies, and city-wide strategies, or take part in decision-making processes
fostering inter-sectoral collaborations that will increase innovative and inclusive solutions.
Key aspects
Choosing the right partnership members
One of the first aspects to consider for a successful partnership is careful partner selection, which will enable effective working relationships and ensure that partnership activities are sustainable.
It is crucial to identify partners who will complement each other and strengthen the partnership's goals. To achieve the partnership's objectives, it is important to bring in different relevant parts of the public sector, as well as the business, community, and voluntary sectors. Fab City Camps are a good example of event formats you can organize to gather, get in contact and exchange with potential partners for your FCH.
Furthermore, if you want to better understand your potential stakeholders and which relationships to invest or improve, you can make use of the Stakeholders Trust Map tool.
Defining a shared roadmap
If you want to establish an effective and impactful partnership, it's important to develop a long-term strategy for that specific partnership. You should start by defining a common vision among partners and focusing on the outcomes that should be achieved. Drafting an action plan is also important, which should identify shorter-term priorities and a working program that includes activities and measures contributing to the achievement of predefined outcomes. The Collective Intelligence Canvas is a powerful tool that can help you define a common action plan with your stakeholders.
Additionally, it's crucial to understand mutual ambitions and ensure a shared commitment among all parties to implement the program. Arrangements for monitoring and reporting progress should also be defined.
Establishing an inclusive and effective communication
Clear and inclusive communication practices among partners are crucial for the smooth operation and achievement of objectives within a partnership. It is essential to ensure that there are clear information flows among partners and their respective teams.
Communication plays both an internal and external role.
Internal communication helps partners understand how their alliance functions, the constraints under which it operates, and the respective roles of the other partners, organizations, and people involved. Along with emails and recurrent meetings for updates, several tools for agile internal communication among different members are available (check this section for a few of them).
External communication is vital to ensure visibility for the partnership's work and secure funding and support. Developing a communication strategy from the outset of the partnership and assigning a dedicated person to handle communication can ensure effective and efficient results.
Tools/Stories
Find here a curated selection of Tools and Stories from the Fab City Hub Network that could inspire you to establish effective partnerships: