The Right Stuff: How To Select Local Partners for ICV Programs

The Right Stuff: How To Select Local Partners for ICV Programs

Eric Schroeder | February 6th, 2012

International Corporate Volunteerism

As implementers and managers of International Corporate Volunteer (ICV) programs, one area where we have not spent a lot of time on is how we identify our local partners. My colleague, Jailan Adly, in her post from Coimbatore, India correctly stated , “The key is to partner with organizations that have the capacity and innovation to capitalize on the resources they receive from their advisors.” I would like to spend some time explaining how we embark on identifying partners with these attributes and developing fruitful working relationships.

Echoing some of Casey Brennan’s comments in a recent post on VolunteerMatch, the idenfication of common goals is critical. This is the first step. For over 20 years, CDS has worked to leverage public, private and volunteer resources to strengthen SMEs and other critical local institutions, governments, and industries that are the drivers of economic growth in emerging markets. We begin our efforts from this organizational foundation. We want to make sure our local partners are involved in driving the growth of their local economies, or involved with serving key and critical local stakeholders. This is done by conducting robust preliminary research into the local marketplace as well as leveraging the extensive network that CDS possesses. Then, we meet and educate potential partners around the program’s parameters, goals and expectations. Through this initial outreach, we are able to gain a better understanding of where our objectives overlap. We want our local partners to be just as excited to partner with us, as we are to partner with them. Once we identify these partners, who share our enthusiasm, occupy important positions in the local marketplace, and have the capacity to maximize the volunteer resources, we move forward with the partnership.

In their “Long Range Planning” article, “Corporate-NGO Collaboration: Co-creating New Business Models for Developing Markets” Professor Dahan, et.al state “combining and leveraging their relative strengths through collective efforts can allow all parties – MNEs, NGOs and other nontraditional business partners – to achieve their individual organizational goals more fully.” Identifying the correct parterns with common objectives is a ciritcal first step, before strengths can be leveraged and collective efforts undertaken.

Over the next stages of scope design and project delivery longer term relationships are established. The local partners need to feel they can trust us with sensitve organizational information and we need to have equal confidence in their ability to be responsive and adaptive to the participants and program’s operating framework. Even though some of our ICV programs only last for one month, our relationships with the local partners begins months before and continues well after, as we look to measure and evaluate each ICV program. However, you cannot move from one stage to the next, if you have not started with the right organizations. Therefore, we start with a foundation of common objectives, build out by establishing mutual confidence in each other and solidify our relationship well-after the volunteers have delivered their project.

Local Concepcion, Chile partners, Manos de Bio Bio, Fundación Trabajo para un Hermano de Concepción, Fundación Accion Emprendadora and Municipalidad de Talcahuano getting started with their assigned IBM Corporate Service Corps participants. Each of these partners possessed the attributes that are described above, which resulted in the successful delivery, in September/October 2011 of their project.

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