Companies have historically tended to keep their philanthropic giving somewhat separate from their business operations. But Timberland and a growing number of like-minded businesses have begun integrating these activities into their strategies and operations. Consider just a few examples. Bell Atlantic deployed its technological expertise in a partnership with a Union City, N.J., school to transform the educational process. Ralston Purina joined the American Humane Association to promote the adoption of abandoned animals. Citibank worked with ACCION International to promote microcredit lending in Latin America. Strategic collaborations are proliferating.

(2)梁宇萍

Forces Promoting Collaboration

The emergence of these more strategic alliances reflects, in part, a rethinking on the part of companies about the role of their charitable activities and their interactions with nonprofit organizations. Two motivations appear to be propelling companies' shift toward integrating philanthropic activities into their strategies and operations. First, companies are recognizing that how they interact with communities and with social issues can directly affect positively or negatively their business success. Generating social value can be an important source of business value in many ways. The burgeoning cause-related marketing collaborations is a clear reflection of this, with such arrangements often being funded out of marketing department budgets rather than from corporate giving offices. For example, American Express partnered for three years with Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger and poverty organization, to mount the Charge Against Hunger campaign, whereby the company donated to the nonprofit 3 cents of every dollar cardholders charged during the November-December holiday season. This generated $21 million for the cause and noticeably increased card usage.

Companies have also become more concerned about the social returns of their philanthropic relationships. The focus is shifting from being charitable donors to strategic social investors. Former IBM CEO and Chairman Lou Gerstner, for instance, has focused the company's social investments predominantly on improving public education in order to increase the impact of its social sector engagement, rather than spreading its resources more thinly among a broad array of social needs.

For nonprofit managers, collaboration with other organizations is becoming increasingly central to achieving their missions. Economic, social, and political forces propel this trend. Shrinking donor pools and rising competition for scarce philanthropic funds pushes nonprofits to work with others in order to cut costs and achieve efficiencies. The growing complexity and magnitude of the socioeconomic problems nonprofits seek to solve often exceed the capacity of single organizations. Multiple competencies and new combinations of resources are needed to tackle problems effectively. Furthermore, the traditional large role of government as the solver of social ills has been shrinking. These responsibilities have shifted more toward the nonprofit and business sectors.

(3) 郭梦鑫

Nonprofits are finding new ways to join forces with other nonprofits to consolidate assets, combine activities, or share resources to operate more efficiently and effectively by eliminating wasteful duplication or providing superior services. But beyond this intrasector cooperation, there is growing collaboration between nonprofits and businesses. Part of this process has been the discovery that nonprofits have brands, assets and competencies that can be of significant value to business. "Nonprofits are worth a lot more than they think they are," according to Share Our Strength founder Bill Shore. This realization has helped shed the supplicant mind-set and create a partnering mentality. Furthermore, there has been a breaking down of some of the nonprofits' suspicions of business and a growing understanding of the potential mutual benefit of collaboration. Many nonprofit organizations that had historically been vocal critics of business have found common ground on which to cooperate. For example, Amnesty International created an alliance with Reebok when it discovered the sneaker company had similar values about human rights. Environmental group the Nature Conservancy overcame longstanding differences with the timber products company Georgia-Pacific to enter into joint management of forestlands to develop more environmentally friendly ways of timber extraction that enabled forest habitat conservation.

Such mutual rethinking has opened the door to a much richer set of relationship options, which poses the challenge of how to pursue most effectively these collaboration opportunities. These cross-sector collaborations are undergoing significant transformation and hold considerable potential.

From Charity to Strategic Alliances

In my research on dozens of alliances between nonprofits and corporations where I conducted in-depth analyses of partnering experiences, I found that these relationships can evolve over time through three different stages. Each stage exhibits differences in engagement level, importance to mission, resource deployment, scope of activity, interaction intensity, managerial complexity, and strategic value. This framework is useful for understanding the nature and evolution of cross-sector collaborations. (Chart, above.)

1. Philanthropic Stage. This is the most common and traditional type of relationship. In simplified terms, it can be characterized as a supplicant-benefactor relationship. The nonprofit seeks a donation from the company, then the company provides a charitable gift. Extensive resources are generally not involved, nor is the relationship deep or critical to either organization. The Timberland-City Year relationship started this way more than 14 years ago, when the nonprofit requested a donation from Timberland of 50 pairs of boots for its inaugural youth corps. Responding to this petition was a simple altruistic act of minor significance to the company. At this early stage, traditional mind-sets constrained the relationship. City Year operated with a fundraising mentality and suffered from what its President Michael Brown referred to as the "gratefulness syndrome": Its task was to extract resources, and if successful, graciously issue thanks but not "bother" the donor thereafter. On the corporate side, Timberland was constrained by the "charity syndrome": Give to a good cause that solicits assistance but deal with these donations as a peripheral part of your activities and minimize your time investments. On both sides, minimizing interaction and communication was the mode of operation.

(5) 桃子

1. Transactional Stage. In this relationship there is more of a two-way value exchange, with each side providing clear benefits to the other. The collaboration is focused around a particular, well-defined activity and the resources deployed often go beyond money alone. Examples include causerelated marketing, where a nonprofit lends its name to the company that through its publicity or a special event promotes the organization's cause. Sometimes the promotion is directly tied into the sale of a good or service, with a portion of the proceeds going to the nonprofit. The activity might involve the mobilization of company employees to participate with the nonprofit in the delivery of its social service, such as building a playground.

The Timberland-City Year relationship evolved from the simple boot donation into City Year mounting community service events for the company's employees. Timberland provided the City Year corps members with their uniform, publicizing Timberland's line of casual and outdoor apparel and commitment to City Year. City Year used its core skills to provide team-building exercises and diversity training to Timberland employees. "Many companies pay thousands of dollars for these types of teambuilding skills. This is not philanthropy," said Timberland CEO Jeffrey Swartz.

（6）：思葳

1. Integrative Stage. The collaboration evolves into a strategic alliance at this stage. It becomes central to each organization's mission and integral to their strategies. Both deploy and combine their core competencies, joint activities proliferate, personnel and institutional relationships multiply, and trust deepens. This is an organizational integration that takes on the characteristics of a joint venture. It is much more complex to manage than other forms of collaboration, but of much greater strategic value. The relationship between Timberland and City Year deepened and moved into this third stage. Swartz became the chair of the nonprofit's board of directors, and a team of City Year corps members began operating out of his company's New Hampshire headquarters. The two recruited additional corporate sponsors and expanded the nonprofit's operations to other cities throughout the country and abroad. They collaborated on a new product line of clothes and boots promoting the City Year name and the two organizations' shared commitment to community service. City Year has received about $12 million to date. Timberland has doubled the paid time employees could give to service to 40 hours a year. According to the company's corporate social responsibility report, its employees now give more than 100,000 total hours of service annually, benefiting more than 200 community organizations in 13 countries.²

Most strong alliances have evolved through the stages of the collaboration continuum, but occasionally there are some that start out as a transactional relationship, leapfrogging the philanthropic stage. Progression along the continuum is not automatic; it is the result of conscious acts and efforts. Moreover, a relationship can regress to a previous point due to unintentional slippage or conscious decisions. The key characteristics of partnerships in each stage provide a useful guide to envisioning strategic options. Each stage evinces a different stance toward three strategic aspects of the partnership: the collaborative mind-set of the partners, strategic alignment of the two organizations, and the collaboration's value.

Strategic Management of Collaborations

Most nonprofits and corporations have multiple cross-sector relationships. To manage these strategically, it is useful to conceive of them as a portfolio. Balance in the portfolio is in the eye of the beholder. But in general, the goal is to create a mix of alliances across the collaboration continuum that makes optimum use of the partnering organizations' resources. The portfolio should not jeopardize the collaboration's value by making excessive demands on either partner's resources. Nor should collaboration leave potential gains of collaborating uncaptured by underutilizing resources. Designing a portfolio of alliances also involves balancing risk through an acceptable mix of high risk/high reward and low risk/low reward collaborations. Nonprofits can begin to manage their portfolio by mapping and segmenting their collaborations.

Mapping Collaborations

The first task is to take an inventory of your existing collaborations. The collaboration table can guide this mapping exercise. Locate each collaboration on the continuum in relationship to the three stages. A relationship can fall at any point on the spectrum, not simply at the single stage markers. It is even more useful to map each collaboration's location on each descriptive dimension because it might fall at a different point on the continuum. For example, the collaboration map might reveal that a burgeoning alliance has quite a high importance to the organizations' mission, but the only resource being deployed is money. This might suggest that the partners should investigate how to deploy their core competencies to create value together. A collaboration might also be in a transactional stage but have a single type of activity. This might suggest that the partners could explore other opportunities to work together to broaden the range of joint value creation. A more refined mapping deepens one's understanding of the nature of the collaboration and its position relative to others.

Segmenting Collaborations to Achieve Portfolio Balance

The mapping exercise gives the manager a clearer view of the organization's collaboration portfolio. One should not necessarily think of different types or stages of alliances as superior. The task is to analyze each collaboration in terms of its role within the portfolio. Different relationships can serve distinct functions. One is seeking functional balance. For example, the mapping may reveal a majority of the collaborations clustering around the philanthropic stage. An organization need not feel that this is a sign of collaboration weakness and that these should be replaced with alliances at the transactional or integrative stages. These philanthropic relationships may be an important source of cash flow to the nonprofit that requires relatively little cost to obtain.

Similarly, spreading out donations to many different organizations may help the corporation reach many different constituencies in a cost-effective manner. KaBOOM!, a nonprofit whose mission is to create safe playgrounds in needy neighborhoods, has its collaborations concentrated in the transactional stage. It organizes and supervises playground construction for a fee from corporations whose employees then participate as volunteers in building the playgrounds alongside people from the community. For some of its partners, such as Home Depot and insurance company CNA, however, KaBOOM! has developed a deeper integrative relationship.

Achieving portfolio balance involves a search for diversity in number and size to avoid overdependency, even if all collaborations are of the same type. But having a mix of alliances across the continuum can increase robustness of a collaboration portfolio. The manager needs to think about the function that the new type of relationship will play. For example, a transactional alliance such as a causerelated cobranding promotion might increase the financial benefits accruing to a nonprofit, but perhaps even more importantly raise its visibility and exposure. A manager of the Nature Conservancy observed that its cause-related marketing arrangement with Canon U.S.A. "garnered us extensive exposure in media that we could never hope to purchase for ourselves." This serves a very important function in building a nonprofit's brand, name recognition, and credibility.

A similar benefit might accrue, in reverse, to a newer company associating with a well-known nonprofit organization. Such benefits would not be accomplished through a traditional philanthropic stage relation; it would only come through a different type of alliance. Analogously, migrating into an integrative relationship would open up the possibilities for a much wider range of collaborative activities producing a higher level of mutual benefits. Yet, the managerial and institutional resources required to create and maintain such a deep strategic alliance are considerable. Consequently, the absorptive and implementation capacities of the partners need to be weighed carefully in determining if and how many such collaborations can be optimally included in the portfolio. Timberland has decided to concentrate the vast majority of its energy and resources into a deep strategic alliance with City Year rather than spreading them out across a large number of organizations in a broad portfolio. This is comparable to a company targeting and tightly integrating into their operations a few preferred suppliers.

New Solutions to Complex Problems

Alliances are bound to become an increasingly important organizational strategy for nonprofits. The potential for interinstitutional cooperation to create joint gains and greater social value is enormous. The imperative to collaborate will not be limited to alliances between businesses and nonprofits. Alliances between nonprofits and government and as well alliances between nonprofits will become increasingly common. Public-private partnerships can produce effective new solutions to complex social problems. Managing these richer and more complex collaboration portfolios represents a major challenge and essential competency for leaders of nonprofits.

1 O’Loughlin, Sandra. “Brand Builders: Positioning – Heart and Sole,” Brandweek, March 31, 2003.

2 See Timberland Corporate Social Responsibility Report at http://www.timberland.com/ timberland/download/include.pdf.

James Austin is the Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration and the chair of the Initiative on Social Enterprise at the Harvard Business School. He has authored 16 books, dozens of articles, and over 100 case studies on business and nonprofit organizations. His most recent book is “The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed Through Strategic Alliances” (February 2000). He can be reached at jaustin@hbs.edu.

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标题：姓名

正文：内容

No.2 梁宇萍 （顺德）

No.3 郭梦鑫 （上海）

No.4 曹蕾（上海）

No.5 桃子（上海）

No.6 思葳（上海）

No.7 王婷玉 （武汉）

No.8 安艺 （威海）

导师：

在对众多非营利组织和公司的战略联盟案例的深入分析研究后，我发现了战略联盟关系可以随着时间的推移，分为3个不同的阶段。每个阶段都表现出差异：深度参与程度，相对使命的重要性，调配的资源，业务活动的规模，互动程度，管理的复杂性，战略价值。这个框架有利于理解跨部门合作的性质演变。

慈善阶段，这是最常见也是最传统的关系类型。简单来说，这可以被概括为“请求者-恩人”关系。非营利组织希望公司能够捐赠，公司就提供的相当于一份慈善礼品。通常来说，不会涉及到更多的资源，同样双方也很难建立深入关键的关系。14年前，当非营利组织请Timberland为首届青年军团赞助50双靴子时，Timberland和City就是从建立这种关系开始的。对于公司来说，响应这样的请求是一个非常简单的利他行为。在这样的初始阶段，传统思维约束了关系。用City Year总裁迈克尔 布朗的话说，当时他的整个筹款运营心态都忍受着“感激综合症”。他的任务就是寻求资源，如果成功，慷慨的发出感谢，但是在捐赠后不再对捐赠者做进一步的打扰。而对于公司来说，Timberland受限于“慈善综合症”：响应良好的慈善事业的援助请求，但将这些援助作为自身业务以外的事情，并且尽可能最小化时间投入。对于两者来说，这个阶段的操作模式就是尽可能减少沟通、接触。

这些更具战略性的联盟的涌现某种程度上反映了,公司重新思考他们在慈善活动中扮演的角色以及其与非盈利组织间的互动。两个动机似乎推进公司的转变，以便在慈善活动中融入公司的营销策略与业务操作。首先,公司开始意识到他们社区打交道、回应社会问题的方式，会直接影响到他们的商业成功与否。创造社会价值，从很多方面来说，都是商业价值的一个重要来源。蓬勃发展的善因营销合作正好明显反应了这一点，这样通常能从销售部门的预算中，而不是公司慈善捐助部门中得到资助。例如, American Express（美国捷运公司信用卡）与Share Our Strength（同心协力，一个消除饥饿和贫困的非营利组织）合作了三年。他们组织战胜饥饿的冲锋运动：因而在11月到12月这假日旺季里，持卡人每消费1美元的，American Express就捐助3美分的给Share Our Strength，去解决饥饿问题。结果就筹得2100万美元，并且明显增加了信用卡的使用量。

公司也变得更加关注他们在做慈善事业方面所得到的社会回报了。公司的角色从慈善捐助者向战略社会投资者转移。例如,前IBM董事会主席兼首席执行官Lou Gerstner,集中公司的社会投资主要用在改善公共教育，目的是为了增加公司在社会领域的深度参与,而不是在一系列宽泛的社会需求中进一步稀释公司的资源。

对于非营利组织的管理者来说，与其他组织合作对实现他们的使命变得日益重要。经济，社会和政治力量共同推动了这一趋势。萎缩的捐助源以及因有限的慈善资金而引起的日趋激烈的竞争，迫使非营利组织为了降低成本、提高效率而与其他组织合作。虽然非营利组织力求解决日益复杂而又越来越重要的社会经济问题，但往往超出了个别组织的能力范围。想要有效的解决复杂的问题，组织间同心协力、资源间的重组是必需的。此外，传统依靠“大政府”的角色来解决社会弊病的情况已经越来越少了。而这些职能已经逐步在向非营利组织和商业部门转移。

大多数非营利组织和公司之间有着多重的跨部门的联系，将他们视作组合有利于进行战略性管理。尽管在旁观者看来这样的组合具有平衡性，但通常来讲该组合的目标是要建立一个包含合作连续性的联盟体以达到合作组织资源的最优化利用。该组合不可对任一方资源有过度的需求而损害到合作的价值，也不能因未充分使用资源而使合作的潜在收益遭到损失。同时规划联盟组合也应当考虑到高风险高回报、低风险低回报的平衡。非营利组织可以通过筹划和细分合作进行组合管理。

规划合作

第一步是据现有的合作做出目录。这张表格要能指导规划方面的工作。根据每项合作同三个阶段的联系对其进行定位。这种联系可能在现有范围的任一阶段，而不仅限于某一标志性的阶段。更有效的做法的是将每项合作都定位到指定的维度内因为它也可能位于范围内的其它维度。比如说这样的合作地图反映出新兴联盟对实现组织目标的重要性，而资金是其唯一可分配的资源。这可能表明了合作者应该调查如何部署他们的核心竞争力以共同创造价值。一项合作可能处在贸易阶段然而仅仅具有单一的活动形式。这也可能说明合作者应该寻求其它的合作机会以拓宽创造共同价值的领域。而一个更加详尽的规划则加深了彼此对于合作本质以及规划定位的理解。

细分合作以实现组合平衡

规划工作使得管理者可以清晰地了解机构的合作组合。他们不必认为不同的类型或阶段的联盟有优劣之分，而应该分析每项合作在组合里的角色。不同的联系发挥出不同的功能。管理者应当寻求功能上的平衡。例如规划可能体现出大部分的合作都处于慈善阶段，但机构不需要认为这样的合作存在缺陷，也不需要将其替换到贸易或者综合阶段。由于某些慈善机构需要以较低的成本获取现金流，上述的慈善联系则是这类组织资金的重要来源。

实现资产组合平衡包含对成员的广泛的调查并且设法避免过度依赖。即使所有合作方都是同一种形式。但具有混合的跨越性联盟可以提高协同合作的坚固性。它的经理需要考虑新形式合作是否会发挥作用。例如，交易性的战略例如causerelated cobranding 的提高对于非盈利组织来说可以增加财政的支持。但也许更重要的是提升它的可见性和曝光度。The Nature Conservancy的经理注意到利用公共事业营销管理获得了美国媒体广泛接触，但他们可能永远不希望自己被购买。这提供了一个非常重要的功能，在建立一个非盈利组织的品牌，知名度，信誉方面。

这一阶段的关系更多的是双向的价值交换，双方都能为彼此提供很明确的利益。这时的合作就会重点围绕某个特定的、明确的活动，而资源配置也往往会优于单靠资金进行的活动。 例子包括善因营销，此时公司会借非营利机构的名义，也会在公开场合和一些特殊的活动中宣传该机构的活动。而有时这些宣传是直接和某些产品或服务的销售绑定的，所得款项将会有部分被用于非营利事业。这些活动也可能会让公司职员参与到非营利机构的一些社会服务中，比如修建操场这一类。

深度合作必将成为非盈利组织越来越重要的组织性战略。机构间通过合作实现互惠互利和创造社会价值的潜力是巨大的。这种合作的必要性并不局限于企业与非盈利组织之间，非盈利组织与政府、非盈利组织彼此之间也将会越来越普遍。这种公-私合作模式能够提供有效的新思路应对复杂的社会问题。而如何管理这些更加丰富和复杂的合作，将是非盈利组织领导人的一项重要挑战和必要能力。

这种相互反思为企业与非营利组织之间的关系提供了更多的可能，也为如何追求最有效的合作机会带来了挑战。这些跨部门的合作正在经历重大转型，并持有相当大的潜力。

因此，决定是否采用以及多大程度上采用联盟模式，就应该仔细考量合作伙伴的采纳和实施战略联盟关系的能力。Timberland已经决定和City Year结成深层次的战略联盟关系，并将绝大部分能力和资源集中投入到这段关系中，而不是分散投入到大量组织的组合中。这就好像公司会在运营过程中，专注 于和几个首选供应商保持紧密关系。