The holiday season is the time of year when many of us find ourselves pulling cookbooks off the shelf or perusing food blogs searching for that perfect recipe. While we can’t help you choose what food to serve at your family dinner, we may be able to give you a different sort of recipe to try out in the New Year.

Our strategy work often leads us to recommend that our clients go deeper with partnerships to strengthen their impact. No organization can accomplish its mission operating in a vacuum, but forming strong, mutually beneficial partnerships takes time and effort. All partnerships are not created equal, however, and many can end up falling apart if not fully baked.

Whether your organization is looking to partner with another nonprofit or foundation, a corporation, or a public institution, we recommend considering the following key ingredients that—when mixed together—can yield strong and mutually-beneficial partnerships.

Ingredients:

List of potential partners

Brand alignment

Value proposition

Resource allocation

Role-sharing

Step 1: Prep

Develop your list of potential partners. The list can include organizations that would be new partners for you, organizations that have approached yours with partnership interest, or a list culled from existing or past partnerships.

Step 2: Evaluate Brand Alignment

Shared values must be present for a relationship between your organization and another to succeed. We recommend applying this filter to all organizations on the potential partnership list.

What to ask: Does the potential partner have a proven history promoting values that align with the mission and vision of your organization?

Step 3: Mix

Identify who at your organization can connect you to a decision-maker at the organization with whom you wish to partner. Or, if the partner has approached you, who in your network may have insight into how this company or institution has operated as a partner in the past.

Step 4: Add Value Proposition

This is the substance of a partnership, the element that takes efforts from exploratory to actionable. It is what makes your organization and your potential partner suited to work well together. To yield the strongest partnership, all parties should enter the conversation with the expectation that each will add value.

What to ask: What value does the partnership add to each organization’s work? What resources will each organization contribute? Contributions may include financial resources, audience reach, content, in-kind services, or enhanced capabilities.

Step 5: Determine roles

Confirming roles and responsibilities is key to the execution of a partnership, as with any complex project. When multiple teams are expected to work together to execute a goal, successful collaboration depends on clear delineation of project leads, supports, and the responsibilities of each.

What to ask: Who will lead and support the initiative of the partnership? Who from each party is involved with decision-making? Through which channels do decisions get made?

Step 6: Execute

Partnerships are dynamic, and partnership management—similar to baking—can require tweaking the recipe to achieve desired outcomes and the greatest possible impact. We recommend setting goals and identifying indicators so that you and your partner(s) have a clear method of “taste-testing”—that is, for knowing if the partnership is on track to meet its goals. Set a schedule to regularly check in on the indicators and outcomes of the partnership work. Refine & repeat, as needed.