Developing strong workplace relationships is never easy, but it’s essential to your food bank’s health and fundraising success. How exactly can you achieve this for your team and your community?
We sat down for a chat about agency partnership with Maria Shanley, Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida’s Director of Marketing and Data Management, and RKD’s own Stacy Sovereign, Associate Vice President of Client Partnership. After six years of cultivating their relationship, they have struck collaboration gold.
We talked about relational skills and distilled their secret sauce into four ingredients for you to use to prioritize your agency partner.
4 ingredients to a successful agency partnership
1. Accountability
An agency partner acts like an extension of a food bank’s team to increase capability and reach. To make this possible, we start with accountability.
Both sides must give and receive feedback with grace and honesty. Owning mistakes and fixing them is a good mark of a partner who wants the best for you and your people.
“We all know things don't always work out like they're supposed to, so when that mistake happens, I love that Stacy and our whole team have been very transparent when something happens,” Maria said. “They don't try to hide it, and I think the best part about that, too, is that they always come with a solution in place. So it's not just like this happened, and now we have to move on. It's like this happened, but this is what we're gonna do about it.”
Another way to build accountability is consistent reporting. Regularly gathering and reflecting on your program helps everyone get on the same page to address your strengths and areas for improvement.
2. Communication
Communication is vital to all healthy relationships. In the world of fundraising, food banks can ask for the rationale behind strategies and more. If you have little expertise in certain aspects of fundraising, then jump in, ask questions, listen and learn.
“I just love asking questions and think that's so important,” Maria added. “And I tell that to any food bank who is working with a partner or an agency. Are you asking these questions? Because sometimes, if you don't ask, you're never going to find out.”
It’s a two-way street, so agencies can also respectfully question plans and offer suggestions.
“We each have a group of people that we're working with,” Stacy said. “And every other week, we do get together. We have an hour meeting. We have a lot of fun at the meeting, but we get a lot of work done. And we go through what is needed, what's coming up, where do we need to pivot, what needs to happen.”
Also, food banks are encouraged to share updates on departments and teams outside of fundraising to inspire greater understanding for all involved. The more everyone sees of the picture, the better they can decipher it.
3. Trust
As accountability and communication are cultivated over time, trust starts to build between food bank and agency. This won’t be easy, though—innovative fundraising wasn’t built in a day.
A crucial building block for trust is expressing, understanding and upholding each other’s expectations. What does this look like? When you trust your agency, you know when to ask questions and when it’s better to step back and let your agency do its thing.
“We trust this team to give us honest feedback,” Stacy added. “We do it timely. We're staying on time. Our meetings help us to stay on the roll. They will be honest about, ‘This timeline is not going to work for us this time, so you're going to need to push that.’”
Over time, you’ll build confidence, and your agency will trust you to go to different team members for different questions and requests. You don’t have to filter through one person and can get the info you need faster.
4. Fun
At the end of the day, we aren’t just fundraisers but humans, so connection is appreciated in business. To grow more comfortable with your agency, it’s OK to have fun. Share stories, make jokes, host costume contests in reporting meetings.
Our work is heavy, and vulnerable communities look to us for help. Burnout is prevalent within our organizations, so any fun break from work can go a long way for healthy and enjoyable workplace relationships.
“One of my favorite experiences I've had with the RKD team is we had an in-person meeting one day, and we all shared our ‘whys,’” Maria said. “Why are we doing the work that we're doing? And it was so cool to hear why Stacy is doing this work because it almost aligned our values together. We're all here for a reason. And I think that made our connection even stronger, too.”
With these ingredients in mind, food banks can evolve their agency relationships to get the most out of their partnership and grow together. When thinking about your agency partner, ask yourself if you’re getting what you need and what can be done to better collaborate.
Bettering the relationship between agency and food bank is an early step to bettering your relationship with your donors. Let’s work better together so that we can work better for our communities.
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