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Grant funders often like to see partnership working and it is also a good way for your service to engage with new users.
Identifying potential partners
Potential partners can be sought from across a range of sectors:
Within your wider organisation
If your service is based in a local authority you may look towards sister services such as Archives, Museums, Art Galleries etc. However, it also worth considering colleagues in other departments for example countryside and rights of way, leisure, skills and learning, adult care, services for young people and colleagues responsible for delivering specific actions such as digital inclusion. By thinking more widely than traditional partnerships this also helps to widen and diversify audience engagement and create different activities.
Other heritage organisations
These might include local properties owned by national organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage, local independent museums and heritage centres, or Local History groups and networks. Again, all will help open up new audiences and activities and add value to your project. However, it is sometimes harder to get larger national organisations on board as they inevitably have other competing interests, so patience and persistence is required in identifying key officers and building relationships.
Regional & national consortiums
These are often formed to provide joint solutions to common problems such as digitisation, storage, training and employment schemes, where there are benefits for spreading costs and workload, or even securing better commercial deals. An early example that involved many Local Studies Services was the Newsplan 2000 microfilming project. Some grant funding, including some NLHF schemes, is geared to consortium approaches and such partnerships should not be discounted.
Community partners
These are possibly the most important partnerships to develop when trying to diversify audiences and make your activities more inclusive, often involving the voluntary community sector. Such partnerships are extremely rewarding and help identify and quantify audiences and mould your project. These might include those organisations working with BAME groups, Adults with Learning Difficulties or with Mental Health issues; or care support groups such as those helping people overcoming strokes, Alzheimers etc. Again, relationships take time to build so try to work with such organisations across a range of projects by embedding them in all your project designs.
Schools, colleges and higher education
These are often open to working with Local Studies services as we are resource rich and have much needed expertise. In return they can provide expertise and specialist knowledge, while students are often keen to participate as part of their coursework or for work experience. Colleges and universities are particularly good for helping to develop technical areas of your project such as databases and applications. However, there are two key considerations when working with schools: First, ensure that your proposal fits with their curriculum needs. This need not of course just be in History and the humanities, but could include cross curricular activity such as English, Maths, Arts and Science. Secondly, always ensure your project costs include providing supply teachers as this enables schools and colleges to release staff for planning visits and training.
Commercial educational & charitable contributions
Some aspects of a project may appear too costly or require specialist knowledge, particularly digital outputs such as Apps, 3-D printing etc. Some companies are happy to provide discount or in-kind contributions as part of their marketing strategy or if they are looking to develop new products. They may also have a specific educational or charitable arm that is geared to working with community projects. Some may be community interest companies, who are regularly looking for partnership and grant funding opportunities.
Formalising a partnership
Ideally potential partnerships have already coalesced around a good idea or activity when you apply for grant funding or embark upon a project, so developing and formalising partnerships become the most important task. Each partner’s contribution should be identified in your action plan, but sometimes it is useful to agree a memorandum of understanding – a halfway house between an informal and a formal agreement, which is simple to do and usually satisfies most funders. The memorandum should include financial and in-kind contributions of each party, what skills they are bringing, which tasks each partner is responsible for delivering, description of the forum for decision making and project management. Sometimes it takes time to build partnerships and develop trust so it is always worth thinking carefully about applications for project funding that have short turn-around times and whether it is viable. Will all partners be committed once the project needs to be delivered?
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