Nonprofit-Business Collaboration: Exploring Dynamics from the Nonprofit Perspective

Nonprofit organisations (NPOs) play an important role in disaster response and recovery for communities, and yet they operate in environments characterised by increasing resource constraints and escalating delivery demands. At the same time, NPOs face pressure to radically adapt and transform the way they work, a challenge which many struggle to contend with. This turbulence drives NPOs to seek opportunities through collaboration with business. The problem is, we do not fully understand the effects on how NPOs adapt to, or navigate within, environmental turbulence. Through a multiple case study design, this research explores thirteen nonprofit–business collaborations in New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with twenty-eight senior decision makers in order to explore the nature and dynamics of these relationships, and the effect they have on NPOs. Having identified a range of collaboration types, contexts, and dynamics, this research reveals that collaboration has the potential to create both positive and negative effects. By evolving with business, NPOs operate on shorter timeframes and often more local scales; as a result, they appear more effective in the short-term, but risk long-term efficacy and a misallocation of resources. Individual actors play a powerful role; they have the potential to increase NPO impact, while also increasing risks associated with commercial activity. The potential implications of this study become important in increasingly complex environments, where man-made challenges and natural disasters affect political, social, and ecological domains. These factors reinforce the need to explore the impacts on NPO capacity to serve as a ‘public safety net’