Partner Zone Guide

Are you interested in collaboration and keen to make contact with other organisations you could potentially work with? Perhaps you would like to team up with other groups in your area or further afield in order to fundraise together, form consortia, jointly bid for contracts or share experiences and best practice?

If so, Funding Central’s Partner Zone is the place for you. Here you will be able to search for prospective partners, view online profiles created by organisations and even create your own, and make that all important first contact in order to pursue a potential partnership further.

Create a partner profile

In order to get the most out of the Partner Zone, you should create a partner profile which will be visible to other organisations as they search for potential collaborative working partners. To begin to do this, click on the Create a partner profile link on the Partner Zone front page.

In order to create a partner profile or administer the details we have registered for your organisation, you must have been granted administrator access – this is our way of trying to save time and ensure that your organisation’s profile is accurate. If you do not have administrator access, you will be prompted to request it by hitting the Request Administration Access button. Requesting administrator access will automatically send an email request with your name and the details of your request to the member of your organisation that is currently the primary administrator for your group. They will then be prompted to click on a link which will allow them to grant you access via their profile.  An organisation can have more than one administrator so you can share the job of updating your profile. The primary administrator (who is able to grant access to other users) is also able to give other users primary administrator access via their profile.

Your partner profile will have two text boxes in which you can give brief descriptions of your organisation and your funding experiences and future plans. You can also add in more detail about your collaborative working experience to date by selecting options such as consortium development or procurement in the tick box section at the bottom of the page. This way, organisations looking for expertise in these kinds of areas will be ‘matched’ with you, via the search.

Not sure what to write on your profile?

Follow our Top Five ‘Tell Us About Yourself’ Tips and you won’t go far wrong!

• What is your organisation’s main driving force – your reason for being? Perhaps you want to improve the lives of people suffering from a particular medical condition or maybe you work to help children effected by domestic violence?
• How would you describe what you do? Perhaps you specialise in artist-led projects or practical activities? Or maybe you run educational or training programmes or provide hands-on support and advice services to those in need?
• What are your goals and aspirations? Where do you see you group in five years time? How do you see your organisation progressing? Perhaps you’d like to branch out and work further afield or maybe you are keen to do something you’ve never tried before, such as delivering public service contracts?
• What are your strengths as an organisation? Where does your knowledge and expertise lie? Perhaps you have an excellent track record in fundraising? Maybe you have developed a project or activity that has the potential to work as a best practice model and can be rolled out to other areas?
• What are you looking for in a potential partner? Are you looking to work with an organisation from a similar field or are you keen to collaborate with someone completely different? Are you seeking particular key skills that you have identified as lacking in your organisation or are you looking to match your expertise?

Search

The Partner Zone has a search tool which will allow you to identify relevant organisations and potential partners by inputting criteria related to your activities and needs. This criteria – your location, the nature of your work, the types of people that benefit from your activities and projects – will be used to ‘match-make’ you with other suitable or similar organisations.

If you have a particular area of work or a specific organisation in mind whilst searching, you should use the keyword search option to seek these out.

If you are interested in collaborating with other groups through bidding jointly for service contracts, you should narrow your search by selecting options from the contracting opportunities drop-down list.

Maybe you are seeking organisations with a particular skills base or area of expertise to boost your fundraising credentials? In this case, use the tick boxes to tailor your results.

It is also worth remembering that you can pre-fill your search criteria by using the information you entered during registration for either your personal or organisational details. To do this, simply select one of the buttons at the top of the page and Funding Central will do the rest!

Save

Just as with any other search you conduct on Funding Central, you can save your Partner Zone search criteria, results listings and favourite organisations to your profile. To do this, simply click on the Save Search or Save Selected (providing you have used the tick boxes to mark the listings you would like to save) buttons. To retrieve the information at a later date, log on to the site and click on the View Profile link underneath the Welcome Back message on the right hand side of the front page and anything you have saved will be listed out in the Saved Searches area. Saving as you go along ensures that you have quick and easy access to all your previous results and shaves valuable minutes by eliminating the need to re-enter information each time you visit the site. If you find an individual group that you are interested in working with, you can also save their details to your profile.

Find out more

Following a search, your result listings of potentially perfect partners will appear in a noticeboard format with at-a-glance snippets of information about each organisation. To view an organisation profile in more detail, simply click on the name of the organisation. The profiles, created by groups themselves, will provide detailed information on organisation type, funding interests, activities and services, beneficiaries and previous collaborative working experience – giving you a good idea of whether or not you could be a match made in fundraising heaven!

Not managing to find any suitable matches? If you haven’t already done so, you should create your own partner profile for other organisations to view, detailing your areas of interest and funding plans.  This way, your proactive ‘setting up shop’ approach will put you firmly in the driving seat and serve to hook perfect partners with similar interests and aspirations.

Make contact

So, you have identified a number of interesting organisations that you believe you could work collaboratively with? The Partner Zone can also help you take that all-important first step towards a successful and effective partnership – making contact. To start the ball rolling, you will need to hit the Contact This Group button at the bottom of the organisation’s profile.

A structured form will pop up which you can use to make contact with the group – type a message into the Partner Request section to ask for more information, pose a question or suggest a collaborative project. A Partner Request message will then be sent to your chosen organisation via email and will include brief details on your name, email address, organisation type and location. You will also receive a copy of this request. Following this, all you need do is sit back and wait for all your perfect partners to respond!

Growing resource

Keep in mind that Funding Central’s Partner Zone is a brand-new resource which we will, with the help of voluntary and community organisations like you, continue to grow and develop.  Perhaps you haven’t found exactly what you were looking for this time?  Try visiting us again to catch up on all the new partner profiles that have been added.  Who knows – your perfect fundraising partner could be amongst them!