Why Collaboration Is More Than Just a “Nice to Have”

Collaboration has become a popular buzzword in recent years, often dismissed as corporate-speak or a “nice to have” culture. But when collaboration is done right, it moves the needle on what matters most—your mission and your fundraising results.

What Strategic Collaboration Actually Delivers

Real collaboration isn’t about forced team activities. It’s about outcomes that create measurable impact:

Better Problem-Solving

Challenges rarely stay contained within a single department. If your donor database crashes right before your year-end campaign, it affects development, communications, finance, and programs simultaneously.

The organizations that recover most quickly are those with departments working together to examine challenges from different perspectives. This collaboration allows them to identify blind spots and assumptions more quickly. Feedback from others allows them to unify their efforts and address issues thoroughly, to prevent similar issues from cascading through the organization.

Sustainable Growth

When teams align around shared goals and pool their resources, organizations achieve greater impact with existing capacity. This unified approach creates a culture that embraces experimentation and takes smarter risks.

This kind of collaboration not only sparks innovative thoughts but also encourages the adoption of the tools and technologies that move organizations forward.

Improved Retention and Engagement

Collaborating across departments can nurture a more inclusive and adaptive culture. When people feel included and valued, they’re more likely to engage, contribute, and grow with the organization.

In the nonprofit sector, where talented professionals have many options and compensation isn’t always the most competitive, creating genuine engagement is essential for long-term success.

More Effective Fundraising

Collaboration is particularly valuable for nonprofits when it makes fundraising more effective. Consider your last major campaign: development led it, but many other teams played a role—communications, programs, finance, events, and IT.

When these teams work from shared strategies and maintain regular communication, the results are impressive. You identify prospects that might otherwise be missed, create appeals that truly resonate, and address potential issues before they impact campaign success.

The Power of Data Governance

One area where collaboration creates immediate, measurable impact is data governance. Data governance affects your fundraising effectiveness more than you might realize.

Data governance is the ongoing practice needed to effectively manage data and the corresponding policies, procedures, and practices surrounding an organization’s data as a whole. The growing complexity of data and technology ecosystems in nonprofit organizations has increased the importance of effective data governance.

Your development team might enter donors one way, your events team another, and your membership team follows yet another approach. Or you want to integrate your volunteer management system with your donor database but lack consistent guidelines for shared data.

Creating an Effective Data Governance Committee

To bring consistency, quality, and accuracy to data and system usage, the organization should establish a collaborative data governance committee with representatives from all teams that use the main systems.

For educational institutions, this typically includes:

• Advancement services
• Alumni engagement
• Development
• Donor relations
• Finance
• IT
• Marketing

For arts and cultural organizations, consider representatives from:

• Audience services
• Development
• Education and programming
• Group sales
• IT
• Membership

The committee should be led by someone with deep system expertise—typically from IT or advancement operations—who can guide discussions and help teams understand technical possibilities and limitations.

Committee Responsibilities

Committee duties should include:

• Evaluating data requests (changes in configuration, data transfer or input needs, maintenance needs, role permissions/access, schemas, or processes).
• Providing data leadership in support of organizational goals (definitions, reporting priorities, vetting changes to technology stack).
• Developing and enforcing data integrity policies and procedures.
• Monitoring data storage and operations.

The committee should review and authorize changes to data structure, usage, or procedures, so that system usage decisions are part of a cohesive plan that considers all system users, rather than an individual user making unilateral choices. All staff would be able to submit issues or requests to the committee, who should discuss and decide on them as a group, and the committee members should communicate decisions to their respective teams.

Good data governance helps break down silos between departments, as a cross-section of staff plays a role in caring for the various databases and systems. Good data governance practices also improve the quality of organizational data, which enables smarter, more targeted donor outreach and more successful fundraising efforts.

As a first step, download our free, editable data governance templates here, designed to help you establish a single source of truth and build a more reliable data environment.

Implementing Collaboration in Your Organization

Adding collaboration to your organizational priorities might seem daunting, but our experience shows that nonprofits that build collaborative practices into their operations consistently outperform those that don’t.

Whether you begin with something concrete like a data governance committee or tackle broader cross-departmental initiatives, success requires intentional planning. Collaboration doesn’t happen automatically—it requires structures and processes that make working together more efficient than working in isolation.