Governance Best Practices from Other Federations
Managing and running a complex partnership like the one that is responsible for our national platform, or any digital infrastructure platform, may seem daunting. But it is vital to realize that federated organizations are increasingly common in the nonprofit sector, especially in Canada or amongst international NGOs, and that many successful examples are available.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to organizing a federation of partners. However, significant thought and effort, in Canada and abroad, has gone into examining governance and management models in a variety of contexts; we can learn both from models that have worked very well, and from cautionary tales. The authors have found the studies listed in the References to be particularly valuable in informing this work.
Evidence of successful federations from across Canada and abroad suggest that the choice of the basic architecture of our federation is sound. But relationships and processes matter a great deal; (Widmer and Houchin 1999) report that they “…came to believe that federations were more likely to be damaged by bad processes than bad structures”. Thus, we focus on how several vital relationships can benefit from being renegotiated in the light of what is done elsewhere. As a starting point for discussion, we take the evidence of federations elsewhere and propose steps for renewing the governance our federation.
(Mollenhauer 2009) pointed out that “The goal of any federation should be to get the benefits of a centralized structure, such as greater efficiency and effectiveness” — and in our case, coherence — “ while retaining the benefits of local autonomy, such as community responsiveness.” It is fair to say that previous attempts at organizing our federation have focused more on one or the other of those sets of advantages. But armed with working examples from elsewhere in Canada and abroad, we can aim to achieve a balance of both.
Clarity of Roles
Indeed, evidence suggests some helpful moves have already been made. (Mollenhauer 2012) describes several successful Canadian organizations going through a ground-up consolidation process very similar to our history, with service providers organizing first into consortia, and then into regional organizations. In the case of both the ALS Society of Canada and the Parkinson Society of Canada, this move was made with the intent to improve both the speed of national decision-making and the coherence of local decision-making, while giving the federated organization a healthy balance between national office and regional offices.
Proposal: The federation partners, members, and funders must come to agreement on clearly-delineated roles and responsibilities of the central office and regional organizations.
However, in the case of our federation, this move may have been incomplete. In both of those two cases part of the process involved clear partnership agreements agreed to by the new regional organizations and the central office as to the roles and responsibilities of each. (Partners 2009) briefly describe a similar process with the American Cancer Society and the Girl Scouts of America — in the case of the Girl Scouts, the clarity of interactions offered by this detailed description of roles allowed, for the first time, delivering programs jointly with external partners
In a case study of the World Wildlife Fund US (Wei-Skillern and Herman 2008), staff described these sorts of agreements very positively: “We learned that we need these kinds of network initiatives to be formal, not with bureaucracy, but with people needing to know each other’s roles.”
Other federations have divided up roles and responsibilities between federation partners in many different ways with success; the exact delineation matters less than clarity and wide agreement.
Boards
Proposal: The central office Board should be provided the training and the support necessary to play their role in the federation.
(Mollenhauer 2009) offers a picture of a frequent challenge in Canadian federated organizations which speaks to the central dilemma facing their Boards:
“A clear distinction needs to be made between the role of the national Board of Directors as it relates to the [central office] and its role in the federation. Some national Board of Directors act as if they have a greater ability to set direction and impose behaviors then is the case. As a result, they undervalue the essential role of the [central office] within the federation as convener and facilitator. … Even the language used by federations can be illustrative of the confusion about the role of the [central office]. The [central office] is a partner in the federation, but written and verbal communication often describes the [central office] as the federation.”
This dilemma is particularly acute for a research support organization, where the Board has responsibilities to both a national membership needing national services, and a national funder requiring national governance, but authority only over a central office — and satisfying their responsibilities requires the participation of all partners in the federation. A Board in this situation can only be successful when their responsibilities are aligned — all federation partners are committed to their shared mission, and national membership and funders that understand the challenges but accept them for the sake of the benefits.
Even then, handling the conflicting roles of a central office board in a federation is genuinely difficult, and we have asked board members to date to take this on with little to no support on how best to proceed. Most studies recommend board training that emphasizes the challenges and possibilities of a federated system, and how governance activities and other board decisions can support the work of the federation as a whole. In our federation this would complement, but still require, greater clarity of the role and the mandate of the central office.
Proposal: The central office and regional Boards should regularly meet to ensure alignment of governance.
With the recognition that a central office Board does not operate in a vacuum, some other possibilities for support present themselves. While in our federation to date, there has been much effort in establishing ongoing meetings between management and staff of the partners of our federation, several works also suggest similar interactions between members of the Boards of the partners to ensure alignment of not just management, but governance, particularly while partners of our federation are adjusting to newly-defined roles.
Membership
Evidence from the study of successful international advocacy NGOs (Brown, Ebrahim, and Batliwala 2012), suggest that membership in a federation should reflect the primary accountability of the federation. In our case, this is to the researchers, strongly suggesting that researchers or their representatives should be members; we suggest that putting the burden on researchers to govern the federation that should be working on their behalf is unreasonable, and that the existing model of membership comprising institutions in their role as representing researchers is a reasonable compromise.
Proposal: Members should be given the access and support they need to play an active role in the federation.
Shared governance in a federation — or indeed the governance of any member-owned non-profit — requires active participation of the members to be successful. A finding of (Widmer and Houchin 1999) is that even in federations where “the membership may appear to have significant powers, in practice, the influence of the membership may be limited by infrequent opportunities to exercise power […], little control over the agenda, lack of experience and cohesion among affiliate representatives, and infrequent meetings of the membership”, whereas in other organizations the membership is given many more opportunities to participate in governance, from advisory roles to votes on policies. Perhaps partly because of lack of visibility members have had into the governance and management of the central office and the federation as a whole, members to date have been reticent to fully participate. If our project is to be successful, this needs to change; the federation has to make sure its members have whatever support they need so that they can take their full role within the federation.
In addition, the membership needs to be actively recruited to reflect as broad a range of Canadian institutions as possible, and barriers to membership should be reduced as much as feasible.
Federation-wide Decision Making
The role of a central office and how it complements the roles of the other partners in the federation is crucial to a federation’s success. (Brown, Ebrahim, and Batliwala 2012) identified several factors which determine whether successful international organizations function as a loosely-coupled network of allies or a more tightly-coupled federation.
In their work, they demonstrate that to the extent to which the work being undertaken is long-term and coherence is needed, that federations, being more tightly-coupled seem to work best. If the work is more short term (as for individual short-term advocacy campaigns) or less coherence is needed (as if each group was going to lobby only within its own region), loosely-knit and perhaps even ad-hoc partnerships worked well.
We argue that Canadian research merits a long-term and coherent computational platform for supporting research, meaning that a federation, and not a loose network, is appropriate. But how should such a federation operate internally? What should the roles of the individual partners in the federation be, and how should decisions be made?
Management of a federation of co-equal partners can only be derived from conensus. Again from (Mollenhauer 2009), a success factor in federations is that:
“There is a clear understanding that leadership is shared across the federation and there is acknowledgement of the role of consensus, not authority, as key to decision-making. The CEO/Executive Director of the national organization has strong skills in communication and facilitation and puts high value on process as well as on delivering results.”
Proposal: Federation-wide decision making processes should be supported by all members of the federation.
This doesn’t mean that consensus must be achieved for every single agenda item in a meeting — that brings paralysis — but on decision-making processes themselves there must be explicit, formal agreement, with clear distinctions between “between decisions that need unanimous or consensus agreement because they are critical (e.g. those tied to risk management) versus those that need a majority (e.g. those related to activities).” And while a central office must be responsible for those processes as the facilitator, which is a different role from being the decision-maker.
The central office has played different roles over the years. As the federal arm of the platform, it will always be primarily responsible for directly working with federal funders, national research organizations and societies, and international partners. Working with those organizations gives the central office a different, birds-eye view of the national research community.
These different perspectives matter: our federation’s mandate is not just to assist individual researchers already working with us but Canadian researchers collectively. It is far too easy to focus too much on either the forest or the trees, and the combination of hands-on and birds-eye perspectives is vital in setting priorities, and consensus decision making is required to bring these two perspectives together.
The Value of a Federation
(Grossman and Rangan 2001) take an overview of five international federations and look at what determines the relationship between the partners. They point out that local autonomy and affiliation to a central coherent framework aren’t opposed; one can have partner organizations with high autonomy and low (Outward Bound) or high (The Nature Conservancy) affiliation and coherence. The determining factor in the authors’ view was the value of affiliation into a federation for the partners; if there was high value in a federation, one would persist and be stable, even in the presence of disagreements about operations or strategy.
Proposal: The federation should make it clear internally, to the research community, and to funders, the value of the federation, the delineation of roles, and the services provided by the federation.
In the case of our federation, there are several important ways a federation can be valuable to the partners, although these have not yet been fully realized. A federation can enable specialization, allowing individual providers to focus their efforts on the services they are best at providing, instead of trying to be all things to all researchers in their jurisdiction; and it can allow the researchers in the jurisdiction to access a wider range of services and expertise than would otherwise be possible. However, those value propositions are greatly diminished if the national platform focuses on uniformity rather than interoperability.
The WWF-US case study mentioned earlier illustrates the importance of need for value from working together for a federation. In the early 2000s, after years of WWF national offices being largely independent with only certain aspects being set centrally, there was disagreement about mission and priorities. This grew to tension between the central office (WWF International, in Switzerland), and several national offices, including WWF-US, the largest, which had seriously considered leaving the network.
But in the mid 2000s a major international victory surrounding conservation preservation in Tesso Nilo, Indonesia, had required coordinated pressure from several national organizations and expertise ranging from finance and marketing and the ecosystem science to the local governance and land management practices; this collaboration, which had grown organically and almost accidentally, convinced the member organizations to restructure the federation around such projects of global impact requiring global effort. Decisions are now largely made through a “network executive team” involving the central office and representatives for national and program offices, and local office commitments to various programmes are spelled out in detailed documents agreed to by both sides. While the national offices retain autonomy, the network now acts in a much more coherent, integrated way; that increased coherence has brought reduced tension between central and local offices due to the improved clarity of the mission.
On the other hand, if the value of federation isn’t made clear, partners may stop engaging with the federation or even depart, such as with the recent situation with the Alzheimer’s Association in the US (McCambridge 2016).
References
Brown, L. David, Alnoor Ebrahim, and Srilatha Batliwala. 2012. “Governing International Advocacy NGOs.” World Development 40 (6): 1098–1108. link.
Grossman, Allen, and V Kasturi Rangan. 2001. “Managing Multisite Nonprofits.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 11 (3). Wiley Online Library: 321–37.
McCambridge, Ruth. 2016. “Why Local Alzheimer’s Association Chapters Are Breaking with National.” Nonprofit Quarterly link.
Mollenhauer, L. 2009. “A Framework for Success for Nonprofit Federations, Revised.” link.
———. 2012. “Transformation in Structure and Governance: National Health Charities Respond to New Challenges and Opportunities.” link.
Strategic Leverage Partners. 2009. “Local Business Structures Within a Federated Model.” link.
Wei-Skillern, Jane, and Kerry Herman. 2008. “World Wildlife Fund U.S.” Harvard Business Review Case Study. link.
Widmer, C.H., and S Houchin. 1999. Governance of National Federated Organizations. Research in Action. National Center for Nonprofit Boards. link.