22RISE for HR&S Country Branches

Partnerships for development

  1. Empowering and coordinating Partnerships for Development
    We reach out to development institutions, development banks and private companies to identify overlaps between our mission and their missions. Then create win-win pitches and approach the potential partners, we follow-up and we ensure good partner care.
      1. Create a list of possible partner institutions and prioritise among them. The key is to have a “door-opener”. So who is friends with your team, who do you and your team know, that can introduce you and/or the project to an important financial partner?
      2. If using HubSpot as CRM (only paid for versions allow team views) to prioritise among potential partners.
        • Upload institutions that may be interesting to partner with.
        • Structure the company section with extra columns
          • Average scores (the average score of the other three scores); Investment capacity (does the other institution have capacity to invest financially?); Mission overlap (How well does our mission overlap with the other institution’s mission?); We have a suitable proposal (do we have a proposal suitable for addressing the other institution’s challenges?). The strength of the door opener (What level of authority does our door-opener have to influence the decisions of the institution). Then score all these from 1-10.
          • Door-opener (the person(s) who can introduce us and our pitch to the institution). Door-opening partners (a partner who knows a door-opener at the targeted institution) This gives direction to partners’ door-openers, thus name of person who knows who to contact or even better can introduce us and/or our pitch. Benefit from LinkedIn).
          • Opportunities for individuals such as research grants, travel grants, mentorship, visit programmes etc. Score and mention which opportunity.
        • Each stakeholder committee member selects 5-10 institutions to compile data for;
          • Fill in the five scores per company/institution,
          • Compile important information about the institution and
          • Compile important information about the door-opener from the company/institution website and LinkedIn.
          • Develop a ROPE review per institution that can easily be incorporated into a win-win pitch together with our home institutions.
      3. Develop a Pitch
        • We make this process efficient by combining ROPE review for each potential partner, including our own. We thereby identify common ambitions, common outcome challenges and we can notice if our own input can be expected to be useful for a potential partner, ad if their input is useful for us.
          • The development institutions input is often financial support, expert knowledge, products and services, while the
          • input from institutions with fragile infrastructure is the SOPs and GMPs developed  during ROPE coaching, as well as “door-openers”.
          • The pitch shall also compile previous achievements.
      4. Reach out & follow-up.
        • It can be noted that as administration costs is often calculated as a percentage of the total, it is usually more favourable for a financial partner to engage in larger programmes.
        • Follow-up until deal has been made or not made. If not compile lessons learned and take informed decisions.

The pitch

How we develop a pitch.

Reflections before starting

  • A potentially successful pitch is not a statement of that we need and/or desire the funds or support a development institution has as a mandate to invest. A potentially successful pitch is a piece of proof of that we already have a system in place that ensures evidence based sustainable impact, matching exactly the Ambitions of the development institution, if funds and/or support is invested in us.
  • It is more efficient to carefully review ROPEs of potential partners and identify strong matching than to send vague proposals. It is also crucial for our brand that if an Institution hears from HR&S they are already sure that the message or proposal is quality.
  • People are very busy and we shall not waste anyone else’s time, so when we do reach out,
    • our request is always professional, easy to understand, makes a lot of sense,is interesting for the targeted person, helps the targeted person with something she/he needs help with,  we are sure we target the right person…, thus, it is of top quality in every aspect.
    • our programme is large enough ensuring that the % admin cost is low for the potential partner.
    • we have already coordinated we an impressing number of co-partners, many of which are already at reach within the HR&S family.

Preparations

We often develop pitches by combining ROPE reviews of the partners form whom we propose a win-win partnership (including ourselves).

  1. Clearly identify the partners for the collaboration.
  2. Compile ROPE reviews for each partner and upload on the CRM platform in use.
    • By doing so can we use the same ROPE review several times.
  3. Assess:
    1. The level of Ambition overlap
    2. If our Sustainable Impact represents a solution to their Outcome Challenges.
  4. If the assessment scores high, then we do have a value proposition to offer, and it is worth the effort to develop a pitch.

Pitch Development

  1. When presenting the problem and the need,
    ensure that it is a something that the potential partner(s) recognise and feel comfortable with.
    • This is the overlapping ROPE backgrounds/contexts for all involved partners, thus the reason to why they have defined their respective ambitions.
    • The need is often versions of the Outcome Challenges.
  2. When presenting the solution and our competitive advantages
    ensure it is an over-lap of Activities. That what we want to do is also what the potential partner wants to do AND needs support to address.
    As competitive advantages we present our SOPs, our GMPs and out TestE survey findings.
  3. When requesting an investment
    try to leverage it to be at at price that is easy for the potential partner to cover. Maybe something small, very easy to understand, precise reporting and a low price. So that they decide to try/take the risk with a new partner, us. Then hopefully we will get a change to scale up, later.

HR&S coordination

We develop pitches jointly within HR&S; Branches and SwedenHQ together.

We use the platform “Notion” for the HR&S coordination.