Creating Fertile Soil for the Merger Option
In 2012, the organization then known as MAP for Nonprofits collaborated with Wilder Research to perform a study examining 41 nonprofit mergers of organizations based in Minnesota. The results inspired a research report and this article by Judith Alnes, published in the the fall 2012 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Nonprofits & Democracy: Working the Connection.” Here, Alnes describes the results of the study and considers how to make the idea of mergers and partnerships more palatable to the nonprofit sector:
In the context of such a stultifying approach, many nonprofit leaders ignore the voices calling for mergers as an uninformed siren call. Why should nonprofits listen? The message minimizes the complexities of programming and community ownership/stewardship issues. But what if the whole proposition were lighted differently to focus on the potential benefits in terms of power, agility, influence, and effectiveness? Might the conversation be more attractive to nonprofit boards? Appealing to nonprofits in a way that reflects the real reasons why nonprofits merge might, in fact, be a better approach, but we know that many mergers fail in the for-profit sphere. What can we hold up as potential outcomes?
