When you work in a nonprofit organization, the following tips may improve your ability to collaborate:

1. Re-read the mission of the organization and consider how all participants are working towards achieving that mission (or common goal).
2. Given the current roles people play in your organization, how do people occupy or enact those roles to contribute to the overall mission? How can you use your role to contribute to the common goal?
3. Consider the boundaries of your organization and how they function to both enable what is possible as well as constrain some actions.  How can you best work together given this context?
4. Before attending a meeting, consider how you will contribute.  You may want to speak to the meeting organizer in advance and ask how s/he expects you to contribute.  Come prepared.
   1. Come prepared to provide an account of your past actions and good reasons for future actions.  When you think of good reasons for acting, be sure that your reasons conform to what is expected of you given your role, your organization’s mission, and the tasks you have undertaken. If you consider alternate actions before being asked, you will be better prepared to address how to possibly alter your future actions.
5. When organizing a meeting, think about the participants carefully – has everyone who can make a contribution been invited?  If someone can lend their knowledge or skills to a decision or to group cohesion, how can you include him or her?
6. When it is your turn to speak during a meeting, consider how best to say what you want to say – how can the manner of your presentation contribute to the goals for the meeting?
7. Take seriously what is said during the meeting.  By holding yourself and others accountable for what is said and done, you will ensure that contributions are made meaningfully.
   1. Consider what is written down based on what is said during meetings.  If you take minutes, how are decisions or commitments recorded and then followed up at later meetings?
8. When changes are proposed, consider the details.  It may be your impulse to resist a new process or procedure.  Before dismissing it out of hand, consider the changes you would make to the way you get things done yourself.  Consider if your joint activities are conducted in the most effective manner.  Are there details to the proposed change that can be altered to make it better?  By contributing to the definition or features of the proposed change, you will be more involved in measuring the success of its outcome.  Often when changes fail, another change is proposed; rarely do things return to what you may have considered the status quo.
9. Consider what is best said outside of formally organized group meetings.  Is there a better time and place to make your contribution?  Sometimes informal conversations can be a more effective way to achieve your goals than making a public statement that is rejected.
10. Enjoy the process – working together to achieve common goals is a way of changing society through the power of collaboration; you can often accomplish larger goals jointly than individually.

©Milburn, 2013

Based on  Milburn, T. (2009).  Nonprofit Organizations: Creating Membership Through Communication.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. -- Afterward, pp. 97-101