I search the web for information about nonprofit collaborations, mergers, and partnerships on a daily basis. Though I find a steady stream of articles about recent nonprofit mergers, it isn’t often that new publications drop in my lap completely out of the blue. That happened with the new booklet on nonprofit mergers called “Merge Minnesota: Nonprofit Merger as an Opportunity for Survival and Growth,” published by MAP for Nonprofits which was mailed to my house. This 8 ½ X 11 paperback is 71 pages long and crammed full of information about the merger process, from soup to nuts including a template for the steps to organizing and implementing a merger, stories about completed mergers, and appendices which identify experts, a literature review, and a very nice bibliography. There were several items in the literature review I had never seen before and it’s so nice to have all that information in one place.
The publisher of this unique document is MAP for Nonprofits, a management consulting firm to nonprofit organizations based in the Twin Cities. MAP launched a three year initiative called Project Re-Design to “help nonprofit organizations with organizational realignment, including mergers, program transfers, joint operating agreements, joint ventures, parent-subsidiary relationships, and dissolutions.” Though they didn’t know in 2007 when they launched the initiative that the country would be in a recession at the time of publication, they couldn’t have picked a better moment to come out with such a document.
If you have been looking for an easy to read, succinct, how-to booklet on mergers, this is a great publication to get. Don’t be fooled by the title; Merge Minnesota was funded by Minnesota foundations and therefore targeted to the local nonprofit market, but I am sure that the information in this booklet is (mostly) helpful to any nonprofit operating in any state in the U.S.
Jean Butzen, Mission Plus Strategy consulting, specializes in mergers and alliances in the Chicago area.
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