The Knitting Factor: Tying It All Together in Celebration of Pro Bono Week

Last year we debuted a concept called The Knitting Factor, which helps explain how skills-based volunteering knits together the expertise from the corporate and nonprofit sectors to create sustainable solutions that don’t come undone when partners part ways. We also introduced three key ingredients to the success of The Knitting Factor: Panoramic Perspectives, Skill Sharing and Sticky Relationships. In celebration of Pro Bono Week, we wanted to share a quick review of how the Knitting Factor has worked in practice over the past year. 

An overview of The Knitting Factor, is perhaps best summarized by:

• Our initial outline of the concept as published in The Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Promise of Skills-Based Volunteering”
• We also broke down the three ingredients to success in our blog post “The Knitting Factor: Making Skills-Based Volunteering Stick”

We highlighted Panoramic Perspectives or a view that looks at people beyond their titles, organizations and sectors to allow value to transcend profit by

• Digging into what makes some of our favorite cross-functional groups work so well in our blog post, “Panoramic Perspectives: Creating Cross-Sector Communities of Practice”
• We then went behind-the-scenes with two exceptional leaders who put their diverse perspectives to work daily in interviews with May Malik of NYC Service and Tim Smith from The Boston Foundation and Pledge 1% Boston

We focused on Skill Sharing, or the idea that skills-based volunteering is a two-way talent exchange where pro bono professionals learn as much from the nonprofits they work with as those nonprofits learn from them, by

• Sharing a personal account on how we’ve seen Cross-Sector Skill Sharing in Action
• Providing detailed accounts of how this all works in practice with case studies from our corporate partners S&P Global and Fidelity Investments and nonprofit partners: The Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, Center for Transforming Lives and Sexual Assault Recovery Agency (SARA)
• And providing a tool to help Develop Nonprofit Leaders through Skills-Based Volunteering

And we are closing out the year with an inside look at Sticky Relationships, or a commitment to building long-lasting partnerships that drive missions and business forward, by

• Examining just what makes great partnerships work in our blog post on “Creating Long-Term Partnerships that Stick”
• Providing a candid look at how nonprofits and corporate partners can best navigate the always tricky power dynamic
• And, going behind-the-scenes with one of our Senior Consultants to reflect on Learning from Real-Life Examples and examining the role we, at Common Impact, play on bringing cross-sector partnerships to life.

Join us in celebrating Pro Bono Week (#PBW18) by tagging @CommonImpact in your #probono service tweets and posts. Follow our stories here on the Common Impact blog and on our new podcast – Pro Bono Perspectives where we will be celebrating the volunteers, nonprofits and corporate partners that make skilled service possible!