By Michelle Shumate, Sophia Fu, Katherine R. Cooper, Jennifer Ihm
Despite a body of scholarship that focuses on the characteristics of both within-sector and cross-sector partnerships for nonprofit organizations at the collaborative dyad or whole network level, we know little about the patterns of relationships that a focal organization maintains with other organizations at the meso-level. This research drew upon surveys from 520 nonprofit organizations and employed the Ward Cluster method to introduce interorganizational network portfolios, which we define as the number, type, and character of interorganizational relationships that organizations purposefully develop. Based on organizations’ similarity across 12 network dimensions, cluster analysis revealed three distinct network portfolios. These portfolios characterize nonprofit organizations as high-level collaborators that engage in within- and cross-sector collaboration characterized by frequent communication and greater intensity (n = 120, 23.08%), traditional collaborators that rely almost entirely within-sector partnerships (n = 332, 63.84%), and isolated impact organizations that have no relationship beyond that of funder-recipient (n = 68, 13.08%). Further, we examined the characteristics of each network portfolio and found that high-level collaborators, traditional collaborators, and isolated impact organizations differed in their social missions and geographic scope.