Coming out of the Covid-19 crisis, Coaching Corps, like a lot of nonprofits, was looking for pathways to create a bigger impact in the communities it cared about. For more than 20 years, the nonprofit had delivered high-quality sports programming to kids through coach training and other activities, with a focus on low-income communities in California. But its board and staff, together with some funders, believed the organization could do more by expanding its national reach and programming.
At the same time, a larger peer nonprofit, Positive Coaching Alliance, was engaged in similar conversations about its next chapter — specifically, how to expand its respected model of bringing healthy, fun, and developmentally appropriate youth sports programming to more underserved communities. Over the years, our two organizations had partnered on several projects and had even talked fleetingly about the possibility of merging. But it was the upheaval and uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with our shared interest in transformative impact, that forced us to act.
More than two years after joining together under the Positive Coaching Alliance name, we are now well on our way to delivering on our promise of improving access to sports for 7 million young people by 2027, with half coming from underresourced communities.
To help other nonprofits and their funders pull off a successful merger, here are five key takeaways from our experience.
Find synergies and play to each organization’s strengths.
Before our merger, Positive Coaching Alliance and Coaching Corps were both seeking avenues to faster, broader impact. Coaching Corps wanted to strengthen its donor base and increase the number of young people, coaches, and families it could serve across the country. Positive Coaching Alliance had experienced a transition from a founding executive director and was trying to figure out its strategy post-Covid. It had a large national footprint but wanted to do more work in underserved communities, which was a core part of the Coaching Corps mission.
Both of our groups quickly saw that a merger would help us get where we wanted to go much faster than we could on our own.
Communicate, communicate, communicate.
When we started talking about a merger, some of our staff, board, and volunteers inevitably felt a sense of loss. We dealt with that straight on: For example, we hosted “mythbuster” presentations to help them see how the merger was going to make each of our organizations more effective and impactful.
Messaging — for both our internal audiences and our donors — was essential to move the merger forward. As the leaders of the merging groups, we each were very deliberate about crediting the legacy and impact of the other organization and what it brought to the merger. We wanted to make sure there was no doubt among our board, employees, and volunteers that the two of us were unwavering in our support for this decision and saw it as an absolute win-win.
Integrate both cultures.
In real estate, they say, “location, location, location.” In mergers, we learned it’s “culture, culture, culture.” We were super intentional from the start about bringing the best aspects of both of our organizations together and creating the culture we wanted for Positive Coaching Alliance.
As a first step, we formed a committee of representatives of both groups to help define our values and how we would work together as one nonprofit. As part of this process, every staff member had the opportunity to vote and provide specific feedback on the committee’s suggestions. This process resulted in a concise list of organizational values that included collaboration, empathy, learning, equity, and belonging.
Given that we were still coming out of the pandemic, a lot of our culture-building efforts had to be virtual. We held staffwide online sessions for learning, information-sharing, and teambuilding, with different departments from each organization sharing about their day-to-day work and priorities. We also started a new branding and logo update process that engaged the staff and board in articulating and refining the identity of the merged organization.
We knew the merger wouldn’t work if we simply tried to impose a culture on the new organization. We had to go into it with the understanding that everyone shared responsibility for its success.
Build support from the inside out.
We created a merger committee with two trustees from each organization who focused on building relationships and buy-in across the two boards from the start. We also decided to keep all board members from each organization post-merger. That meant we had a large board at first, but over time some people left, so we right-sized it during the first two years.
Likewise, we committed to keeping all staff from both organizations for a year after the merger. Obviously, that resulted in some similar and redundant positions, so we had to do a fair amount of role-shifting — and not everyone agreed with where they were placed. We lost some employees because of that, and then in the second year had to make some hard decisions and let some people go. Now we think we have the team in place to push forward with what we want to do.
Engage funders early.
As we considered the idea of merging, we held confidential conversations with our core funders — a few large foundations and close, longtime individual donors — to get their opinions and feedback. We explained how we believed merging would help us meet our goals and tried to connect that to what they had already told us they wanted for our organizations, which was greater impact and broader reach.
If we could do one thing differently, we would ask for more support for the merger in those early conversations. Merging might deliver long-term efficiencies, but it costs money upfront. As it was, some funders said they wanted to wait to support the merged organization until they could see how things played out, and that made for some dicey times. It’s a delicate balance, but the more of a commitment you can get at the outset, the better off you will be as the merger moves forward.
Now more than two years into our work as a merged nonprofit, Positive Coaching Alliance is hitting our goals and going strong. Early in October, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an ambitious plan to train 25,000 coaches in positive youth coaching techniques across the state by the end of 2025, with our organization as a lead partner. Meanwhile, we expanded access to sports for roughly 59,000 low-income young people during our 2024 fiscal year — a 100 percent increase over the previous year.
We believe these results, alongside others, would not have been possible without our merger. By combining forces, we’re already reaching a lot more kids with programs that help them, their families, and their communities see the benefits of positive sports.
