By Bonnie Chiu, MD, TSIC

This is the first blog in our integration series, sharing reflections from our acquisition of TSIP and Renaisi last year.

We’ve had a few tough years in the social impact space – and the challenges seem to keep growing, from backlash against civil liberties to economic recessions and withdrawal of funding. Unfortunately, social impact organisations may need to close and can no longer continue their missions. But closing is not the only way – collaborating with others, some of whom may be your competitors – can be an impactful way forward.

In the corporate sector, this is known as “mergers and acquisitions” (M&A), and it is part of the life cycle of any business. But it is rare in the social impact space. In a Webinar recently about the impact of USAID’s withdrawal of funding on humanitarian organisations, it was mentioned that M&A isn’t on the table for vast majority of these organisations. The Good Merger Index from UK-based consultancy Eastside People, has seen a 31% growth in number of charity mergers last year, though there were only 63 mergers involving 131 organisations, out of over 170,000 charities registered in the UK. Why isn’t this more normalised?

Last year, we had first hand experience of acquiring two social impact consultancies in the UK, but we have largely kept quiet about it externally, partly because it is not considered the norm in the industry, and we are unsure what the reactions would be. But we were encouraged by the bold call to action by Kataly Foundation – “Failure often happens in secret. But what is possible when we share our failures in public?”

Failure is a stigmatised word, and it’s important to highlight that failure of organisations is not always the fault of the organisations themselves, much less the people working in them. In 2024, we found ourselves in a situation to consider if we should step in to support two social impact consultancies, similar to ours, as they otherwise would run out of cash and not be able to sustain their work – technically, they would otherwise “fail”.

One of two consultancies is a longstanding partner – The Social Innovation Partnership (TSIP) – with whom we’ve collaborated with on multiple projects including serving as the learning partner of their participatory grantmaking initiative in Southwark, The Giving Lab. The other was Renaisi, whom we have admired from afar, given their pioneering work on designing and evaluating place-based systems change programmes.

We want to share our learnings from the past ten months – most of them are based on things that we haven’t done well. Kataly shared their failures publicly in order “to practice radical honesty and transparency, hold ourselves accountable to moving differently going forward, and share lessons that others in philanthropy can learn from.” This is also what we are trying to do.

To our knowledge, this is the first acquisition of this nature in the UK social sector comprised entirely of organisations that can be considered backbone or knowledge organisations. Looking ahead, we feel that the pressures for organisations to deliver more and more, within constrained budgets, will only increase, and we hope that by sharing lessons learnt, we can help others navigate through these unchartered waters.

The next blog will be focused on strategic benefits from integration, followed by how to bring the team along, and ending with some sector-wide reflections.

There is so much to share so it will be a blog series – stay tuned!