The examples in this newsletter are drawn from real partnership experiences. Names and identifying details have been altered to protect privacy.
Who's This For
You're past the midpoint of your funded project. The work is happening. Reports are being written. And somewhere, maybe in the back of your mind or maybe in an explicit funder expectation, there's a question: what will last?
Not just what you'll accomplish while the funding flows, but what you'll have when it ends. What documentation, what evidence, what relationships, what shared intellectual products will exist that didn't exist before?
This newsletter is for anyone thinking about legacy before it's time to write the final report. For PIs who want to capture outcomes while they're happening rather than reconstructing them at the end. For partnership coordinators who understand that the best evidence for your next proposal is documentation from your current project - if you capture it now.
Here's what I've learned from watching projects end well versus end poorly: the difference isn't in the quality of the work. It's in the quality of the documentation. Projects that capture their legacy as they go finish strong. Projects that wait until the end spend their final months scrambling to reconstruct what they should have recorded along the way.
The Partnership Moment
Picture this: You're a year out from project end. Your program officer mentions something about "tangible products of the partnership" in a call. Your partner asks, half-jokingly, whether there might be a paper in what you've been doing together.
And you realize you haven't thought systematically about what shared intellectual products this partnership will produce.
You have outcomes. Students trained, activities completed, relationships built. But products? The kind you can point to, share, cite? That feels like a different question.
Meanwhile, your partner exists in a world where "publication" means something different than it does for you. For you, it's peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. For them, it might be a trade magazine, an internal report, a promotional piece, a presence at an industry conference.
You've been collaborating, but you haven't really talked about what the collaboration produces that lives beyond the grant.
Under the Surface
Here's what most partnerships miss about co-authorship: it doesn't have to mean traditional publishing.
When researchers hear "co-authored products," they think journal articles. Conference papers. Scholarly publications with their names in the byline.
But think broader. Shared intellectual products include:
Participating together in community or policy engagement
Developing a new product, curriculum, or methodology
Co-presenting at conferences - yours and theirs
Writing for trade magazines or practitioner outlets
Creating promotional materials that showcase the work
Building intellectual property or exploring commercialization
Co-participating in an incubator or innovation showcase
These expand partnerships beyond what they started with. They create tangible evidence of collaboration that speaks to audiences you might not otherwise reach.
The shift is from "will we publish together?" to "what representations of this project could work across all partner types?" The answer often includes venues and formats you wouldn't consider if you only thought in academic terms.
