You’ve written the phrase “broader impacts” more times than you can count. Each proposal, you stare at the partnership section and wonder: what do real partnerships actually look like? How do other people do this?
So you Google it. You borrow language from a colleague’s funded proposal. You describe partnerships that sound good on paper but have no infrastructure behind them. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know reviewers can tell the difference.
Here’s what nobody told you: partnership design is a professional skill. It can be learned. And you don’t need to invent it from scratch every time you write a proposal.
That’s why I built Partnership Designer.
It’s a collection of eight Team Guides covering the full arc of partnership development, from figuring out your impact identity to turning ideas into funded, functioning collaborations. Each guide is a complete package: eight newsletters, interactive tools that produce outputs you can actually use, downloadable resources, workshop slides, and video walkthroughs.
The guides came from years of evaluating NSF EPIIC institutions and doctoral research on how STEM faculty actually build partnerships. Not theory. Practice.
Here’s what you’ll find:
Story Stacks helps you articulate who you are as a researcher and what you actually care about. It’s the starting point for everything else.
Partnership Idea Sparks shows you what real partnerships look like across seven sectors, from policy to industry to workforce development. No more blank-page syndrome.
Partnership Best Practices teaches the difference between partnerships that work and partnerships that just look good on paper. Spoiler: it’s about designing for mutual benefit, not extracting what you need.
Participatory Evaluation for Researchers embeds assessment into your activities so it doesn’t feel bolted on at the end.
Participatory Evaluation for Workforce adapts those same principles for career development programs.
Partnership to Proposal walks you through first conversations, relationship building, and writing sections that reviewers actually believe.
Layered Partnership Design connects individual collaborations to institutional infrastructure, so your partnerships survive personnel changes and outlast any single grant.
Workforce Development Pathways helps you design career programs where employers are co-designers, not just advisory board names.
Sixty interactive tools. Eight complete guides. One system that meets you wherever you are in your partnership journey.
The first issue of every guide is free. No credit card. No commitment. Story Stacks is entirely free, all eight issues, because it’s where everything else begins.
Subscribe, and Issue 1 arrives in your inbox tomorrow. Try the Impact Identity Explorer. See if the approach works for you.
You don’t need to reinvent this. The map already exists.