[Translation : EPALE France]

When you embark on European cooperation, through Erasmus+ cooperation projects, you quickly find yourself faced with a major challenge: finding organisations in other countries with which to cooperate. Because yes, that is what it is all about. And it is easier said than done... especially when you have previously only worked at national level.

With Fable-Lab, we recently took our first steps in European cooperation, and we have tested a number of methods to find partners. Here is some feedback, which is necessarily fragmentary but hopefully useful!

Before we begin, it is worth remembering that when you embark on European cooperation with Erasmus+ (but the same advice applies to other programmes such as Europe Creative), it is strongly recommended that you start by setting up a small-scale partnership. In Erasmus+ speak, this is known as a simplified partnership (minimum two partners from two different countries). But even then you need to find (at least) one partner! So here we go.

EPALE

We will start at the beginning: using the partner search tools offered by the institutions themselves, and in the case of adult education, this means EPALE. Before even setting up a cooperation project, you can take a look at the “list of organisations” section and target the countries and/or sectors of activity that interest you, for example. But there is also a section dedicated to finding partners to set up projects, the “collaborate” section of the platform, which offers several ways of searching for European organisations. One section is specifically dedicated to finding partners, with the option of searching for advertisements published by other organisations or publishing your own once your organisation has registered on the platform.

We recently tested the publication of an ad designed to identify potential partners for a project we wanted to submit.

The first positive point is that it is very simple: all you need to do is to fill in a form on the platform, providing a certain amount of information to help people understand the nature of your project. Once written, your partner search ad is approved by Erasmus+ France before being put online.

Following our publication, we received a lot of replies (around fifteen messages in the space of two weeks), which enabled us to identify two partners of different kinds (an NGO and a local authority) in two countries where we had no contact.

A few tips for writing a partner search advertisement: write in English to reach as many people as possible; be precise in your description of the project (though you won’t be going into too much detail either!) so that the people who read your ad clearly understand your intention and so that you receive relevant responses; set a deadline for publication (and don’t have it end too late because there is still a lot of work to do afterwards!) It can also be nice to reply to organisations that are not necessarily the ones you end up working with, because they have made the effort to reply to you and they could be potential partners for other future projects.

The Erasmus+ National Agencies also organise online or face-to-face sessions to find partners. You should check the Erasmus+ European Training and Cooperation Activities platform regularly for information and/or the dedicated page on the Erasmus+ Education and Training Agency website.

Activate your contacts (and this means all your contacts!)

Even if you have never carried out a European cooperation project, there may be structures and people around you who know organisations in other countries (and remember that European cooperation can involve associations, local authorities, training bodies, private-sector structures, etc.). This may be a colleague who has worked abroad or whose sister lives in Germany, the members of your Board of Directors who may have professional or personal contacts in different countries, an organisation with which you share premises that is already involved in European projects or one of your friends who works in a large NGO with branches in other countries. Now is the time to tell people about your project and get the ball rolling!

Being a member of a regional or national network (the Fédération des Acteurs de la Solidarité, the Réseau Français des Fab Labs (RFFLabs), the Chambres Régionales de l’Economie Sociale et Solidaire or the Mouvement Associatif, to name but a few) can be an (excellent) gateway to Europe, even if you didn’t join these networks in the first place! In fact, some of these network leaders have staff dedicated to setting up European projects.

In the same vein, your organisation or your affiliate networks may be members of European networks that could enable you to discover structures in other countries working on the same issues as you or that could complement your expertise. There are networks of stakeholders (including associations, but not only) on many subjects (sport, disability, citizenship, feminism, etc.) and even if you are not a member of one of these networks, you often have access to the list of their members in different countries, so a little research on the Internet (see below) can prove invaluable. To take just one example, I mentioned the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) in another post. You can find a list of their members on their website if you are looking for anti-racist organisations. In a different area, RFFLabs works closely with the VULCA network, which brings together European players in the maker movement.

And if you have already identified a partner in a European country, you can also ask them if they know of any organisations that might be interested in your project in another country.

Your organisation may also be involved in European projects in other ways. For example, if you are working with a local authority (local or regional councils, etc.), it may already be involved in European projects such as URBACT projects, which specifically involve this type of stakeholder, or Erasmus+ mobility projects. In this case, you can ask the people running these projects to share your call for partners with their network. This is how we found our first Erasmus+ partner, thanks to the Seine-Saint-Denis Departmental Council team sharing our search for partners through the URBACT WELDI network, with which we are associated.

Using contacts can be highly effective because your contact is a trusted third party for both you and the potential partner. A request from someone you know, or someone you have worked with, is reassuring, and can really help you get high-quality replies.

Surf the Internet (but not only)

As we said, if you really don’t have any contacts in your field, the Internet can come to your rescue! By looking at which European networks are working on the same subjects as you, and who their members are in the countries eligible for the Erasmus+ programme; by doing research to identify structures working on the same subjects as you, and also by looking on websites linked to European funding programmes to see which structures have already been funded on themes similar to yours and who was in their consortium.

Social networks can also help you identify projects and partners. The European networks mentioned above often have a presence on LinkedIn or Instagram, and some of them regularly present their members, their projects, etc.

For a European cooperation project and with a view to co-financing, it may be interesting to look at the towns twinned with the town where you are based, the town(s) where you intend to carry out your project or the town of a partner already identified. For information, a Wikipedia page lists all the twinned towns in France (and their partners). In the same vein, networks such as ANVITA (a network of local authorities working towards welcoming migrants unconditionally) can help you identify institutional partners involved in the reception of migrants if you are working on this specific subject.

Plan (well) ahead

Whatever the case, finding European partners can take a long time, and once you have found them, you have to set up a project together, which can also take some time. You therefore need to prepare your project, and your search for partners, well in advance of submitting your project!

It is important that you have enough time to talk to your potential partners, get to know them, understand how they work and their constraints, and find out about the context (socio-economic, political, etc.) in which they operate so that you can understand them better and then develop the project as a whole.

While looking for partners can be a little scary, and is not an easy process (especially when you are just starting out), it is also a hugely stimulating and rewarding experience! Discovering organisations doing the same thing as you at the other end of Europe, being able to talk to people you would probably never have met, discovering countries you didn’t know at all... You have to make sure you don’t get lost: clarify with your team the type(s) of partner(s) you are looking for, the preferred geographical areas, the important criteria for narrowing down your search (expertise, target audience, etc.), the time you are giving yourself for getting replies.

What are your tips for finding European partners?

Note: Thank you to everyone who shared their advice on finding European partners with us!