This was much more complicated than it needed to be and all comes back to the ability to communicate clearly and effectively through various mediums (email, phone/skype, in-person). On my part, I was not completely clear on the finer details of what my research was to look at, mostly because I wanted to match it with the organisation’s interests but I was having great difficulty in finding out what those interests were due to the lack of communication and insufficient information about the organisation. I was worried that if I proposed something that was not of interest, then it might be turned down and I would be back to square one, looking for an organisation again. However a lesson from this is that, if there is one particular topic you are interested in researching then you should pursue it. If one organisation is not interested in that topic, then you can move on to find another, rather than spending much more time trying to negotiate a topic that is acceptable to both parties. This is of course, only a recommendation if you are strongly interested in a particular topic, rather than a particular organisation.
My biggest lesson from this was to have a clear and firm idea of not only the topic but the direction in which you would like to take the research (being flexible to the organisation’s needs, of course) and to do as much “pre-research research” as you can in order to have a firm idea of how this will benefit the organisation and what they can expect from it. This would have helped me a great deal had I done this before the initial discussions with the partner with whom I worked.