Struggling to win corporate partnerships?

How to help companies say ‘yes’ by showing the value in partnering with your charity.

Effective corporate fundraisers have always known that the best charity partnerships are genuinely win/win.

But not all companies understand this, especially early in the conversation, which is a major reason they may be reluctant to consider a partnership, or to explore the idea of building something more generous and ambitious than they currently do.

A powerful question to explore is, how can you help them ‘get’ it?

The first useful step for most of us is to increase our own certainty that partnerships really are good for companies!

Most fundraisers who take part in the Corporate Partnerships Mastery tend to become more confident when negotiating with companies. And they become more bold and creative in reaching out to companies and persuading them to meet for an informal chat in the first place.

When they get there, those chats tend to go better, largely because they are more comfortable to be doing less talking (about their charities) and more curious listening about what might be in it for the company. So the conversations become two way. Information about challenges and opportunities for both parties get shared which is obviously essential for any effective negotiation.

A big factor in this shift is they have become more certain that partnering with a charity will be valuable to the company too.

One reason this conviction is so valuable, is because usually what happens is that when charities use the word ‘partnership’, companies don’t actually hear that word in its truest sense.

What they presume you mean is that you’ve come to ask them to be kind / philanthropic. So they either tell you there is, or there isn’t a process for giving out grants. They rarely think in terms of genuine benefit to both parties.

So how do you increase your own confidence that partnering with your charity would be valuable?

There is nothing more powerful than finding examples of the ways partnerships add value to companies as well as charities.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Talk to your existing partners!

If your charity already has some corporate partners, it is highly likely that some of them are experiencing some benefits.

As you read this, if you had to think of the one or two for whom this is most likely to be true, which ones spring to mind?

(Of course, a challenge is that they usually have not explicitly told you. And almost certainly not if the way you asked was by email.)

To help, in our recent podcast all about improving your confidence negotiating with corporate partners, corporate fundraising specialist Ben Swart shares lots of examples. This includes a cleaning product company that encouraged by a charity to try a Cause Related Marketing (CRM) partnership. Though initially sceptical, they agreed to test it for three months. Sales increased by 73%!  The company immediately signed up to repeat the partnership the following year. Why wouldn’t they?

Ben also talks about a partnership between M&S and NSPCC, the charity where he used to work.

One Christmas period, M&S acquired the license to promote 22 different Paddington products, including Paddington pyjamas, slippers, a soft toy etc. One of the 22 products was a Paddington book which was sold in aid of the NSPCC (Childline).

What happened?

Out of all 22 products, the one that sold fastest was the book in aid of the charity!

In fact, it sold out and a re-print was needed. It sold over 600,000 copies in a few weeks. It even outsold Paddington Bear soft toys themselves.

Crucially, we’re not saying that in every partnership, they are necessarily selling more product, or they have necessarily conclusive market research e.g. showing their brand is perceived more positively… although both are sometimes true.

Rather, there are many ways that partners can benefit. There are usually positive effects for the company (even if this was not the primary reason they decided to partner with you). For example:

• Relationships. Very often, partnering with a charity helps a company improve relationships with some of its stakeholders, for instance, its suppliers, or the retailers it depends on to sell the product. This can be incredibly valuable to companies!
• Culture. Ben mentions a company which said that one of its long-term challenges had always been reducing silos and a sense of separation between levels of hierarchy. He said that in a recent staff engagement survey one junior colleague fed back that in the day volunteering for the charity partner he had spent several hours working alongside the CEO, something which felt really valuable and had never happened before.
• Positive feedback in staff surveys. We’ve found that partnerships are often mentioned in staff surveys as one of the most positive things about working for a company.
• Engagement on-line. We’ve noticed thatcompared to all the othercontent a company shares, the videos or other posts relating to its charity partnership tend to receive much more positive engagement, and way fewer negative comments, than the rest of its content. In this age of digital marketing, this is invaluable. In the podcast, Ben shares an example of a well-known football brand partnering with a charity, where this positive effect was emphatic.
• Repetition. Companies tend to do more of what’s working! The adverts which promote the brilliant partnership between McCain and Family Fund have continued to be aired for three years, because they are so effective in marketing terms.

If you have a partner that has supported you for more than one year, as well as making a difference to your cause, there is a good chance that it’s working out well for the company too. For instance, in terms of the colleagues or the customers approving of this partnership. How could you find out why?  

The most powerful thing you can do to better understand the positive effects of partnering with your charity is to reach out to existing partners and suggest a catch-up cup of coffee (or Zoom / Teams call.)

Be eager and open to hear about how the existing partnership is going. Where there are challenges, be curious rather than defensive, and use what they tell you to explore solutions, where they are possible.

Above all, be on the look out for comparisons.

• For example, what was morale like after the charity volunteering day compared to before?
• What was online engagement like for the product that included the charity Cause Related Marketing (CRM) offer, compared to their other products?
• According to staff surveys, how engaged have staff been since the partnership started, compared to before?

2. Study other charity partnerships

If you don’t already have partners, (or so far you’ve not be been able to get any sense from your partners that they there is any benefit to the company), then the next best thing is to study other charity partnerships that you hear about on-line, at conferences or from contacts in other charities. Here are a couple of examples that Ben mentions on the podcast.

• For example, the long-standing partnership between suicide-prevention charity Samaritans and Network Rail since 2015 has included a range of measures to raise awareness and provide training for what to do if staff are worried about someone they notice in a station. In the nine years, staff have intervened more than 27,000 times. Note, this partnership has not only saved thousands of lives. With these prevented tragedies it has also reduced the trauma that would have been experienced and improved the well-being of staff at Network Rail, and reduced delays for commuters.
• Ben also shared the story of a well-known cleaning brand which partners with charities at least once a year. During the promotion period, the company has the marketing benefit of doing a special promotion without having to discount as much as with other promotional tactics (such as Buy One Get One Free); it also stands out on the shelf because being associated with a good cause brings emotion to a product that is otherwise largely functional (in spite of what their branding agency might insist, it really is just chemicals and water); and it’s really valuable for marketing teams to set up conversations with retailers, who often hold most of the power in these relationships. During a charitable promotion like this, retailers tend to be more open to meeting with suppliers.

How studying value will help you win partnerships

The more you collect your own examples and study those of other charity partnerships, the more confident you will become when you reach out to companies to discuss partnering.

It can be valuable to share a couple of your favourite examples. Being able to succinctly share them is a powerful way to re-frame how they were perceiving a potential relationship with your charity. On the podcast we show you how and when to do this, to improve your conversations with companies.

And as important, even if you don’t proactively mention them, simply becoming a student of this value anyway increases your confidence when explaining the immense power of partnerships, in both internal and external conversations.

Want to grow your Corporate Partnerships fundraising results?

If you’d like to improve your partnerships results, then Corporate Partnerships Mastery will help. To find out more, or request a call, follow the link above.