The 10 Commandments of Corporate Partnerships

Here’s a checklist of top things to consider when setting up, or fine-tuning, your nonprofit’s efforts to develop or maintain corporate alliances.

1. Understand your product and your value. Your nonprofit should do a great deal of analysis to determine what it can bring to the table long before it has a conversation with a potential partner. What unique value does your organization offer? What assets do you have that a business partner may seek (e.g., intellectual property, supporters with attractive demographics, events, employee engagement opportunities, connections with other companies or stakeholders)?

Once you have ascertained your organization’s greatest value, know how to communicate it compellingly and succinctly. For example, DoSomething.org’s value is being able to reach 6 million young people, largely via text — a huge asset to many companies looking to engage this population.

2. Understand business and how it works. Like you, the people you will be meeting at corporations are extremely busy. Before a conversation takes place, you must do research about their company so you can demonstrate that you are familiar with their business. Nonprofit professionals who are successful at developing alliances know how to speak the language of business, bring valuable knowledge to their potential partners, and, as a result, stand out from other nonprofits.

For example, Share Our Strength has deep experience working with the restaurant industry and understands the key performance indicators that motivate individual restaurant locations. The nonprofit strives to tailor its “Dine Out for No Kid Hungry” campaign each year to ensure it delivers on those KPIs.

3. Follow classic account-management principles. High-performing development operations set themselves up to serve corporate partners in a professional manner. They designate a primary contact within their organization for the company. Behind the scenes, they are organized, so that the nonprofit liaison knows what he or she can and cannot agree to when talking with a company. When a question can’t be answered immediately, the liaison knows how to get an answer promptly.

Avoid appearing bureaucratic or slow to respond. The answer does not always have to be “yes,” but potential partners should not be left hanging for long periods because a nonprofit is suffering from analysis paralysis.

4. When first meeting, leave the paper at home. Kurt Aschermann is a strong advocate for “proposal-less” fundraising: forgoing a written proposal at the first meeting. He recommends listening to the company’s needs and describing your cause and capabilities at that first meeting. You want your potential partner to be invested in the plans as they develop, and you don’t want to drown anyone in paper. Build a proposal after that first encounter — ideally with company input along the way.

Avoid trying to get everything done in one meeting out of fear that you won’t get another face-to-face opportunity. In truth, if you can’t get another opportunity to get together or otherwise communicate closely, the company is probably not a good partner prospect.

5. Listen up! As the old saying goes, we were created with two ears and one mouth for a reason. It is absolutely critical in building business relationships to resist the temptation to dominate by impressing potential partners with all you have to say. Listen, and you will often hear clues about what the company seeks and what your group can offer.

6. Practice patience. Building corporate partnerships is not for organizations or individuals with short timelines. Partnerships are complicated: Between budgeting and planning cycles, busy schedules, changes in personnel, required approval, and other factors, cause-related marketing takes time.

On average, practitioners tell me they expect successful partnerships to take about 18 months to come to fruition.

7. Get your whole organization behind the effort. Before seriously committing to building corporate alliances, make sure that your leaders believe in the idea. Without the approval of top executives and the willingness of department leaders to implement programs in a timely manner, your efforts will likely be doomed to failure. Try to demonstrate the value of these partnerships to your colleagues so they will be willing to invest time and resources in them. Solicit input from as many internal stakeholders as possible so you can uncover potential objections or risks (or the perception of such risks) and address them.

On the corporate side, make sure you’re speaking to as many different departments and levels of management as possible, and avoid funneling everything through one person. This ensures that the lines of communication remain open even if one key employee departs.

8. Foster strong relationships. As Aschermann says, these commandments are just good relationship management: “As the saying goes, people give money to people. Taking it one step further, people do more for those they like and trust and those who care. Cause-related partnerships — like all good relationships — are about caring for your partner’s needs.”

9. Deliver the goods. With an average development time of 18 months, nonprofit development professionals — and their business counterparts — put in a tremendous amount of work to get from first meeting to a signed contract. You don’t want all that work to end in a short-lived relationship.

If you fail to produce something you promised, the partnership likely will not be renewed. That is why it is vital to develop agreements that your organization can live up to. Have the courage to say no when you are asked to provide services that you cannot deliver. Your reputation is on the line; commit with care.

10. Become part of a corporation’s business strategy. In the best of all possible outcomes, you will forge long-term ties with people at companies who have access to substantial resources — those on the sales and marketing side of the house.

Take time to conduct research, demonstrate your business intelligence, and showcase your organization’s capabilities. Then you’ll stand a good chance of building long-term relationships that will benefit you and your partner for years to come.

This article is adapted from “The 10 Commandments of Cause-Related Marketing,” written by Kurt Aschermann and published by the Cause Marketing Forum in 2003. This update is written by David Hessekiel, founder and president of Engage for Good, formerly the Cause Marketing Forum.