5 Ways to Build Corporate Partnerships That Outlast Budget Cuts

In a time when corporations are thinking carefully about which nonprofits they partner with, having employees who support your nonprofit can help advance current partnerships or get new ones off the ground, say organizations involved with winning corporate support. 

Nonprofits that focus exclusively on chasing corporate donations or sponsorships are missing out on a key strategy: engaging employees of a company to create personal connections that strengthen ties between both organizations.

Volunteer Fairfax in Northern Virginia helps small nonprofits find corporate partners for volunteer engagement. And while a lot of its work focuses on new matches, those easily can turn into long-term relationships, notes CEO Jennifer Williamson.

Engaging employees through in-person or virtual volunteerism can “deliver a deeper connection” to your work for the corporation, she says. 

Employee engagement can help keep corporations committed in today’s tenuous environment, says Chris Noble, head of corporate partnerships at CARE.

“Philanthropic budgets, we know, are being cut, trimmed back, or scrutinized,” Noble says. “Employee recruitment and retention budgets in most companies are not, because it’s getting harder and harder to retain good workers.” Given how much employees value the chance to volunteer, Noble says, focusing on employee engagement “is a very, very good way to stay engaged with the company.”

“If you want to get to employee giving, you have to be top of mind with the employee base,” Noble says. Committed volunteers will donate directly in times of crisis, or organize care-package events that involve their friends and family — and that commitment often starts in the workplace, he says. “It’s an entry point for us.” 

To start, make a connection and have a conversation.

If you are reaching out to begin a partnership, try to find someone within your organization or network who has a connection at the company — a corporate employee who volunteers at your nonprofit or a trustee who knows someone who works there. When looking at potential  opportunities, it’s important to talk about shared values, says Karen Coon, corporate volunteer services manager at Volunteer Fairfax. 

“Look for corporations whose missions really align with your own,” Coon says. “Corporations want to give back to nonprofits who are already supporting what their values are. So look for that alignment and then just communicate.”

Noble agrees, noting it can be tempting early on to want to share every way a corporation can be involved with your organization, but it’s most effective to hear from the company in early meetings.

“You’ve gotten the meeting for a reason,” Noble says. “You need to spend that time listening and figuring out where they want to go.” When you have an understanding of their goals, then you can explain your mission and where they see alignment with your programs. And then you’ll know really quickly whether to pursue a partnership or move on, Noble advises.

And even though opportunities for corporate support can feel scarce in today’s environment, it’s important to recognize where you don’t align and to not force it, adds Williamson. “Sometimes the right answer’s going to be no,” she says.

Opportunities can range from simple to strategic.

Creating activities that engage employees and benefit the company and your  organization require careful thought. At CARE, Noble says they have created a variety of engagement opportunities, from fairly simple to long term, that offer various partners the chance to get deeply involved.  

Easy tasks include gathering employees to build care packages for mothers and children in need or for hurricane relief, which CARE stores for quick deployment when needed.

CARE also offers companies team-building or leadership skills-building exercises. For example, for team-building the organization will stage a mock disaster, such as a flood at an imaginary location. The corporate employees participate in drills on how they can respond to move resources and mobilize assistance.

“It’s a great way to enlighten people about the impact on the ground and humanitarian situations,” Noble says. “It’s also a great way for people to build trust inside the company.”

For something more high-level, CARE taps into the corporation’s skilled labor to help it solve problems. In a Shark Tank-like exercise, CARE shares a problem it faces in its work and then tasks corporate volunteers to split into teams and devise a solution. CARE then votes on which team has the best solutions. 

Once, Noble adds, CARE asked a corporate partner with a wide product-distribution network to help CARE resolve some of its distribution challenges.

“It’s always great to work with a partner to say, ‘Here are our real challenges. You have some of this experience in the real world. Can you put your best minds on this real challenge for us?’” he says. Design employee engagement programs to help address your biggest needs.

At Children’s Miracle Network, many of its corporate partners are big retailers who can solicit donations in their stores. Because local hospitals have different rules about the types of solicitation that can be done, the nonprofit often educates frontline staff about the charity, says Julie Breckenkamp, vice president of corporate partnerships. That can include bringing local hospital representatives and families receiving treatments to visit retail partners to share information.

“The employees are able to see that they’re helping kids locally and really make that connection,” Breckenkamp says.

Every engagement should reinforce your mission.

All engagements, even if they’re just a few hours, should involve moments of reflection,  when the nonprofit can talk about the value of the volunteers’ contributions and offer some future ways for the company to interact with the organization, says Coon. 

Coon, who handles smaller organizations, says that creating engagements for corporate volunteers is really about thinking through what your nonprofit’s needs are and creating opportunities that will offer some impact to teams that come in.

“You have to have a broader vision and understanding of what volunteers can do and make it useful and beneficial,” she says. 

It’s important to explain the tasks they’re asking volunteers to do, what their timeline is, and how it ties back to the impact or mission of the organization, and to highlight the impact metrics they’ll want to share back with the company.  

“If you’re not bringing the context to why this is an important activity and who it’s going to serve and how you’re going to help, you can’t engage or sustain employees,” Noble says.

Additionally, Williamson suggests nonprofits offer the companies some space for the team to gather as a group after any engagement activities, in case they want to discuss how this relates to their corporate goals or mission. That extra time for reinforcement and connecting the dots is important, she says.

Poor planning can undermine a good partnership.

Coon and Williamson have seen things fall apart with corporate engagement when small organizations don’t put enough time into planning events to find work that has an impact.

“The team leaves with a negative impression of the organization and people feel like they wasted their time,” Williamson says. “People want to know that the work that they did actually created some kind of a benefit.”

Noble admits that CARE is an “aircraft-carrier-sized nonprofit,” so some of its engagements may not feel doable for smaller organizations. But smaller organizations can focus on their practical problems when they’re talking to partners who have the skills they need, Williamson says. 

For example, if an accounting business wants to partner and volunteer, they can do on-the-ground work like helping in the food pantry, she says, but they can also provide assistance with accounting and finance challenges if needed. Williamson has even seen volunteers with specialized knowledge come on as board members, which is immensely helpful to small organizations and bolsters corporate ties.

Include options for remote employees if possible.

While many of the most effective corporate engagements are in-person, Noble notes that the reality of remote workforces means a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work anymore. CARE’s Shark Tank project can be done with virtual teams as well, he notes. 

Virtual employee-engagement opportunities are becoming more common, notes Catherine LaCour, CEO of Blackbaud Giving, which works with corporate-giving programs. “When employees both give and they show up, and that can be through virtual engagement, that creates a much richer connection or richer dialogue, that makes a nonprofit feel like that partner in a company’s culture,” she says.

She’s seen nonprofits enlisting virtual volunteers to mentor children, write letters to isolated senior citizens, and use MailChimp to send the organization’s newsletter. 

How to assess whether a partnership is working well is an important discussion to have with a corporate partner in the early stages of the relationship. Hammer out the ways you plan to measure success, Noble says. For example, a corporate partner may want a set number of engagement events per year, but a nonprofit may want to involve a certain percentage of employees. 

You’ll know your partnership is working when you’re both delivering and meeting those shared metrics, Noble says. “If you don’t have a base agreement of what the underlying numbers are, and the underlying impact you want to drive, you don’t actually have a partnership.”