Trends in corporate partnerships: opening the way to small charities

From behemoths such as Macmillan, to more modest outfits such as Beating Bowel Cancer and Elephant Family, non-profits of all shapes and sizes are in the running for Charity of the Year partnerships, as Jenny Ramage discovers.

If you’re a small, lesser-known charity that thinks going for Charity of the Year is a waste of precious time and resources, it may be time to reconsider.

For years, the customary staff vote has been the bugbear of smaller, less popular causes. It’s a problem Rachel Kirby-Rider, fundraising consultant and former head of fundraising at the Samaritans, has come across time and again. “It can be really demoralising for the fundraising team when it’s always the same charities that win”, she says. “I know a lot of charities of a similar size to us, with quite difficult or uncomfortable subject matter, who have said to me: ‘we’re no longer going for Charity of the Year, because we never win. It’s hugely time-consuming, and you spend a lot of money going through the process to constantly not be voted for by staff’.”

An emerging trend

Certainly the early years of the recession saw little dynamics in corporate partnerships. Risk-averse companies tended to stick with the larger charities, often expanding on current relationships rather than seeking out new ones.

However, a new trend is beginning to emerge: many corporates are now starting to look beyond the traditional large charities, and have opened their doors - and their minds - to a much wider range of organisations. Take Deutsche Bank: In the last few years, the financial institution has shifted away from partnering with large organisations. Last year, it selected the understated Elephant Family (circa £2m income) for its Charity of the Year programme. The charity beat 300 other organisations for the coveted place, following a shortlisting process that ended with a staff vote.

“Elephant Family had never had a corporate partnership before, and Deutsche Bank is one of the most sought after corporate partnerships in the sector”, said the charity’s head of art, Marika Chaplais. “Last year, they helped raise over £1m for Elephant Family’s work - doubling our income.”

Lateral thinking

Increasingly over the last few years, there has been a shift in the corporate mindset; a movement towards becoming more strategic in choosing charity partners - possibly due in part to the economically challenging times forcing companies (and charities alike) to think more laterally.

“Corporates are thinking much more now about alignment between their own brand values and the charity’s values”, says Rachel. In this regard, corporate partnerships are increasingly moving away from being solely about employee engagement. “I think a lot of corporates want to make sure they are utilising their charity partnerships in a way that means they get some kind of strategic brand value from it - so it’s more like an investment than a philanthropic partnership”.

Alix Wooding, head of corporate partnerships at Macmillan Cancer Support, has also witnessed this shift. “We’re seeing much more aligned and integrated partnerships that are much closer to the organisation’s core business objectives - whether these are very commercial or something much softer, such as how a company expresses its brand values.”

Macmillan’s partnership with NPower, whereby cancer patients have access to help with fuel debt and capped fuel costs, illustrates the point. “People who have cancer very often find their fuel bills go up, because they are at home more often and they feel the cold much more. NPower have a duty of care to their vulnerable customers - so we can bring those two things together, and build it into our partnership”, says Alix.

It seems charities can offer corporates the opportunity to express their brand values in a way that other channels cannot. Alix says: “If you think about the partnership between UNICEF and Pampers, where one pack of Pampers buys one vaccine, that may have the outward impression of purely driving sales - but it’s also an incredibly strong expression of Pampers’ brand as being a brand that cares about babies, in a way that its competitors don’t.

“It changes the consumer choice from being a very functional product choice, to a choice that is much more to do with an emotional connection - and that’s much more powerful.”

Outside the box

Usually, the rationale behind a strategic corporate-charity partnership is clear; there is an obvious alignment between the cause and the brand. However, this isn’t always the case. How your brand might resonate with a desired corporate partner may not immediately be obvious.

The Eureka moment came for Age Concern England (now Age UK) in 2003 when it established an innovative tie-up with Innocent Smoothies, in the form of the Big Knit. Here, we have a situation where a brand that is not just young, but also very youthful, has chosen to partner with a charity that helps older people. On the face of it, the two organisations are completely incongruous - but the partnership absolutely works - and it’s proven itself to have longevity.

Graham Kelly, now director of fundraising at Beating Bowel Cancer (which has had notable success in partnering with large companies such as John Lewis), was overseeing fundraising at Age Concern when the Innocent project started. Older people in local Age Concern shops starting knitting the mini bobble hats to be placed on Innocent Smoothie bottles, with a donation to the charity for each one sold and money raised going back to the local Age Concerns that participated. Consumers loved it - who could fail to be charmed by a drinks bottle wearing a tiny woolly hat? “I still think this is one of the most innovative CRM campaigns created”, he muses.

It’s not all about the money

Being more strategic in your approach to corporate partnerships also means thinking beyond just fundraising and corporate donations. As Graham says, “charities can reap huge benefits from pro bono support and expertise within companies. At Beating Bowel Cancer, we’re a small team, so if a corporate can bring extra resource and knowledge, it’s of huge benefit. It’s important to look at all the areas where a corporate can bring additional value.”

This approach is just as beneficial to larger organisations. Macmillan’s Alix Wooding believes it’s “shortsighted” to look only at money. “Companies bring to us a huge wealth of different value; if we only ever ask for cash, we will be missing out on a whole bunch of expertise, time, people, enthusiasm, skills, channels, and communications. And if you stack those things up, sometimes they end up being more valuable than just asking for the money and going and doing it ourselves.”

Take Macmillan’s famous partnership with Boots: Macmillan trains Boots’ staff in giving cancer information, in order to help reach people with cancer who are out of hospital. “If we were going to do it ourselves, and set up a network of 2,000 professionals on the high street around the country, we would be going to Boots and asking them for £20m - but we don’t have to, because we’ve seen how we can leverage what they already have.”

Give and take

Wooding concludes by reminding us that a corporate partnership is a game of two halves: it’s not just about what the corporate can do for you, but what you can offer them in return. “Think about it from their point of view; it has to make sense in their world, and you have to know why they would be interested in talking to you. It can be easy to forget, in our rush to tell them about us and why the world would be better if we could just do this one little thing. We have to take a step back and think about it from their perspective - why is it important to them?”

Jenny Ramage is editor of The Fundraiser

Next month: Top tips for small charities trying to win corporate partnerships - keep an eye out!