How to Create a Corporate Partnership That Accelerates Your Impact

It’s easy for nonprofits to fall into the mindset that corporate partnerships are entirely transactional: Our organizations get money in exchange for feel-good publicity for the company. But I’ve learned that a corporate partnership can be truly transformative when it’s rooted in a deep level of mission alignment, mutual respect, and a willingness and ability to contribute to each other’s objectives.

At LavaMaeX, we teach people around the world to bring mobile showers and other essential care services to the street, where our unhoused neighbors need them most, and we provide service ourselves in three California cities. Over three-plus years, from 2019 to 2022, we partnered with the Unilever social enterprise body care brand The Right to Shower, which granted us $1.275 million over that period to support seed funding for mobile shower providers, along with expanded advising and support services, free toolkits, product innovation and impact data collection. 

In addition to scaling up our impact, the relationship taught us several valuable lessons about making the most of a corporate partnership. 

1. Think Big

Aim for multiyear support, and back up the ask with a holistic vision of what the relationship can deliver. Tell the partner how you’ll actively engage corporate employees and the larger community, how you can help them create captivating stories for their customer base and what impact returns they’ll get for their investment. 

Because we had a multiyear partnership with The Right To Shower, we were able to disperse $370,000 in grants to 28 organizations that served more than 53,000 guests in 44 U.S. cities. Not only that: The partnership allowed us to refine our intensive one-on-one mentoring program; develop LavaMaeX Connect, a global community space where people learn how to replicate our model; and create a new toolkit for producing Pop-Up Care Villages, where guests can get haircuts, medical care, legal advice, employment assistance and other free services. 

We never could have accomplished all this with a one-year or single-project grant.

2. Act as a Collaborator

Aiming for a one-team approach can help you expand the value of the partnership in multiple, sometimes unexpected directions. For example, the new toolkit inspired The Right To Shower to host its own Pop-Up Care Village. We worked with the company on high-profile issue campaigns promoting public awareness and education, such as Homelessness Awareness Month and World Water Day. 

And early in the COVID-19 pandemic, The Right To Shower led six Unilever brands in donating products that LavaMaeX and our provider network incorporated into hygiene kits for unhoused people. The company also helped us deploy a do-it-yourself handwashing station design that we developed for communities without access to clean water. 

In addition, the desire to be an effective collaborator with The Right To Shower spurred us to build protocols around everything we do. We got better at asking the right questions to find the grantees who can have the most impact, and we learned to articulate how we engage our service providers over time and to effectively share data and stories with corporate partners. 

3. Focus on Storytelling

To promote the work and the impact that the partnership enables, take advantage of the fact that corporate communication channels typically reach a far broader and more diverse audience than most nonprofits have. 

In our case, we collected impact data and stories for The Right To Shower to share on its communication channels, allowing a wide distribution of perspectives on how showers restore unhoused people’s sense of hope, dignity and opportunity. The Right To Shower created a 12-episode podcast dedicated to a wide-ranging conversation about issues surrounding homelessness and cleanliness. Working with the company in this way allowed us to showcase the issue, our own work and our network’s activities far more robustly than we could have on our own.   

We’ve applied these lessons in developing new partnerships with Kohler and The Starbucks Foundation. Kohler’s support will help our affiliated programs offer approximately 20,000 showers across the U.S. And with $110,000 in funding from The Starbucks Foundation, we’ve launched the Hygiene for Humanity Fund, which supports the scaling up of new and current mobile hygiene programs across the U.S. 

Working with a corporate partner can be an ongoing, deeply supportive relationship that enables a nonprofit’s most important work over time. We’ve found the keys to achieving this are developing a vision for multiyear impact; leveraging every opportunity to amplify your communications and refine your processes and practices; and actively seeking a corporate-nonprofit partnership that’s about more than money.

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.