Leverage Your Assets to Align With Corporations

"The corporation has a bottom line objective, so [nonprofits] have to approach them with that in mind," Wise says. "It can't be a purely mission-based approach."

4 Discuss how your assets can help them alleviate some of the problems they're confronting.

"It's got to be an authentic belief that the nonprofit is doing work that is important, that starts to align with the corporation," Wise says. "Where it works really well is where it's multi-faceted where there's an element of cause-related marketing and employee volunteerism ... a number of different connections between a nonprofit and corporation."