Leverage Your Assets to Align With Corporations

Leverage Your Assets to Align With Corporations

Nov. 15, 2006

By Abny Santicola, FundRaising Success

Even if it doesn't seem like it at first glance, all nonprofits have assets that can work in their favor when trying to secure a corporate partnership, according to Alfred Wise, managing director of Washington, D.C.-based Community Wealth Ventures, a consulting firm that helps nonprofit organizations generate revenue through business ventures and corporate partnerships. The key to a sustainable, long-term partnership between nonprofits and corporations, he says, is a situation where the nonprofit doesn't lose sight of its mission and key goals but rather uses some of its assets to help a corporation achieve some of its goals.

The fact of the matter is that, for the most part, corporations aren't signing over huge amounts of money to organizations just because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy.

The following are steps Wise suggests nonprofits take when attempting to secure corporate partnerships:

1 Think about what assets your organization has that might be leveraged in different ways to help a corporate partner.

2 Read your potential corporate partner's Web site and financial information to better understand what its challenges and objectives are.

3 Have a conversation with people from the company to understand what the potential corporate partner is dealing with, what keeps them up at night, and what the marketing department and other departments are trying to deal with.

"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."

Wise adds that one major challenge in setting up nonprofit-corporate partnerships is "getting nonprofit people to understand the corporate culture and corporate people to understand the nonprofit culture."

Alfred Wise can be reached by visiting www.communitywealth.org.