Corporate Partnership Success in 3 Easy Parts

Corporate giving has a huge impact on nonprofit organizations and the people they serve. According to a 2013 report, workplace giving programs across the nation raise $3 billion every year, fueling the vital programs that bring change to communities worldwide.

To tap into this pool of support, many nonprofits seek to collaborate with corporate partners. The good thing is that corporations want to partner with charitable organizations too, and businesses across the country have launched giving campaigns to provide employees the opportunity to give back.

Among other things, the report dives into the pain points employers’ face when running a giving campaign. Luckily for nonprofits, these challenges are actually great opportunities to lock in a corporate partnership.

In response to some of the report’s findings, we’re going to discuss the challenges surveyed employers have pointed out, along with proactive ways your organization can address them and, ultimately, make it easy for a business to say yes to hosting an employee-giving campaign.

Pain Point #1: Running a Giving Campaign Is Just Plain Difficult

About 85% of surveyed employers say a huge obstacle to launching a successful giving campaign is their capacity to run one efficiently.

As seasoned fundraisers can understand, administering a campaign takes a lot of work. While online fundraising software and technology has made it easier to give online, employers can still use all the help they can get when it comes to starting a campaign from scratch.

What you can do: Create the campaign page ahead of time

By pre-creating the campaign page for the employer, you can minimize the effort it will take for an employee to implement and dissipate the partner campaign. You’ll be able to hand over the completed page(s) and the employer can hit the ground running.

If you use software like Classy, handing over control of a campaign page is very straightforward. After you’ve created the page, add your point of contact as a Campaign Administrator. Once assigned as an admin, he or she has full access to the campaign and its setup, including the ability to add custom questions to a donation form, edit any copy, send messages to employees (supporters), enable eCards, and more. They can also add any unique company and employee-giving program branding.

After assigning campaign access to your corporate partner, send them the URL to the campaign page and step-by-step directions on how to log in and navigate the page. By doing the work of building the campaign and providing well thought out documentation, you can help your corporate partner get the campaign rolling immediately.

Insider’s Tip: Stay connected!

By having employers – and subsequently, their employees – use your campaign page, you are able to seamlessly collect donor information. Since donation pages require emails, the giving campaign will provide you a whole new cohort of supporters with which to communicate. Additionally, if employees are creating personal fundraising pages for a campaign, you will also add all their supporters to your email list.

Even after the campaign is over, you can add these donors to your contact list and deliver engaging and encouraging emails to keep them in the know about your cause. Improve open and response rates to this messaging by segmenting these donors into a new list of supporters and create targeted messages just for employees.

Pain Point #2: Engaging Employees Is Also Difficult

As we know, a campaign’s success depends heavily on its ability to engage and motivate its community. But businesses find this challenging, with 85% of employers struggling to keep employees excited and involved during giving campaigns. They are also seeking options and tools that allow employees to make giving more social, spread the word and create camaraderie among coworkers.

What you can do: Prepare social tools and assets

More than half of surveyed employers hope to incorporate peer-to-peer capabilities and social media tools that enable employees to share their charitable initiatives with friends and family.

You can make these tools a reality, increasing your chances of corporate partnership success. Create a fundraising toolkit that your corporate partner can share with employees, complete with sample social media posts, email appeals, photos, and other digital assets that will help spread the word about their involvement with your organization. You can even brainstorm and suggest possible hashtags for the campaign to help track social media engagement. Make sure that the tools and messaging you create are specific to this giving campaign.

Companies and organizations are looking for ideas to tackle the challenges of creating and sustaining engagement. When you hand these tools over to time-crunched administrators, all prepped and packaged, they will be empowered to engage employees and enable them to take their giving experience outside the office walls.

Pain Point #3: Lack of Information

The survey also collected employees’ thoughts on giving programs. When they were asked what their employer could do to make a giving program more effective, 32% said they would like more information about the charities featured in their campaigns.

What you can do: Help them talk about you

If a company chooses to form a corporate partnership with you, make sure you provide inspiring impact stories, videos, photos, and/or blog posts. You can also ask the employer to encourage employees to sign up for your newsletter, so that they’re kept in the loop about what your organization is doing in the field.

While you’re helping the employer become a better source of information, also make your organization directly available as a resource. Consider hosting a Q&A session over a Google Hangout or Tweet Chat just for employees. It will be an engagement opportunity to directly connect with donors and start building a relationship with them.

Help Employers Help You

The next time you pitch a charitable partnership to a corporation, remember that you’re empowered to get the initiative off the ground. By laying some groundwork and resources for the campaign, you can increase your chances of locking in a corporate partnership. Offer the platform, tools, and resources to help employers administer the giving campaign and keep it interactive, and you may be able to reach a new pool of donors!

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Image Credit: Tobias Mikkelsen