Introduction
My colleague Dave studied aeronautical engineering back in the 90’s.
One of his lecturers was more entertaining than most, and not above poking fun at other lecturers.
The lecturer in question quoted one professor, who was famous for his publications of scientific theory, but fairly useless at analysis of real-world data. Said this prof:
“I don’t like experimentation!
“It ruins theory!”
Point being . . . you can create all the how-to and step-by-step guides for all the problems in the world . . .
. . . but if they don’t stack up with practical experience and hard-won observations, they aren’t worth (to borrow from John Nance Garner) “a bucketful of warm spit”.
This is why we humans like stories – They tell us how the world actually works (as opposed to how we’d like it to work).
Here’s one piece of nonprofit theory for you:
Corporate Nonprofit Partnerships can significantly grow the impact for both Corporate and Nonprofit
We have an ebook for download that goes into lots of detail about how to set such partnerships up.
But it’s a how-to guide. What does the data actually say? Are there any stories to back up the above statement?
In this article, we’ll tell 4 such stories, and give you 4 insights that fall out from them.
And you’ll see . . . that a corporate/nonprofit partnership can take many forms. For some of them, no money changes hands at all, yet a great deal of value is created.
Indeed, there’s really only one rule that covers all those forms . . .
It has to be Win-Win.
Nonprofit Partnerships examples: Food
Maot Chitim is a Chicago nonprofit aimed at helping Jewish people in Chicago connect, unite, and celebrate Jewish holidays . . . regardless of their financial circumstances.
When Beeline met them, they were struggling to keep their donor base up, just like every other nonprofit out there. One thing we spotted right away was their lack of a good lead magnet with which to persuade people to subscribe to their list.
We started brainstorming around their purpose, and a winner of an idea wasn’t long in coming.
What’s central to just about any holiday in which far-flung families gather to rejoice, celebrate, and enjoy each other’s company?
FOOD.
Ain’t no Jewish festival, in fact, ain’t no festival that doesn’t involve food.
So a cookbook was the obvious answer. But that immediately raised problems.
How many recipes? Whose prized chicken soup recipe gets to go in it? and whose bubbe is going to sit fuming when her recipe gets left out?
The answer to that was also not long in coming. None of their prized recipes would go in it.
We’d reach out to some Jewish celebrity chefs and see if they’d be willing to contribute a recipe for free, for the cause . . . in exchange for us highlighting their own recipe books.
Free, high-quality advertising for the chefs!
Top-notch Jewish recipes for the holidays, for anyone in the US wanting a proven, delicious recipe!
Win-Win, if ever we heard one.
We reached out to 13-15 Jewish chefs. 10 responded positively, contributing one to five recipes each. We made the book digital and mobile-friendly, so that it could be displayed on a phone or tablet propped up on a kitchen counter.
Most online recipe websites are jammed with advertising, stories, and everything surplus to the act of actually preparing the food with that recipe. These recipes were devoid of all that. And they got around the problem of having to constantly scroll up and down between the list of ingredients and the instructions – the list of ingredients was there, all right, but beneath each instruction was a sub-list of the specific ingredients and their amount. Once you’d assembled the ingredients, you just had to scroll through the instructions. Presto.
It was called, appropriately enough, Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe Book. And it was a hit from the start. Maot Chitim’s donor base grew from 3,000 to 5,000.
They raised $30k in the last 18 months just from those new subscribers!
We have no idea how much new business the chefs have gained. It’s a near certainty that they’ve gained some, and will continue to – There are now 5,000 people across the US (not just Chicago) who know about them!
Nonprofit Partnerships examples: Purpose synergy
The story behind Switch SC’s start isn’t told, but it’s not hard to deduce.
Sometime in 2012, a critical mass of Greenville, South Carolina residents became troubled enough by a disturbing statistic:
Of all the counties in the state, theirs had the most sex trafficking going on.
That spurred them into action.
But they were in a similar situation to Maot Chitim: They had no lead magnet to offer potential donors.
So we worked with them to identify ideal corporate partners whose expertise they could feature in an ebook. And we were strategic about it.
We reached out to SaaS app founders, university professors, and law firms . . . all with functions and interests that had synergy with Switch SC’s purpose.
Of the 9 we contacted, 6 responded positively. None of the 9 had any previous knowledge of Switch SC, yet it only took 1-2 emails to get them onboard! (We cover the How-To in depth in this article.)
Nonprofit Partnerships examples: Garbage & Gold
Help Heal Veterans (HHV) got started in 1971 when someone realized that the wounds veterans come home with are not always visible.
PTSD, TBI, depression, anxiety, pain, addictions . . .
So they started assembling craft kits that injured veterans could start using to create, work with their hands, reskill . . . and take their minds off the horrible places and events where they’d been stuck.
Assembling these craft kits called for tangible material. Wood, paint, glue, fasteners, leather . . .
All of this material has to be sourced from somewhere. And either paid for or donated.
Somewhere along the line, Help Heal Veterans connected with a senior manager at a major airline company. This manager casually mentioned the airline’s policy of updating the leather on all the seats in their B-737 aircraft every 3 years.
The airline also had an environmental policy of minimizing waste.
The airline’s fleet of B-737 aircraft is huge. At the time this article was published, that number was 815. Which means that in any given year, roughly 270 B-737s’ worth of aircraft seat leather . . . was just piling up in a warehouse somewhere. (Their self-imposed environmental policy disallowed throwing it in the dump.)
That’s a lot of old leather.
HHV said . . . Um, any chance we could have, say, maybe a palletful of it?
The airline, hardly believing their luck, replied, How about a truckload?
Fast forward a bit, and HHV were soon taking ten (read that: 10) truckloads of perfectly-usable old leather and turning them into useful craft kits for recovering veterans.
Win-Win, all around. That’s an example of a great corporate-nonprofit partnership.
It didn’t stop there, however.
In 2020, the airline business worldwide went through a massive dip with the pandemic.
With that came a temporary stop to the free truckloads of leather. Nothing to be done about it.
But in 2022, someone from Help Heal Veterans reached out to The airline and said, Hey you helped us all those years. How can we help you guys, now?
It kicked off a new conversation.
We hear that you have some kind of program with schools and teachers.
Why don’t we give those classrooms a contest where the kids can design a new kit for us? We’ll pick the winning design and make 1000 kits of it. If it sells well, we’ll make 100k kits!”
The airline loved the idea.
When the winning school pupil was picked, the airline offered to fly the pupil, their family, and the teacher to HHV’s facility in California, to let them see how the kits get made.
HHV loved that idea, and said they’d provide a taco truck and make a party out of it.
The airline loved THAT idea, and said Hey, we’ll fly out a camera crew to film the whole thing!
Then they said they’d also like to financially support HHV for the whole project.
So HHV reached out to help the airline, not seeking financial help at all . . .
. . . found a way to help . . .
. . . and ended up with that financial support anyway! And the airline got an advertising campaign, giving both them and Help Heal Veterans very positive public exposure.
All because a nonprofit and a corporate started talking, asking questions, and coming up with nonstop, outside-the-box ideas for collaboration.
Nonprofit Partnerships examples: Common needs
OK, this is cheating slightly. Beeline isn’t a nonprofit. But we serve nonprofits, so we think of ourselves as one😀.
Since its inception in 2016, Beeline has reached out to 90 different potential partners.
45 of them (i.e. 50%) have turned into actual partnerships. You can see several of them displayed on our homepage. The partnerships are not continuous – we might only work with them 2-3 times per year.
With most of them, no money has changed hands at all. It’s been purely a collaboration of time, skills, and insights. Oftentimes it’s as simple as an appearance on a podcast – they get a free guest specialist, Beeline gets free publicity.
And each partnership was initiated with something incredibly simple:
We sent them an email.
That’s it. Just an email.
And it looked like this (feel free to use this nonprofit-corporate email template for your own purposes):
I. Subject line – first name
II. Hook – first line (5-7 words); interesting/get attention – the purpose is to get the reader to want to open the email – ex: “You are my personal Oprah” “My kid tore up your book”
III. Anchor – prove you’re neither a stranger nor a fan (instead, you’re a collaborator) and help them feel comfortable with you (the more you know someone the less of an anchor you need – too many anchors is weird) – anchor ideas:
- something or someone in common
- proof you’ve learned from them and shared their content with others
- specific about their company (not the contact personally)
- focused on them, not you (how often do you use the word “I”?)
- measurable
- includes a picture if possible
IV. Win (Win for you / win for me) – “Because of X, I thought that we could do Y” –
I.e. “Because: you do _____ or Because your company cares about _____ . . . I thought that we could ____” – give a specific idea & result that would come from working together
Because your company cares about pets, I thought we could feature your company’s insights into pet nutrition in an eBook we are creating for our audience.
The win for you is often implied
V. Ask/Close: are you interested?
- Only ask one “yes or no” question (are you interested?)
- No links
That template (along with the mindset of helping your partner and aiming for win/win) has achieved a 50% success rate. In the world of marketing, that’s stellar.
Beeline has templates for follow-up emails as well – see here.
That was 4 stories. So what are the 4 secrets?
Nonprofit Partnership Secret 1: Ask questions, and listen
Two ears? One mouth?
Don’t assume that corporate decision-makers only ever think about money.
They do some of the time. They have to, if they want to keep their jobs. But by no means is that all that ever crosses their minds. And frequently, they are thinking altruistically.
John Brothers writes this about an experience he had as he was assuming the presidency of the T. Rowe Price Foundation:
“A well-known nonprofit leader walked into his conference room well prepared with numbers.
“Before I could even really know her name, she pulled out all these charts and graphs, and she started to show me why she was valuable,” said Brothers.
“And it was just so backwards.
“I didn’t get a chance to know about her. I didn’t get a chance to see what she felt was important and what was the North Star for her organization. . . She thought the only thing I cared about were charts and graphs.
“And that’s unfortunate.”
When you get the chance to have a good honest conversation with a corporate decision maker, ask them questions. Questions about them. What their lives and situations are like. What their problems are.
Most of the time, our assumptions about other parties are wrong. Be open to having your preconceived notions shattered, and your horizons broadened.
Nonprofit Partnership Secret 2: Look for the waste
The old leather was WASTE.
To Help Heal Veterans? It was GOLD.
They were just alert enough to spot the gold that the major airline company had left lying around.
By taking it off their hands, they were getting a resource that they otherwise would have had to pay for . . .
And simultaneously saving their corporate partner the cost of trying to find creative ways to get rid of stuff they couldn’t use or throw out!
Think likewise.
What company’s trash looks like gold to you?
Nonprofit Partnership Secret 3: Look to give, not take
In 2022, Help Heal Veterans knew that times were not good for airlines. The likelihood of getting their airline partner’s attention with a Please give to us message was low.
So they turned it around. Hey, how’s it going? Do you need any help? How can we give to YOU?
The result? The airline recognized the generosity of spirit.
Nonprofits often get this backwards. They are so fixated on Giving to their beneficiaries, they think they have to approach corporations in order to Take. They adopt a Beggar mentality. That’s a deal killer. It’s a conversation killer.
Always be thinking, What do we have that would do them good? What would they value?
The key to that is to study your target corporate partner deeply.
What line of business are they in? Who are their clients? Do you know any people just like those clients, to whom they might like to be introduced? (Offer to make an introduction.) What problems are they battling? Do you have any insights for solving those? (Or know someone with those insights.)
Then find the name of the most likely interested decision-maker in the corporation.
And then send an email like the template I posted above . . . to the name of the person, not the corporate. (If you can find a street address for that individual, a hand-addressed snail mail is even more effective.)
CRAZY FACT: Corporations are just groups of human individuals who hang out together every day. (Same as nonprofits, actually.)
ANOTHER CRAZY FACT: Most corporate employees don’t care about the corporation as much as they care about themselves, and their problems.
If you reach out to them, and show that you care about them, as individuals . . . there’s a very high chance you will get their attention!
Nonprofit Partnership Secret 4: start with shared values
With Switch SC, we didn’t try to reach out to Ford, Proctor & Gamble, or Microsoft.
Not that those corporations are bad. They just don’t have obvious synergies with Switch SC. Reaching out to them might well have yielded fruit.
But when you’re picking fruit, there’s an age-old rule of thumb:
Start with the low-hanging fruit.
It’s just easier and faster to pick. So we went for:
- SaaS apps designed to help parents protect their kids from online risks and threats . . .
- Professors and lecturers from counseling departments of universities . . .
- Law firms specializing in prosecuting sex traffickers . . .
. . . All of whom are people who understand the issues that Switch SC deals with daily, and likely share their values.
The result was a very high rate of uptake.
Conclusion
Corporate-nonprofit partnerships really can move your nonprofit forward, very quickly. Beeline has experienced it ourselves first-hand, more than once.
And it really isn’t hard or tricky. We’ve produced a handy-dandy guide for doing it, which you can download here.
As always . . . If you need more help with any of this, just reach out to our team here.