28 May, 2012

For obvious reasons, charities are increasingly interested in partnerships with corporates.

Over the years, we’ve worked for many businesses and consumer brands on corporate responsibility programmes, employee volunteering and cause-related marketing campaigns. And we’ve worked with charity clients to secure, shape and implement corporate partnerships.

There is a certain amount of healthy cynicism within our team. We have in the past seen charities lose out in the power battle, and businesses enter relationships with questionable motives. Happily, this has not been so evident over more recent years.

Charities have grown in confidence and are better equipped to get what they want from a relationship. And businesses have realised that ethics and integrity are important to their customers.

At the moment, we’re working on three fantastic charity-corporate partnership projects, developing and implementing communications and engagement campaigns that benefit both partners. We have another two in the pipeline.

We like working with consumer brands (many of us come from consumer agencies, handling big brands). But we confess, if pushed we would unashamedly prioritise the interests of the charities involved, their causes and the people they serve. We’ll make sure it’s a huge success for the corporate, but never at the expense of the charity.

That’s why our latest guide is an introduction to charity-corporate partnerships, not corporate-charity partnerships. You can download it here.

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