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Five Essential Features of a Corporate Partnerships Strategy

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October 16, 2025

The Japanese strategy guru, Kenchi Ohmae, said, “Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.”

A strong corporate partnerships strategy will give your team greater focus. It will help you seize opportunities, avoid confusion and unite an organisation. Also, the world has changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it is vital that you clarify how you will respond by shifting your corporate partnerships approach.

So here are our five essential features of a corporate partnerships strategy.

Corporate Partnerships in a Coronavirus World
This is the new context for your strategy. It means that some companies are fighting for survival, whilst others are thriving. It might be hard to reach company decision makers, but they need you now, more than ever.

This is because COVID-19 has created a purpose pressure cooker. In the midst of the pandemic companies will show their true colours. Do they really care? We believe that most business leaders (who are people by the way!) want to provide an extraordinary response to this crisis. It is up to charities to engage them and show them what is possible.

How can you be part of their survival plan so you can both emerge stronger from the pandemic?

Competitor Analysis
To understand how to stand out in your market, you need an understanding of what other charities in that market are doing. Identifying three or four charities that have a similar mission or cause to yours and conducting some brief research into how they run their corporate partnerships programme can be incredibly useful.

We recommend you seek to understand the history of their key partnerships – including how they were formed and what they look like. It can also help to note how they talk about corporate partnerships on their website and social media. This exercise will provide you with vital insight that will enhance your strategy and increase your corporate partnerships success.

How You Build Corporate Partnerships
It is very easy to have a scatter-gun approach to building corporate partnerships. But the problem with this approach is you rarely hit the target. Therefore, your strategy is a great opportunity for you to write down how you build corporate partnerships. What is your method?

You can define your method by answering these questions below:

What is our purpose for creating corporate partnerships?
What makes our partnership offer unique?
Who are our target industries (see below)?
How do we make our first approach?
How do we convert prospects into partners?
How do we deliver a brilliant partnerships experience?

If you clarify your method in your strategy you will empower your team to deliver resuls, safe in the knowledge that they are following your recommended approach.

Involving Colleagues
As we mentioned in our previous blog, involving your colleagues in building and delivering corporate partnerships is probably the greatest factor determining your success. So you want to ensure you build strong internal partnerships with key colleagues.

Your strategy is the ideal place for you to describe your approach to building these internal partnerships. We recommend you include a table of “interdependencies” in your strategy. It should have three columns with the following headings:

Internal team
What you want from them
What they want from you

In column one you list all the teams who are essential for your corporate partnerships success. Then you write down what you want from each of them in column two. For example, this could be helping build pitches or attend prospect meetings.

The next step is to meet with them and share what you want. Ask them what they want from you in return and write this in column three. If you follow this through you are on your way to building strong internal partnerships.

Target Industries
Who you want to partner with is one of the most important strategic decisions a partnerships team can make. Therefore, spending some time looking at the industries that can really make a difference to your cause is an essential step in forming your strategy. To identify your priority industries, we recommend asking the following questions:

Which industries can help solve your problems? Can they help you scale your services, reach new audiences or strengthen your virtual offering? Who has expertise that you need?
Which industries have problems you can help solve? Do they want to increase to their employee engagement, reach new audiences or increase their diversity? Which industries would really benefit from your partnership?

Equipped with the knowledge above, your corporate partnerships team will be empowered to form corporate partnerships that genuinely contribute to your mission, deliver incredible partnership experiences and be fulfilled in their roles. So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to write that strategy.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn more, consider attending our upcoming Corporate Partnerships Strategy Training.

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The Four Ways Charities Create Value For Businesses

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Charities help companies achieve the following goals:

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Employee Engagement and Retention

Corporate partnerships provide employees with opportunities to support causes that matter, strengthening morale and workplace culture.

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Competitive Differentiation

Working with charities helps businesses stand out and demonstrate purpose in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

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Sales Opportunities

Purpose-driven partnerships can strengthen customer relationships and attract new customers.

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Brand Trust and Credibility

Authentic partnerships help companies build stronger, more trusted brands.

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Right now, all four of these areas are top priorities for companies.

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Why Understanding Partnership Value Matters

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When charities understand how to measure and communicate their partnership value, something powerful happens.

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They gain the confidence to pitch bigger opportunities, create stronger proposals and negotiate partnerships based on the real value rather than guesswork.

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This shift allows charities to move beyond undervalued collaborations and instead build high-impact corporate partnerships that benefit both sides.

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Learn How To Calculate Your Partnership Value

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To help charities develop this confidence, Remarkable Partnerships have created a new service: Unlock Corporate Partnerships Value Workshop.

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This practical session is designed to help charities understand the value they can offer companies and apply a simple framework to calculate it.

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During the workshop, you will learn:

About the four types of partnership value.
Explore why understanding value helps secure higher-value corporate partnerships.
See examples from successful corporate charity partnerships.
Work through an interactive exercise calculating the value of a current partner or prospect.

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The session lasts 2 hours and 30 minutes and provides a practical method charities can continue using when developing future partnerships.

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If you’d like to learn more about the workshop, contact: jonathan@remarkablepartnerships.com

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Many charities undervalue their corporate partnerships, limiting both impact and opportunity. This article explores why, the real value charities bring to businesses, and how understanding it can unlock stronger partnerships, with a workshop for those looking to take it further.

Learn More

Latest News

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Build Partnerships That Smash Targets

We know that charities can build major corporate partnerships, even in these tough economic times. That’s why we held a webinar where three special guest speakers shared recommendations to build corporate partnerships that smash targets.

Their recommendations and insightful stories are described below.

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Stop Asking and Start Giving

Matt Turner MBE from Creative Pod recommends that charities stop asking and start giving. He said the best corporate partnerships are where every single person around the table wins. It’s about doing things differently, standing out a little bit and pushing the boundaries.

He shared a story about a hospice who provide free grief counselling to anyone in their local community. Matt worked with them to create a corporate product of grief counselling for companies to offer their employees. It’s £3.50 per employee, per month, and anytime your employee has a bereavement they are fast tracked to the front of the queue and receive 12 free sessions of grief counselling.

Another suggestion from Matt is if you have a corporate ball and you have two tables that you just cannot shift, stop wasting your time trying to sell them and give them away to two banks instead. You tell the banks to bring their richest friends and customers for a night out. Then you know you have two tables with some extremely wealthy people with whom you can build long-term partnerships.

Both examples demonstrate that when you stop asking and start giving it helps you build long-term corporate partnerships.

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Lead with insight, not instinct

Nina Saffuri from Raise Impact recommends you lead with insight, not instinct. She shared the following inspiring story which demonstrates her point.

When she was at War Child they got through to the final four of a major charity of the year, but they came second in the staff vote. They were really disappointed, because this wasn’t the first time they hadn’t won a staff vote. Nina asked her Head of Corporate Partnerships to look at the last two years and analyse how much time they had spent on losing, especially on charity of the year. They came back and said they were wasting one third of their time on losing.

Nina suggested they do a test and don’t apply for any charity of the year opportunities for one year. She encouraged her corporate partnerships team to be bold instead and turn their attention to something they were more likely to win. She asked them to find an industry that wasn’t so competitive and where there weren’t any staff votes. They came back and suggested the gaming industry. Nina and here colleagues weren’t gaming experts, so they spoke to a couple of their donors in the gaming industry. They asked them to share about the industry and make some introductions. They also recruited someone from the gaming industry.

They started with a “Games Jam” where they asked gaming companies to create games for War Child which they sold on a gaming platform. This activity only raised £10,000. However, during that week they engaged and built relationships with some of the major gaming companies in the UK. Now that industry raises £700k-£1million unrestricted income for War Child ever year.

The key message from Nina is find your valuable insight. Spend time understanding where you’re losing and see if you can build more partnerships with industries. In other words, lead with insight not instinct, because it transforms your focus, your partnerships and your results.

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Find the company’s pain

Peter Chiswick from Remarkable Partnerships shared the good news that this is a time of opportunity for charities to build major corporate partnerships, but only if they take the time to find a company’s pain and show how their partnership can solve it.

Peter demonstrated his recommendation by sharing an example from his corporate career where he worked for a company who provided data on patent software. One of their clients was a major engineering company.

Peter’s company were just one of 3,000 suppliers and they had a small relationship worth £2,000 a year. He secured a meeting with their Heads of Innovation and he knew this was his opportunity. Before the meeting he asked his internal colleagues to build a list of the latest releases of technology in the sector where the engineering company operated, and put it on one piece of paper.

When Peter went to the meeting the company spent the first 20 minutes telling him how everything was fantastic and they were ahead of the curve. Peter said you might want to have a look at this, and he dropped the piece of paper on the table. It showed they were six months late to market, whereas they thought they were miles ahead.

In that moment Peter and his company moved from one of many suppliers to a company adding massive value. He was helping solve their pain. More senior people came into the room to see the piece of paper, and that was the start of a very large contract with the engineering company.

You can apply the insight from this story to corporate-charity partnerships. Before you approach a company, take time to think what could be their commercial pain. Then when you meet with them you can describe how a partnership with your company will help solve that pain.

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Conclusion

These three experts show that successful corporate partnerships aren’t built on hope. They’re built on smart strategy, bold thinking and a genuine commitment to creating value for everyone involved. Whether it’s giving rather than asking, using insight to focus your time, or uncovering a company’s commercial pain, each approach helps charities stand out and build stronger, longer-lasting relationships. By putting these recommendations into practice, your charity can not only survive in this challenging climate but build partnerships that truly smash targets.

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