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Walk with giants

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October 16, 2025

If you are responsible for corporate fundraising for a charity, sometimes you might feel daunted when you want to approach a company. We know it. We’ve been there. You might be thinking, “why would that giant, sophisticated corporation with their expensive office want to partner with us?”That’s when the fear comes in.So rather than approaching them in a creative way, you send an email instead. Or maybe you meet with them, but they offer you a small donation rather a long-term partnership. Either way you are on the road to corporate fundraising disappointment.In this blog we will share six techniques you can use to shift your perspective, transform your results and become a giant too.

1. Create your powerful partnership product

The more we work with charities to help create corporate partnerships, the more we’re convinced that your partnership product is the best place to start. It’s so tempting to want to rush out and meet companies, but you need to know what you are offering them first. Your offer is your partnership product. It’s the opportunity of partnering with you in a package that’s attractive to senior business decision makers. If you take time to create a strong product you will feel ten feet tall (like a giant!) when you share it with companiesWe recommend your partnership product contains the following essential ingredients:

Urgency
Emotional value
Commercial value
Partnership activity
Props

Please note, your product shouldn’t be “one-size-fits-all.” It’s more like a Saville Row suit that you can tailor for each major corporate prospect. But the overall design should be unique to your charity.

2. Schedule your prospect development time

Sometimes you might avoid approaching prospects because you are afraid you might fail. Or perhaps you’re concerned about your colleagues listening to you when you’re making prospect calls. We recommend you book prospect development time in your diary to overcome these challenges. Contacting prospects is a bit like eating Brussel sprouts during Christmas dinner. If you get them out the way first, then you can enjoy everything that comes after them so much more.Another way to approach prospect development is to make it fun. One of our charity clients is completely embracing this approach. She writes a script and books a meeting room where she can make her prospect phone calls. Her focus and proactivity are really delivering results, because she has now secured major partnerships with her top two prospects.

3. Involve your colleagues in building your partnership product

As mentioned above, your partnership product is a vital first step to creating major corporate partnerships. When you build it, we strongly recommend you involve your colleagues. Including colleagues brings so many benefits. You get diversity of thought, so the content you create feels fresh and interesting. Also they will be on-board when it comes to pitching to prospects. And they will help you deliver when you land the partnership.The ideal colleagues to involve are those who have a stake in corporate partnerships. Make sure this includes some people who are enthusiastic and creative. The way to involve them is to hold a brainstorm. Tell them you want their help to develop the content for your corporate partnership product. Invite them to tell stories about your beneficiaries so you generate the emotional content. And ask them to tell you what are the unique benefits that your charity could deliver for companies.Once you have all this exciting content you can package it up into a powerful product. Then you will be ready to start identifying your ideal corporate partners.

4. Involve your colleagues and beneficiaries in meetings with companies

When you’re responsible for developing corporate partnerships, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of doing it on your own. Especially when you meet with companies. If you go on your own it’s so much simpler, because you don’t need to waste time trying to find a date that is convenient for everyone. And you save time because you don’t need to brief anyone else before hand. Right? No. Wrong!If you go solo then the company decision makers miss out on the very people they really want to meet. They don’t want to meet just you. You’re the conduit, the facilitator. They want to meet the people who work directly with your beneficiaries so they can hear first-hand stories of how you change lives. And they want to meet your colleagues from the media team who can help them raise their profile and enhance their reputation. Companies don’t just want to partner with the corporate partnerships team, they want to partner with your whole charity.Most of all you want to make sure that you involve a beneficiary in some way. This could be through video. Recently I was working as the interim head of corporate partnerships with a medium sized charity. We attended a meeting with a giant corporate prospect. I was feeling a bit nervous at the start of the meeting, but I grew in confidence when I reminded myself that we were properly prepared. I started with asking them what their company’s problems and priorities were. We listened attentively and took notes.When it came to our turn to speak, we shared a video of a woman we had helped. It was an emotional and powerful story. I looked round the room and saw that people were clearly moved. It was a strong start to a very positive first meeting.

5. Learn to see companies’ problems

In his brilliant new book, “This is marketing”, Seth Godin talks about the importance of “learning to see.” In fact, the sub-title of the book says, “You can’t be seen until you learn to see.” This skill is especially important for creating major corporate partnerships, because you want to learn to see companies’ problems. Like any skill, the more you practice it, the better you will get.You especially want to look out for companies that have problems that a partnership with your charity can help solve. As someone summed it up so succinctly, “who has an itch that you can help scratch?” When you find those companies, they could be excellent candidates for your list of top prospects.A great example of a charity who formed a partnership in this way, is Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Care (PTHC) and their partnership with Bridges Estate Agents. One of the biggest problems for Bridges is that estate agents have a poor reputation, so people might find it hard to trust them. PTHC was perfectly placed to help with this problem, because the catchment area of both organisations is almost identical and the charity’s cause is especially powerful. Also Bridge’s sale boards are heart shaped, but there is no particular reason for it. The partnership with PTHC gave them a reason. This is PTHC’s biggest ever corporate partnership and it should last a long time, because there is no way that Bridges will leave them, for fear of one of their competitors taking their place.

6. Make the company the hero

Now that you have grown to giant status and you can look the company in the eye, the most powerful thing you can do is make them the hero. This might feel strange at first, because so may people in your charity tell you about the incredible work you do. This suggests the charity is the hero and the company is the bank account who pays the hero’s expenses.But the reality is that your charity cannot solve your problem on its own, otherwise they would already have solved it! You need major corporate partners to help you solve it. Seeing the company as the hero is a 180° shift in your perspective. And it changes everything.Recently we helped a charity build a pitch for a giant corporate prospect. When they showed it to us, we quite liked it, but something wasn’t right. Throughout the presentation they spoke about themselves first and then the company second. This suggested that the company was less important. We gave them the feedback and they took it on board. They swapped around the presentation, so the company was the hero. It worked! The company loved the pitch and now they are partnering with the charity.

In conclusion

We hope that these six techniques help you create the giant corporate partnerships your charity deserves. Your charity has enormous value that you can offer to companies. Especially if you package it into a powerful product, involve your colleagues, schedule your prospect development, approach the companies who need you the most and you make them the hero.If you have any questions or comments we would love to hear from you.

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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

min read

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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We know that charities can build major corporate partnerships, even in these tough economic times.