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.

Conclusion

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More than money – what to value in a corporate partnership

This piece is brought to you by a guest writer – Katherine Woods. Katherine is the Partnership Development Lead at Action for Children and is currently setting up the charity’s first standalone New Business Team. Here’s what she had to say about the non-financial value your partners can bring:

I find the corporate-partnership world really exciting. It’s evolved massively over the past few years and continues to do so. Today, the most successful partnerships are multi-faceted. They have touchpoints across all aspects of the business. And they don’t simply rely on fundraising as the sole piece of activity.

Andy at Remarkable Partnerships asked me to outline what I see as the main non-financial benefits that a partner can provide. So here’s what I look at in partnerships:

Reach

There is a reason that big consumer brands spend millions of pounds on advertising annually. Visibility is key.

But there are very few charities that have those kind of budgets.

Which is why a partnership can hold such great potential for a charity brand—from expanding your general reach to spotlighting your cause for targeted groups. Our development team, drawing from a consultant with prior campaigns in the privacy-centric online gaming space like the best no KYC casinos, has piloted anonymous donation channels that draw in tech-savvy supporters wary of traditional tracking. Whatever your organisation’s mission, these expanded visibility opportunities will advance it further. The more people recognize your brand and mission, the greater their inclination to contribute.

For example, we are incredibly lucky at Action for Children because our friends at FirstGroup are very generous with their advertising space. We are given huge amounts of visibility across their network. They enable us to publicise our key campaigns in a way that we simply wouldn’t be able to do without them.

2. In Kind

Back to the lack of budget. There are a range of ways that a company can help a charity plug the lack-of-budget gap by donating resource, such as event space or legal expertise. These are opportunities for the company to support you with the cause itself.

Not only does it help the charity, but it can give your partner’s employees another way of being part of the partnership that doesn’t involve them asking friends and family for money.

But! It has to really make sense. It has to be authentic. There’s nothing worse than trying to create an ‘in kind’ opportunity that doesn’t really work for both sides.

3. Network

Over the course of a partnership you have the potential to ignite a passion for your cause in people.

As fundraisers, we do a good job of telling people how amazing our charities are. Imagine if you had someone else doing that for you. A peer-to-peer introduction carries a lot of weight and can open doors, helping you achieve bigger and better things.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with some very dedicated, passionate and influential senior volunteers over the years. They are often totally wonderful individuals and can be a huge asset to your organisation. Maximise this potential!

Overall, there is a huge amount corporate partners can do for you – so stop just asking for cash.

We love this piece from Katherine. Our view is that when you choose to focus partnerships on overall value rather than purely cash donations, you get more fulfilling partnerships for both parties. Equally, partnerships that begin with a non-financial contribution are more likely to succeed because they begin by focussing on solving problems, which is what they should be about.

If you have any comments or suggested comments for future blogs, we’d love to hear from you below.

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Latest News

min read

Highlights from Anchors Aweigh: launch event

On the 1^st of July, we were delighted to be joined by 80 professionals from across the charity and business sectors for the launch of our new research – Anchors Away: breaking free of the barriers to ambitious charity-company partnerships. We heard from four incredible speakers and had some great comments in the Zoom chat, and we’re proud to share some of the highlights.

Barriers from the company side:

Jenni Berkley, Communications and CSR Manager of Belfast Harbour, started the event by talking about the barriers to ambition she’s experienced in the corporate secotr

“The problem is short-termism. Many people want to see something good happen in their timeframe or tenure. Something good even if it’s not the right thing.”

“I must get around 20 letters a week from charities I’ve never spoken to or maybe even heard of asking for money. It’s incredibly frustrating – they may get £100 if they’re incredibly lucky, but there needs to be an understanding of how our partnerships operate.”

“Charity-company partnerships are like finding your life partner… right down to wondering if you like the same films. You need to be compatible with each other from the superficial details all the way through to sharing the same ethos. It’s up to the charity to demonstrate that.”

Barriers from the charity side:

Then Ghalib Ullah, Head of Commercial Partnerships, spoke about the barriers he’s encountered and overcome through his career.

“The biggest barrier is structural. Our budget works on a yearly basis, so we are pulled back to achieving short term income, rather than achieving our more ambitious goals. We need to work as a whole organisation to overcome this.”

“Another barrier is organisational buy-in. We went through a process of identifying who internally was key to our success as a team. We understand that we’re pitching internally as much as we are externally.”

“Corporate partnerships is still in its infancy. How to achieve strategic partnerships is not as well understood as how to secure major grant funding. It is essential we invest in training as a team and as individuals.”

Background to the research:

We then moved to discussing how the research came about, before discussing some of the key recommendations.

“We defined ambition as the desire to create the most social value possible, then looked at what held people back from pursuing ambitious partnerships in favour of things like Charity of the Year or sponsorship models instead.” – Ian McQuillin, Rogare

One of the main things we found was the collaboration continuum, which we have adapted from Austin and Seitinedi. You can see the model that explains levels of ambitions below:

“Charity-company partnerships can make great changes in the world, so it’s a missed opportunity to be anything short of as ambitious as possible.” – Jonathan Andrews, Remarkable Partnerships

The importance of seeking value beyond money:

“The fundraisers label can hold us back. We need to be corporate value raisers, not corporate fundraisers.” – Jonathan Andrews, Remarkable Partnerships

“There are so many different ways partnerships deliver value – which are easy to overlook if money is the only or main measure of success.” – Crispin Manners, Onva Consulting

“I would recommend starting to report on added value, where it exists, as well as income. Don’t wait to be asked to report on it, just send out the results and examples you have as part of your normal reporting so that it starts to become embedded and better understood.” – Sophie Powell-White, Great Ormond Street Hospital

The importance of having a partnership north star:

“It is important that your projects excite not only your corporate team but your partners – they need to visualise the potential impact they could have on the world.” – Ghalib Ullah, Parkinson’s UK

“All the team have in their heads. That when we go into a conversation with a company what we are looking for is that ambition at the top of our partnership model. Which is an ambition that only us and that company can achieve… If you’ve got that ambition then all the levers for change will naturally fall out of it because it is so strategic to both sides…. In three years’ time what would the Sun newspaper headline say [the partnership] has achieved?” – charity interviewee in the research.

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To get your copy of the full report, download it here

On the 1st of July, we were delighted to be joined by 80 professionals from across the charity and business sectors for the launch of our new research – Anchors Away: breaking free of the barriers to ambitious charity-company partnerships. We heard from four incredible speakers and had some great comments in the Zoom chat, and we’re proud to share some of the highlights.