6
Managing corporate partners…
Leading a corporate relations department…
1. Do your homework. Anticipate your partners’ questions and needs. Know their brand, products, target audience and giving history. Build trust.
1.
Know what needle you’re trying to move, and that senior leadership seriously cares that you’re trying to move it.
2. The devil is in the details… Follow-up, followup, follow-up. Tie up loose ends. Never assume.
2.
Listen more than you speak. Silence can be golden.
3.
Culture trumps strategy.
4.
Focus on the job, not the politics.
5.
Hire people smarter than you.
6.
Pick a few things, and do them well.
7.
Give yourself and others permission to fail. Be forgiving.
8.
You’re not as smart as you think you are.
3. Senior leadership must empower staff to set boundaries if a sponsor is going to far or crossing the line without fearing an internal backlash. 4. Don’t say, “No, we can’t.” Offer alternatives for what you can do instead. 5. Once you get a meeting, match the attendee levels, such as CEO=CEO, etcetera, and don’t seriously outnumber the other side. 6. Have at least three staff members interacting and building relationships with their corporate sponsor counterparts so that the alliance doesn’t hinge upon a single person’s employment. 7. Your job is not just to represent your nonprofit, but to broker both parties’ interests, expectations and responsibilities. To preserve the relationship, you must stand in the other person’s shoes and care about helping them to also be victorious. 8. Listen. Listen. Listen. Hear what your partner wants and needs, and how they’ll measure success.
9.
Passion without metrics will not succeed. Find metrics that make sense to your senior leadership team, or they won’t appreciate the value of the corporate partnerships. Other than cash, a few good ones are impressions, new members, web traffic, email acquisition, and volunteers. 10. If you spend all your time protecting your turf or trying to control everything, you’ll soon find yourself all alone on the battlefield.
If you wait for it to be perfect, you’ll never get it going… ‘Good
9. Ask your corporate partners to help open more doors to other companies.
enough’ is great! Get out the door and start building relationships!
10. No two deals will be the same.
© 2013 The Cause Academy, LLC.
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