We often get asked, especially by smaller charities and NGOs, how they can be more effective at corporate fundraising. For the worthiest causes with limited budgets we respond with a free half-day tailored workshop. So if you think you are in this category please do give us a call. If you don’t fall into this category, but would still like a workshop, we’d still be delighted to talk.

Our view is that motivating financial supporters is as much about listening as it is about transmitting information, and knowing when and how to approach. So we usually start with a listening and cooperation exercise to see who can absorb and use information quickly, who truly listens, who can stick to their objectives and ultimately who comes to the best and most amicable outcome. There’s usually lots of creativity, earnest discussion and laughter – and at the end a demonstration that concentrating on what someone else is saying (rather than just what you want to say) can make a huge difference to success.

With this understanding of the how best to listen and understand others’ points of view we work together to examine your corporate fundraising proposition, and particularly what is distinctive or motivating about it from a donor’s perspective.

This is the sort of exercise that organisations can agonise over for days, months or even years without coming to a conclusion. We agonise with you for just an hour or two to shake out what a great proposition could be, how you could communicate it, and especially how it can be proved to be honest, powerful and robust.

We don’t rewrite propositions on the day of the workshop – but we find our clients often want to afterwards. A clear proposition makes it so much more obvious who should be approached for corporate fundraising support.

Our broader work is aimed at establishing and deepening lasting partnerships principally between corporate donors and great charities and NGOs, and we apply learnings from this to the workshop .

This longer-term approach provides stability, reduces stress and allows cooperation to deepen and broaden. Not every donor can work in this way and so we work with you to identify the likely characteristics, both organisationally and personally, of potential long-term supporters to help avoid a lot of wasted effort (and depressing rejections).

It is this personal element that easily gets forgotten, and we try to put this back – with a final exercise in pitching to a ‘real life’ potential donor. Team members are asked to build on what they have learned and work out how to meet the donor, what to say and what to ask for.

People’s approaches are extremely varied – from the very forceful to the mild and cooperative; from a facts-based approach to one steeped in emotion. There is no single answer and indeed different approaches will work better with some individuals than others. What has often surprised us though is that the some people who believed that they would never be able to ask for support, or craft a partnership, surprise themselves and their colleagues with their abilities.

By the end of the day we expect you to be able to listen more attentively, express yourselves more clearly and target potential funding partners much more effectively – and truly to understand the etiquette of corporate fundraising.

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‘PP ran a really engaging fundraising workshop for us using practical exercises to put us into the mindsets of possible funders and how they might see us, and exploring how we could present ourselves to get a better return for our efforts. Everyone came away feeling far more confident about how to make ‘the ask’. We would recommend Powering Partnerships to anyone in the charitable sector who wants to build their confidence, focus and funding.’

Migrants Organise

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If you would like to arrange a workshop, do get in touch. We give away twelve free a year and run others on a paid-for basis.

The post Corporate Fundraising – Free Workshop appeared first on Powering Partnerships.

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” Alvy Singer[1] could just as well have been talking about partnerships. Partnerships have to evolve and develop and if they don’t, they just fade away into irrelevance, taking with them a lot of hopes and wasted investment.

So how can a dying shark relationship be brought back to health to continue its work? Obviously the most important thing is to get the patient off the (sea)bed and moving again – but how do you do this?

Like any lasting relationship there needs to be some vision of a shared future, not just a shared present; something to aim for that ideally brings hope and joy and lifts the soul away from the humdrum of everyday. In short, we need a shared dream.

Dreams come in small and large sizes but they must be motivating; and to be super-attractive they should be distinctive and unique. These are what we call ‘signature programmes’ and when we develop them with our clients they are easy to spot – by the fizz of excitement in the room. A key rule of selling dreams is that you too have to find them exciting, and help others to do so too.

But like relationships, it is also possible to revive partnerships by starting with a good bit of listening – something that is all too often forgotten. Assumptions and expectations can build up until they become quite divorced from reality, and we may feel that we are still listening when in fact we are just going through the motions. Things are left unsaid to avoid causing upset – and by not being addressed become more toxic.

Sometimes, as in relationship counselling in our personal lives, it takes an outsider to identify where it all started to go wrong – and to help us to put it right. For Powering Partnerships this means finding out what your partners wouldn’t want to say to your face, but is still really important; or probing a bit deeper to see how circumstances have changed and so how the focus of the partnership needs to change, or perhaps even be wound down, saving wasted effort and misunderstanding down the line.

Best of all we get to frame these impressions and feed them back to our clients, along with recommendations of how they could adapt their behaviour to breathe new life into those relationships – and start new ones on a fresher and more productive footing.

As in human relationships, showing that you have listened, and acted on what you have heard, can soften the hardest hearts and revive partnerships that could otherwise be written off.

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If you would like to find out more about how we can help to revive your partnerships and start great new ones, do get in touch

[1] Alvy Singer was the hero in Annie Hall, a 1978 film which won four Oscars and had some of the most famous lines in romantic comedy.

The post How to Revive Partnerships appeared first on Powering Partnerships.

‘The more people and organisations are involved in a partnership, the more unwieldy it becomes’. There isn’t a name for this Law – but perhaps there should be – and it is the flipside of another unnamed adage that ‘the greater the number of important players involved in a partnership, the greater its potential effect’. So big partnerships have the potential to move mountains but can be really tricky to get to that point.

Diverse partners bring a range variety of skills, insights and influence – some unique, many overlapping – but also beliefs, approaches and cultures that can grate and conflict. Nor can this complexity be mastered once and for all; it is dynamic. As representatives change and corporate priorities shift so does the whole balance of the group and, without careful management, focus, momentum and cohesion are lost and the initiative runs into the sand.

Sometimes it is especially difficult for one of the partners to be permanently in the chair moving events on, as this can lead to concerns about bias and overreach and – almost as corrosive – to other players holding back and ceasing to make a meaningful contribution.

This is quite aside from whether the individual deputed to run the partnership has the skills, experience or time required to devote to the task.

Using an external resource for partnership project management can help to overcome these challenges by being seen to be genuinely impartial, having a focus on making the partnership a success and bringing in some particular skills to enhance the outcome.

This external help can be delivered at a number of levels. The most basic, and probably common level is administrative – setting up meetings, formulating minutes, handling queries and keeping track of the movement of any funds. This could perhaps be seen as primarily reactive hassle management, and works particularly well with groups that are internally or technically focused and usually have a bit of time in which to complete their work.

At the next – agency – level externals are used to initiate and manage wider actions on behalf of the group; for example management of the meetings, drafting communications, working with researchers, pooling and reporting data from the participants, and setting up events. This is particularly useful when the participants are stepping out of their comfort area, for example in commissioning external research or putting together a common government relations programme.

At the highest level the direction of the partnership itself can be outsourced – of course to a tight brief and with suitable reporting – devolving responsibility for the group’s progress and outputs to an independent facilitator and driver. This approach is favoured when a sponsor wants to assist others, who otherwise would not have the resources to set up and run their collective endeavour.

All three of these approaches to outsourced partnership project management can help to deliver faster and better outcomes because, as Harry Truman put it, ‘It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’.

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If you would like to find out more about how we can help to make your partnerships more successful and less hassle, do get in touch

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What feels like success for one partner does not always resonate with another.

Broadly, for a company, success is something that boosts shareholder value. The effect may be quite indirect – such as strengthening positive perceptions of the brand through a clear ‘brand purpose’ or building staff loyalty and retention – but these can probably still be estimated in financial terms in one way or another. Cause-related marketing such as promotional endorsements would be an example of the former and staff volunteering an example of the latter.

Other benefits could be in risk mitigation – for example working with academics to understand flooding in low-income countries may help to protect assets in richer countries – or in developing and testing new product concepts.

These can all be understood and appreciated by even the most hard-nosed investor, whilst pure philanthropy may be a harder ‘sell’.

For an NGO or civil society partner success may look similar in some instances. Lending their logo to a product may bring in some much-needed revenue but, some would argue, at the price of ‘selling out’ to commercial interests that are along way from the central mission of the organisation. This feeling can be quite intense, as one client noted ‘if we had done that fifty PhDs would have downed tools and stopped working’.

Other benefits are likely to centre on scale and access. By collaborating with a large commercial partner there may be the opportunity to reach thousands or millions more people, to protect vastly more natural heritage or get access to centres of power and communication – which are just beyond their normal resources.

So for corporates communicating successful partnerships with NGOs may often be evaluated – indirectly – in commercial terms, such as brand reputation, access, research and development. For NGOs communicating successful partnerships with corporates  may focus on how they have advanced their mission with the minimum compromise to commercial forces.

As should be obvious by now, one style of messaging is unlikely to satisfy all of the internal and external audiences involved, but it should be equally obvious that all of the messaging should come from the same set of facts to avoid confusion and dissonance.

Thinking about these different audiences – internal, external, commercial and philanthropic and what they need, at the very start of the partnership, pays dividends. If a corporate wants to know how many otters have been saved so that the number can go in their annual report, it’s a good idea to find a way of estimating this from the beginning (and if it is impossible finding another measure). If the sponsoring department wants to communicate effectively internally they may want other demonstrations of value such as Social Return on Investment (SROI). Thinking about the metrics early on will save a lot of heartache and estimation later.

Social media will often be a key way to get the messages out and this requires a flow of images and stories, endorsements and use of logos. Again the framework for this should form a core part of any partnership agreement. Some form of policing may also be in order to make sure that all partners are pulling their weight, acknowledging the support they receive, and communicating effectively. The more varied and supportive the voices, the greater the benefits.

At the weightier end of the communications spectrum intelligent reports and white papers often add weight and lustre to the partnership’s results, but these are rarely read in their entirety except by the authors, the commissioners and a very few enthusiasts. In a disaggregated world these become resources for smaller and more accessible pieces and insights that greatly extend their reach and impact.

So thinking and planning early, creating a common repository of facts and stories and understanding the different audiences and their needs can transform the communication and increase the duration of partnerships. But expertise, vigilance, flexibility and dedication to the task are necessary to ensure the message gets out there, stays out there, and is clear and effective.

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If you would like to find out more about how to communicate about your partnership from strategy to execution, do get in touchC

The post Communicating Successful Partnerships appeared first on Powering Partnerships.

A quick glance at the UK 2006 Companies Act shows that the directors must act to promote the success of their company for the benefit of its members [shareholders]. Taken at this level it seems to rule out any corporate philanthropy at all.

Fortunately directors in many well-run companies go on to read that this should be done with regard to ‘the impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment’, amongst other matters – and so give generously to a wide variety of good causes, often through partnerships with charities and NGOs.

For them, though, the scrutiny of the shareholders will always be there, or as one senior executive said to us, ‘we can spend a few million – but anything more that that we have to really justify’.

For shareholders, analysts and managers the answer is always in the numbers, and these numbers should ideally have dollar or pound signs attached. So the obvious way to evaluate charity or NGO partnerships is to represent them in financial terms. But valuing a community or environmental benefit credibly can be exceptionally tricky.

We deploy Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis in our projects to make some sense of the mass of data and possibilities. By using proxy values such as the financial value of a life saved, and assumptions such as the number of lives improved or saved, we can develop an estimate of the ‘social’ value of the activity and so the notional financial return on the investment.

Of course it’s not that simple in practice. For example: there are several different ways to calculate the value of a life saved and for those methods that are related to national wealth (GDP) the average values between nations can vary hugely. We are usually interested in not just saving lives but improving quality of life, in which case another ‘currency’ – disability adjusted life years (DALYs) – could be more useful . This has the added intentional benefit of valuing all lives equally.

Then there are the assumptions of how effective a particular activity or intervention has been in saving or improving those particular lives – and so there is need to filter out the whole host of other factors that could affect the outcome.

In short this is complicated stuff. Which is why some analyses are developed in a sort of ‘black box’ where a gratifying SROI Ratio is spat out at the end but it is not at all clear by what magical process it was generated nor how it should be used.

Our view is that SROIs can play a major role not only in justifying why investments make sense or represent social value, but in focusing them more effectively in the future. So each analysis has the opportunity to inform not just that investment but also other philanthropic initiatives with similar intent or interventions.

To do this requires transparency and openness, and so we go to some trouble to make our calculations comprehensible not just to the experts but to the lay reader with a taste for a bit of a puzzle.

This opens the analyses (and us) up to scrutiny and comment and helps to inform future studies and firm up the understanding of exactly how and where partnerships generate value.
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If you would like to find out more about how to evaluate your project or partnership, do get in touch

The post Using Social Return on Investment (SROI) to Evaluate Partnerships appeared first on Powering Partnerships.

When Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations said, ‘When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies and civil society work hand-in-hand, we can achieve great things’, he was telling a great truth. . He was perhaps also glossing over the huge amount of work that setting up and developing these partnerships involves.

Our experience is that clients who have many ‘partnerships’, often spread around the globe, can find their days drained of purpose by administration to keep them going, responding to partners’ (sometimes not very important) requests and trying to get less biddable ones to deliver. This leaves little room for thinking big, identifying the relationships that can help that transformation, and still less for making change happen.

So that’s where partnership typology comes in as a way of separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff etc (add metaphor of your choice). In fact it’s a bit cleverer than that as it typically uses a bespoke matrix to separate partners into types according to the type of relationship and the assistance that they can deliver.

This classification requires both research into the nature of the relationships and clear thinking. Examining the relationships often reveals truths that had been forgotten or never really appreciated. Typically a number of relationships aren’t equal ‘partnerships’ at all, they are more or less transactional. Academic institutions and professional bodies, for example, may be funded for some development work or contribute to an impressive paper. Part of this service may be to have their name and logo associated with the material – and so ‘partnership’ is a much more acceptable public face of the relationship for both sides. In reality though, the relationship is essentially commercial – they provide a service in return for money.

All sorts of other groups from civil society groups to for-profits who are contracted to provide a service come under the same umbrella. These relationships often evolve organically rather than as part of a detailed plan, and so are governed by a range of agreements, contracts and MOUs and treated in a variety of ways. By using a partnership typology to group them together administration can be simplified, and as far as possible automated so that precious thinking and development time is not wasted in areas where there is very limited potential.

Other groups may be ‘critical friends’, or even just ‘friends’, who have helped the project along without payment. This is not always their preferred financial relationship. When we pointed out that a ‘friend’ of one of our clients had been helping them for years in the hope of eventually getting paid in some way they quickly arranged a payment – making their friend even happier and more cooperative.

At the other end of the spectrum are the partners that require nurturing to deliver to their very real development potential. At first pass some of these groups or individuals are far from obvious, but that can be because not enough time was available to work with them to explore how they can help, and indeed why they should.

Thinking time released by simplifying the management of the more contractual relationships can be used to explore opportunities with these few key partners, work on joint solutions and genuinely pool resources.

The result of the partnership typology is a much more productive way of working in which creative and relationship-building skills are put to best use; cooperation is developed more quickly and productively; and the team responsible for the work put firmly back in the driving seat.
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If you would like to find out more about how to manage your partners better, do get in touch

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