How should nonprofits engage corporate partners?

Kevin Munday, Chief Executive, City Year UK

Hi there, my name is Kevin Munday. I'm chief executive of City Year UK. We tackle educational inequality and youth unemployment here in the UK.

When we start to engage corporate supporters, we try to think about, what would they like from a partnership? Generally speaking, they're looking for three main things.

• Firstly, a good idea that links to their mission and what they want to achieve as a brand.

• Secondly, opportunities for their employees to get involved. In our case, that's alongside the young people that we're supporting.

• And then thirdly, they're looking for a robust organization that's well-led, is going to be easy to work with, and which they will find a successful partnership through.

Offer pathways to collaborate

When we first meet a corporate partner, we'll share our business plan and a case for support. That includes all of our ideas about what we're trying to achieve and why we're a good organization for them to engage with. 

Then secondly, we'll provide a menu of different ways that they can partner with us. In our experience, some corporate supporters who perhaps want to recruit young people into their workforce are looking for opportunities where they can meet young people, can see through our work that the young people are work ready, and eventually to be able to offer them jobs.

But we have other corporate supporters who are unlikely to directly employ young people. They're a bit more interested in brand opportunities, things which position their organization effectively, things that give their employees engagement opportunities.

Understand partner needs

As a small organization, we need to be as efficient as possible. We start off with a fairly standard pitch and a fairly standard menu of ways of engaging.

But when we go in to meet with a potential partner, we start by listening to them. We'll have done some research in advance, looking on the internet about what's publicly available.

But the first meeting, we'll try to get them to talk first, tell us what they're most interested in. Then when I present to them, I'll pick out the bits that seem to match most with their interests. Then we'll ask lots of open questions to hear more from them.

Normally after meeting, I'll do a follow-up. In that, I can give a more tailored set of information focused in on the things that they care about the most. Then listen hard to their feedback and keep tweaking it if we need to.

And of course, after the first one or two things we've done together, you begin to understand the partner's needs a little bit more and get some feedback on what they're most enjoying, and be prepared to switch or to pivot the partnership if it's needed.

Establishing clear collaboration guidelines

With a new partner, right at the start, we try to agree the ways of working: what level of information they want, when they want it, what things they want written down, what we can perhaps do face-to-face.We find it really efficient if we can use some of our standard materials we're already producing. If we have to do dozens of very different types of reports or presentations, it can be really challenging.

Key takeaways

• Provide a menu of partnership pathways and engagement opportunities 

• Tailor your pitch to serve partner interests

• Agree on ways of working and reporting formats upfront