Focus, care, and alignment: how nonprofits can secure corporate support in a competitive market

In 2016, I made a cross-sector career jump, leaving a role as a development manager at Keep Tahoe Blue to dive headfirst into the world of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). If I can be real with you for a moment, a big driver of my transition was personal frustration at the limited success I’d had as a fundraising professional at successfully building corporate partnerships and securing grants. Instead, I wanted to gain an insider’s view of how CSR teams and corporate foundations decided who to support, in hopes that I could break down barriers between the Bay Area’s well-resourced technology companies and the local nonprofits providing valuable services to our communities.

At the time I thought that the primary obstacle in resource exchange was a translation challenge; nonprofits weren’t doing a good job of asking for the resources they needed in a way that resonated with companies, and corporations thus couldn’t understand how to effectively support these organizations – either financially or with their employees’ time. After just a few months on a CSR team, I realized that translation wasn’t the issue, it was numbers and focus. There are 1.5M nonprofits in the US alone. Roughly one third of those nonprofits have an annual budget of $1M or more – large enough to have a staff member dedicated to fundraising. That’s over 500,000 nonprofits competing for funding from the few thousand companies with formal grantmaking programs. 

Much like individual donors, companies have a finite budget to allocate to philanthropic giving. They develop a strategic focus area for that money that aligns with their brand, communities where they operate, and their employees’ passions.  For example, pharmaceutical giant Merck focuses on global access to health; Lego works to create a better world for children; and Schwab teaches financial literacy to young adults.  Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose’s 2018 Giving in Numbers data indicates that companies are narrowing their focus areas and making larger grants to a smaller number of recipients; between 2015 and 2017, there was a 22% decrease in number of grants written, but a 19% increase in the size of the grants.

So, how does a nonprofit break through the wall and build strong relationships with partner companies (or at least access grant funding)? While I don’t have a panacea, I can offer two tips:

1)    Find your perfect fit for grant funding; don’t force a square peg into a round hole. Indiscriminately sending grant applications into the world doesn’t work. In fact, it’s a waste of valuable time and resources. Almost every CSR team has a webpage that states their mission and focus area front and center – take this seriously, as it’s rarely up for debate or creative interpretation. When looking for potential corporate partners, you probably don’t want to start with the big names that are already in the news for their recent multi-million dollar donations. Instead, find your perfect fit by thinking strategically about what companies might care about based on their product and brand. If your nonprofit provides free healthcare services, look to the pharmaceutical industry; if you’re fundraising for an outdoor education program for opportunity youth, try an outdoor equipment company. If you’re going after grants in the $5k-$50k range, target smaller or newer companies; if you’re fundraising for a 100+ person nonprofit, approach some larger companies. 

2)    Should you struggle to find a perfect fit for corporate grant funding, try cultivating employees into individual supporters. Companies listen to their employees and stand behind their philanthropic priorities, most commonly by matching their donations or sponsoring volunteer activities run by nonprofits. At LinkedIn, we just increased our employee donation match to $15k per person per year, and we’ll match employee donations dollar for dollar to almost any nonprofit organization globally. With an employee base of over 14k, that’s $210M that could be unlocked every year (or 2x that if you take into account the corresponding employee donations).  Many companies encourage their employees to run fundraisers internally for causes they’re passionate about, which means that finding one committed supporter could help you access an entire cluster. At LinkedIn, 30% of all individual donations are made through employee-hosted fundraisers. One word to the wise: build relationships directly with employees (by mining your donor database and board) so they will fundraise on your behalf. As you can imagine, members of CSR teams tend to be inundated with requests to host and/or promote fundraisers for nonprofits and are rarely able to accommodate them.  

Having spent hundreds of hours attempting to secure corporate grant funding, I know that it can at times feel very difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible. The people who sit on CSR teams are real humans who want to create real impact, but doing their jobs well means making strategic decisions based on myriad variables. Perhaps most important is that nonprofits not sacrifice their visions, missions, or existing programs just to chase corporate dollars, because in the end this isn’t in either party’s best interests.