Commercial partners – are they the right choice for your charity?

Commercial partnerships have been on the rise in the last five years, with a growing realisation that a relationship of this kind can not only benefit both parties but the community as well.

However, if you’re looking to work with a charity, there are questions that you will need to know the answers to, and alongside this, which ones should you choose?

First, let’s look at an example:

The Big Knit is an event organised by innocent, where they work in conjunction with Age UK, and it’s a community get-together in raising money by knitting hats, big or small. Targets are set, and finished hats can be dropped into many places across the UK.

Since launching the cause fifteen years ago, together they’ve raised over three million to help Age UK reach out to more elderly groups of people, such as loneliness.

The charity also has its own section of ‘The Big Knit’ on its website, showing the work being done by the partnership. Here, it not only raises the profile of both companies, but it can help bring more awareness to the cause, but through a fun project such as this.

Looking through both organisation’s sites, you can see that they both have a shared value to this project, and because of innocent’s product range, they’ve been able to share it across the range of products, which can gain great visibility due to them being available in almost every shop across the UK.

It’s the kind of commercial partnership to follow on from; it’s a great template to build on and to see how it could work in your company.

Benefits

The benefits are too many to list, so here’s four that stand out the most:

• Staff Engagement: This can help inspire your staff at work, especially when working from home, to get involved and to help a great cause. It obviously won’t be limited to staff, so family and friends could be encouraged to also help out, which in turn, can help both your business and the charity.
• Shared Values: A shared goal, a common value or set of beliefs is always important when working with someone else. If these are also applied to the partnership in question, the dividends would be huge in making sure that the project succeeds and stays on-brand and on-message.
• Enhanced Credibility: When a project relates strongly to a cause, one of many consequences could be that the awareness for the charity and your business could increase exponentially. Press coverage and social media awareness paired together could really give the donations and project as a whole, a shot in the arm, which can often outperform expectations.

Naturally, factors need to be placed to make sure that your business and the charity know that there should be next to no risk in the project.

Of course, there is always risk involved, but the understanding should be that the project’s end game is to benefit the community in question, that they will be the one to reap the benefits most of this commercial partnership as a whole. This can then have a long-lasting benefit and will add to brand associations down the line. 

As long as the charity you align yourself with has these values at the forefront, the only challenge will be working on the creative and public-facing element to really engage and capture your target audience’s imagination.

In the end, the actual return will be doing good for the community around you, knowing that the business you’ve worked up hard over the last few years, is giving back to the community who supported you all those years ago. There’s great things that can be done when the commercial and charitable worlds collide, it’s how you move forward that will make the difference overall.