Surprising Alchemy: How Corporate Partners Can Empower New Donor Growth

With DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining Read More

With DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people, you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect. We provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect they both say the same thing, the people you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

Hello, everybody Hello. My name is Champa taro I’m a DonorPerfect training specialist. Welcome to Chris Barlow’s session. Surprising alchemy, how corporate partners can empower new donor growth. Here’s a little bit about Chris As founder and customer happiness director of Beeline. Chris is thankful to help nonprofits grow their mission and donor base through digital marketing, specifically, Google grant Bing and Facebook’s ads. Most of all, he’s thankful to be the dad to seven kids, and to help them learn to Live generously. Now before I hand the session over Chris, I’d like to address a few housekeeping items. All presentations are attached to the sessions and can be downloaded for your review. Please be sure to add your questions to the q&a tab so that we can see them and get them answered for you. All sessions will be recorded and found on our DonorPerfect website post conference. So let’s give a warm welcome to Chris. Take it away, buddy.

Thank you so much, Shawn. It’s great to be with you today. Thank you for taking the time to join my session. I know you could have joined a session with Julia Campbell. And I wish I could be there too because Julia is awesome. But I’m excited to talk to you today about a surprising synergy, which I use the word today alchemy where we take something that seems not valuable and make something valuable from it. And that’s how the synergy comes between how corporate partners empower our new donors. Are both. And for 13 years, I worked in inside sales doing cold calling. And surprisingly, I enjoyed it. I was not like the movie boiler room, if you’ve seen that with Ben Affleck, a bunch of guys in rooms kind of standing up talking really loudly, even yelling into their phone and high pressure sales to try to scam people out of their money. No, that was not at all. We were obviously it was a b2b company, we had a good product, and I believed in it. And in those years, I made 1000s cold calls. And I remember there being several times a day, where I would look at my list of contacts to reach out to to call, I’d see a certain prospect, maybe or a company that I was intimidated, and I would just get stuck. And so instead, I’d call one of my clients because I know they’d be friendly, or I’d research more about that prospect to try to psych myself up, or I clean up my desk or I hit Send Receive on my inbox hoping to get an email that needed reply, or I go into my CRM, and I’d reschedule the call to tomorrow. Has this ever happened to you? Have you had an important task that needed doing, but the moment it came to doing it? You just found other things to do instead, you just keep pushing that tasks to the backburner, like moving into the future day tomorrow, tomorrow, get it done? I can tell you, I’ve done that for a whole year on tasks like that. What about you? Now there are a problem. There are probably a lot of things for your organization that you feel this way about. And I’ve spent some time thinking about this as I was reflecting, like, why do we have a project or task that’s important, and it needs to get done. And we want to do and we know it’ll help. But we just are stuck. And here’s why I think that happens. There are three reasons that I find I’m sure there’s more, it’s when we get stuck, because we actually know where to start. We haven’t taken the time to think through what is our first step, it just feels big and intimidating. Or we’re afraid of failing or reject or getting rejected in the case, especially of attracting corporate partners or fundraising. We just don’t want to have to go through that. So we’re just we don’t get started. Or we’re just not convinced it’s worth doing. We’re not sure it’s valuable. Now you joined this session on attracting corporate partners. And so probably you feel like this is something worth doing. And you’re wanting more results. So maybe you’ve never tried doing this before. You’ve never tried to attracting corporate partners, and you’re just getting started. And you need to know what what is our first step? What are the steps we should take after that, or you’ve tried before and didn’t succeed, you don’t are seeing the success you want, you’re getting rejected or you had success in the past and can’t repeat it. Or maybe you know, you need to do it. And it just keeps getting put on the backburner other priorities keep coming up. And so again, if you if you were having a lot of successes already, then you probably wouldn’t have come to the session you might have joined Julius, you could be here teaching yourself if you are really successful, or maybe you’re just curious to learn a different approach. So today, one of my goals is to help you stop putting something as important as attracting corporate partners on the backburner and instead, start doing it because it’s really clear how how what how easy and simple it is. I mean, it’s hard, but it’s very clear what you can do. And you can see how successful you can be. And the good news is I’m going to give you the first step to take and the ones after that. And I think by the end, you’re going to feel a way less anxiety and fear of rejection, and even feel confident about doing it. So and there’s one more thing that that’s interesting about what I’m going to share today that’ll that’ll bring value. There’s another task that we in the nonprofit world often put on the backburner, and that is creating new content. It’s not like no one likes to create content, it can be fun to put together a new digital fundraising campaign or a new page page on your site or a downloadable guide, or a resource of some way that that that helps your audience. But the problem is the time that it takes to create content, there’s always something more important to do, like fulfilling improving your programs or fundraising and creating content just feels kind of far removed or low on the priority list. So in addition to showing you how to attract corporate partners, you’re going to learn said is a surprising alchemy, how to create gold out of lead the fake science of the Middle Ages that actually led to a lot of real scientific discoveries. We’re going to leverage your need for good marketing content, and the lack of time to create more with your goal to get new corporate partners. And we’re going to find how those things work together really well. So our goal really and truly is to help you have a plan when they land a new corporate partner in the next 30 days. To learn, you’re gonna get an overview of the strategy to attract corporate partners and create content that helps you attract new donors. We’re going to go through a three step process to contact and connect with companies and get your foot in the door in relationship with them. And then we’re going to go through an email framework that gets a 50% response rate, any 30% or more success rate? Now, how do most attempts at attracting corporate partners start? Now, a lot of you have a lot of generic experiences. So they don’t all start here. But from what I’ve really seen myself a lot of a corporate partnership attracting to model start with creating your sponsorship patch, you put together a nice swatch of options for companies, and you have something that’s beautiful, compelling and well crafted. But the problem with this approach is, our company’s asking you for those for a swatch to look at. And for options to choose from, how do you get this in front of companies in the first place? How do you get them to read your sponsorship packages? How do you get them to say yes, to me, this feels intimidating. And it’s also a numbers game. Remember, I did inside sales for 13 years, I know all about the numbers game, and it works. But you have to put all of your effort into it, you’re gonna get rejected a lot. You can succeed. Maybe if you reach out to if I call 100. Companies may be one of those would turn into a client maybe. But the good news is, and some days it was better than that. But the good news is, I’m not here to teach you how to make cold calls or play the numbers game. I’m not going to show you how to win at that. I’m going to show you an approach that gets a response half the time and a yes, a third of the time, meaning contact three companies in the next month, and one of them will say yeah, let’s work together. To me, that’s doable and exciting. So how do we do this? How do we start going about this? How will I want to look at how do we get people to say yes, and this is these are kind of the underlying principles that we’re going to operate on today. We want to first offer something that people already want. If we want people to say yes, well offer them something that they already are looking for or wanting, then it’s easy for them to say yes. And the second thing to do is to make it easy for them to say yes. Don’t make them jump through a lot of hoops in order to say yes. So how we communicate, what we’re offering to a corporate partner in working with our nonprofit is important and how we, that communication process is something we’re gonna look at. But I want to start with, what are companies wanting? What are they looking for? What are the kinds of things that companies want? Well, they want sales, right? They want to improve their brand image, they want employee satisfaction. They want to care for their customers, their employees, their community, they want tax write offs, they want to retain their employees, and they want to live out their values. So we’re gonna look at one specific thing that companies want that we as nonprofits can offer them. And that is to grow their audience through their marketing. So why not take your nonprofit expertise from your programs from your mission, combine that with an offer that to a company, who has matching subject matter expertise from their product and services, and create content together, that helps you both attract someone new. The thing is, companies are always wanting to create content, to reach new audiences, to retain their current ones to to nurture their relationships with their customers. So why not partner with you with your nonprofit who has a complementary set of skills and knowledge and maybe even audience overlap, and create something that will help you both attract new people, let me give some examples. So if you’re an animal sanctuary, you could partner with a company that provides products for pets and pet owners. And maybe you guys could work together to create a guide on pet nutrition, or the top 10 things or 50 things to do more things than 50 tips for new pet owners. Or maybe you’re an anti human trafficking organization. And you could partner with an app company that helps parents monitor and protect their kids from online risks. And you guys could use your combined expertise to create a resource to help parents or teachers know what or look for the signs of bullying online and know how to talk to kids about these really important and kind of maybe scary topics for them. And just having a resource like that can be really valuable to both your audience and theirs. Or maybe you’re a food bank, you could talk to local chefs in your city and get recipes from the favorites on their menus and put together a recipe book and now you can offer this recipe book to people who love to cook and your both the both the restaurant is getting people to be interested like I don’t want to cook tonight. I want this dish I’m gonna go to the restaurant and you’re finding out about another organization, a food bank that provides something to people who can’t don’t even have enough food in their pantry. Now in other while as I mentioned, we the content is hard to create because of the time it often takes a back burner so Why not, instead of having to create something from scratch, you could even reuse content that a company has made. Here’s an example for a real client we worked with the Jewish Food Bank, we will, I’ll get into why we created a recipe book. But we decided to create this recipe book. And instead of them sourcing these recipes from their employees and their audience, we reached out to Jewish celebrity chefs who have shows on the Food Network, who have large social media following, we found recipes that we really liked on their website, and we just asked them, would you donate these recipes to this book that we’re making, we’re not going to resell it. And all of our chef contributors are going to get Kundry page with information about their chef link to their Instagram and a link to their physical books on Amazon in case our readers want to go buy the book. And we pretty much got maybe 75%. Yes, from every chef, we asked. And not only do we get Yes, a lot of the chef’s provided a few extra recipes, okay, use these. And they gave us high quality photos. And so the partners that we were talking to didn’t have to do any work except say, Yes, or maybe send us something one little email. Or we could just take stuff that was off the website, because we got permission to do so. And it didn’t take hardly any effort that you had to, you know, we had to curate, we had to put this book together in the end. But we didn’t have to create anything new, which is much easier. So in this example, and the others, I shared the digital resources used to help your organization and the company grow their audience. And it looks great because they the company gets to say they created it in collaboration with a nonprofit cause and you get your foot in the door to start a real long term relationship with a company. Now before I go any further into explaining the three step process on how we contact and connect with companies, let me just briefly go over why content is so valuable in helping you grow your donor base, and why we need to have these kinds of things in the first place if we want to keep reaching new people, and even maybe more importantly, nurturing our current subscribers and current donors, because we know that we need to keep retaining people in the first place first before we even start attracting new ones. So in marketing, the approach coming from the movie Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. We hope we build this amazing website, we build this amazing campaign, fundraising campaign, and we just hope people will come and unfortunately, in the attention starved, calm economy with all the different places that people’s attention are being pulled. The approach of if you build it, we you they will come does not work. Instead, we have to build a bridge to people to the people who are potential donors to our current donors to our audience in any way. We need to make it easy for them to come to us just like I said, if we want people to say yes, we have to offer them something they want, and make it easy for them to say yes. And so one way we can do that is through digital content. Now over the last year, we’ve helped an organization grow their email list by over 26,000 subscribers using three pieces of content. And it wasn’t just a generic signup for our newsletter was three resources that help solve problems that their audience wanted. And were looking for. And here are three other examples. Like I mentioned, the Jewish holidays, digital recipe book, we also have a free online course that one of our organizations offers to school administrators and teachers who want to change their school climate and culture. And then another one, have a customizable coloring book for parents who are dealing with or just came through a cancer diagnosis and are trying to help their kids understand, you know, just being sick or, or dealing with surgery. And so they have a customizable coloring book for families. So those are just examples of the kinds of things that organizations have created to start building a bridge their audience. And if we want to do that, it starts with the question, what do people who share our values want? We want to meet people where they are by understanding what they’re looking for, and create something using our expertise as an A or as a nonprofit that will meet one of their needs in some way to answer some of their questions, solve a problem for them, serve them in something small. And the reason we want to do that is because the questions and the problems and the interest that people have like that are above the surface are often tied to their underlying values. So if you can meet the needs or serve in some small way, the people who have questions, problems interests that again, that you can answer through your expertise, you’re likely going to find people who then share your values as an organization. And we know that people who share your values are much more likely to become donors. So again, examples here or if you if you’re an animal sanctuary, and you serve the needs of pet owners, they’re these pet owners understand the value of what you do. And if you can meet their needs, and build up, start building a relationship with them, they’re much more likely then to eventually become a donor. If you nurture that relationship, again, people who love to cook, and they love to host and they love to have people over. And they care about the connection over the holidays, pretend in potential bar. And in particular, they’re going to understand the value of a food bank, and what food banks do, or people who love to go camping, and are looking for good water filter for their next camping trip. If you’re a clean water organization, and you provide it in third world countries, if you can meet their needs by talking about here’s some good water filters that we’ve reviewed, because we know all about this through our mission, now you’re meeting a need of theirs, and they at the same time understand the value of what you’re doing. So again, if we want to grow and reach new people, new potential donors, we want to understand their needs to create a resource offer in exchange for them to subscribe, and then start cultivating those relationships. I know I, I ran through that really quickly. But again, that’s not the point of our session today. But I wanted to mention it because it’s all tied together and how we attract new corporate partners. So let’s look at that three step process of how do we reach new companies? Well, again, we want to start with the same thing, we want to understand what our donors needs are now, if there’s a different audience, you’re wanting to reach obviously wouldn’t be your donors. Like if you’re wanting to reach and create something for new volunteers. That’s who that’s who you’re trying to attract. Or you have something for your whatever your mission, your mission or programs that you’re trying to create. Obviously, that’s then what you’re going to be thinking about. So but we’re going from this session, we’re going to talk about donors. So we start with our expertise and knowledge and say, What could we create? What different answer questions could we answer or problems we could potentially help with, and come up with some different ideas that you could create. And then before you go and start reaching out to companies or creating something, I recommend doing a little bit of quantitative and qualitative research. Those words may be unfamiliar to you, I assume most people are familiar with them. But all I mean by that is, let’s just make sure there’s some demand for this resource before we take the time to create it. And there’s one tool that I recommend, it’s a free tool that you can use to do some quantitative research. And that is the Google Keyword Planner, just search that on Google, the Google Keyword Planner can get access to it. If you have an ad account with Google, you do not need to have credit card information in there. You do not need to set up any ad campaigns. It is a tool that you can access where let Google allows you to enter in different keywords and find out what is the search volume for these keywords, how many searches are happening in a given month around these different topics. And then you can, then you can validate how many people are searching for that topic, I’m going to drop it into the chat, its ads dot will calm is where you would go. It’s the Google Keyword Planner. Thank you, Sara. And so essentially, once you have a few topics that you have looked at, inside that, that search tool and seen, okay, there’s a lot of people searching for this every month, there’s 10,000 searches per month, there’s 100,000 searches every month for this topic, and you’ve made a shortlist maybe two or three different potential topics, then you can do some qualitative research. And you can what you can do is create a quick survey for your current audience for your, for your donors and subscribers and say we’re thinking about creating a resource related to one of these three things, what would be most valuable to you. And you could see, here’s a real survey that we sent with that real example I gave earlier of the Jewish recipe book. And you could see that their audience said, we’d really like you to create a recipe book, like the other ideas are okay, we those would be fine too. But this is the width, this is the thing that would actually be most valuable to us. And so putting those two things together helps us identify, there’s some demand around this resource. This is what we should create. Now, once you’ve gotten a list, and you’ve identified maybe one or two different resources you could create, it’s much easier than to go to step two, which is to create a list of companies you could partner with, who could who could help you with this content, and may add their subject matter expertise to it. And the here’s the factors to consider when you’re reaching out or making lists rather, of companies, obviously, their expertise, you’re thinking about what are their products and services? What can they do to help? What is there how does their knowledge contribute? Or even provide the information we need for this resource? And then look at their values? Do they share their values on their website? Do they share them inherently on their social media, if I like different initiatives that they’ve that they’ve taken part in? And if you have a company that has expertise and values that align that is a really good potential corporate partner, they’re likely in the long run, to be self accompany that is us going to support your organization, the other things to consider are, of course, the size of the company’s audience. So their social media, following the number of employees, they have their customer size. And then of course, the size of the company revenue wise. And a lot of sponsorship pitches start with let’s just go after the big fortune 500 companies, fortune 1000 companies that have well known corporate giving programs, and we know they give a lot to nonprofits. And the problem with that is, they may not share your values, they may not share expertise. And there’s a lot of other issues with that approach to and will there, I do recommend it, if you if you’re willing to play the numbers game. But if you can find a small company, even with 10 employees, who shares your expertise in values, that is a very likely good corporate partner. So how do we reach out to them? How do we contact them? Well, there are two things to consider. There’s first of all, who should you reach out to at the company, and then how, and I obviously recommend talking to someone on the marketing team, someone who’s in charge of the content. And here’s why, if you’re going to the traditional route, to the director of employee engagement, or director of corporate citizenship, or corporate philanthropy and giving, you’re going to go through the long decision making and approval cycle that all nonprofits have to go to, to decide whether a company will give financially. And so if you’re coming in, especially as a new nonprofit, and you’re bringing your swatch to them to consider, you’re competing with every other nonprofit, and you’re not even going to someone who can say yes to you, right, now, they have to go through their process. And if you instead go to the person in marketing, who is in charge of this, and it’s their job to put out new content, and they’re looking for new ways, and new creative ways to reach new audiences, they can say yes to right now. And so you can get a new, get your foot in the door with the company immediately. And then the other way, other point is, how do we reach out to them? Why recommend cold email. And the reason cold email is good is because everyone has one, you can send a message to someone on social media through a direct message, if you’re connected, that’s also valid. But just the key to cold email is to write something that gets their attention that they want to respond to. And so this is the cold email template or framework that I mentioned to you that you can use. And I’m going to, at the end of this session, send you a link to where you can download a kit that will take you through this process more slowly. So you can go through it step by step. And there’s even a link in there to an email template that you can just use and kind of fill in yourself. But the four parts, as you can see here, hook anchor, when asked, let’s go through those briefly, the point of the hook is to get their attention, and to get them to want to open your email. So create a little bit of curiosity. And your hook can often just be their first name as the subject line. And the reason I like that, and it doesn’t feel of click Beatty to me is because whatever one responds to the first name, you are writing to that person. And rather than just starting with a subject line where they have to start digesting, like figuring out what your email is about. If you put their name in the subject line, the first line of the email now no longer needs their name, you can just start with a question or whatever your however you would open your email. And in most email inboxes, they’ll see a preview and it’ll just say, say their name, you know, Chris, I wanted to talk to you about or I you know, I’ve been a customer of yours for 20 years, or however you want to get them to open the email with a hook and I, again, it shouldn’t be clickbait the hook. But it should be something that creates some curiosity in their mind. The really the most important part of the email is the anchor. And the anchor is how you establish trust. Now, for someone you already know your friend, someone you work with someone you’ve worked with in the past, in another company, there Angkor is already there. It’s inherent, you don’t need to write about it, you both know how you know each other, and there’s already trust. But if you are reaching out to a company who doesn’t know who you are, then you need to know who they are. You don’t necessarily need to know who the person is that you’re reaching out to personally, that can also that can feel a little bit strange, because you’re blending in, you’re going into like stalker territory, but you need to know the company and you need to show that knowledge through this anchor. And the way to do that is to not flatter them. Don’t flatter them, you know that you’ve all gotten emails from people that were trying to get you trying to sell something to you. And it’s just flattery. It’s just like, you guys have a great blog, or I love your organization and you know, or flattery from someone who you don’t know, and doesn’t show that they know you is meaningless. And in fact it’s even a turnoff. And so if you want to build that trust and have a strong anchor, I recommend something along the lines of we’ll talk about the company’s products. Have you used them before? Or have you did you just buy one to try it out if it’s something that your organization could use, or

have you read their marketing content? Did you take the time to do that? If you did, then better than just saying, I read your blog, why not take some action based on it. So is there something in their content that’s actually helpful for your organization that you, that you that was informative to you or to your audience, a great easy thing you can do is to read a bunch of their blogs. And then if you find something that’s really that speaks to you, and that’s relevant for your organization, in your audience, share it on social media, and then in the email, share a screenshot of your share and say, Here, I shared, you know, this blog on our social media, because I thought it was really valuable. And here’s why. So again, you’re building trust by showing you know them, even if they don’t know you. And then once you’ve written your anchor, you move into the wind. And the wind really is, is still very connected to what you’ve been saying, you start with, because your company cares about a, or because your company has done a I thought we could do B. So because your company cares about pet nutrition, and has written a number of blogs about this, I thought we could work together to create a guide on pet nutrition for owners, specifically, with with pets who have sensitive diets or whatever it might be. So your your when is kind of what your pitch is. But you’re starting with because you care about or because you’ve already done this, I thought we could. And you don’t have to write it in exactly that language. But the point is to connect what you’re asking for, to what they already do and care about. And then finally, you’re asked, this is where you make it easy for them to say yes. You You just say are you interested? Or can we get on a call? Don’t go into any other details? Don’t like map out a plan at the stage. You just want them to say yes. Because if they say yes, then you can set set up a meeting with them and work out the details, just make it so all they have to do is hit reply and say yes. And then they don’t have to think they don’t have to work hard to get something started with you. Once you’ve written your email, you’ve gotten that, yes, it’s time to collaborate with them. And you’re going to work together again, you’re going to borrow the content they’ve already made and recreate put something new together. Or maybe you’ll write something completely new from scratch, and you’ll take decide on what it’s going to be. And here’s some ideas for your Collaborate. Again, you’re going to come to this meeting well prepared, because you’re gonna say, look, we’ve already done some market research, we already know, there’s a lot of demand around this topic, our audience is already looking for a resource along these lines. So you can provide that to them. And they can look at you and say, Wow, you’re really well prepared, this doesn’t make sense for us to work together. And you can ask them for, again, content you’ve already created, you’ve done their your homework on the company, you know, some of the marketing content they’ve already put together, you know what’s relevant, and you can ask them for their marketing support, here’s where they can quote, donate to you, they can give their marketing teams time, they can help you write something, or they can provide graphic design for it, here’s where having a company come in and help make it really professional or just, they’ve got maybe a much bigger marketing team than you, that’s where you can get a ton of value. Because they are already set up to do this, and it’s part of their job. And May and then then you can start talking about how you’re gonna promote it. And before I mentioned that, though, here’s what you’re bringing to the table, here’s why we’re not, we’re not really taking the anxiety off the table. I hope that this, this will bring so much confidence to you. And this is the part that’s really the most exciting to me, you’re bringing nonprofit you are bringing so much value to companies. And it doesn’t matter if they’re a fortune 500 companies, you’re bringing positive publicity and branding for them, you’re helping them live out and support their values in a very practical, tangible way. That’s not tied to just a financial gift, they’re getting to actually do something related to whether a company already has to do and cares about. But that furthers their values. And you’re also helping them engage their employees in that activity. It’s not just like, hey, everyone gets a paid day off to do some volunteering, which is also awesome. But it’s separate from their day to day jobs. And so now you’re like you’re giving them an outlet for their employees to actually do something that feels and is really meaningful, because they’re helping a nonprofit cause in the midst of what they have to do anyway. And you can go to them. And you can say, Look, we’re not just going to create this resource together. And it’s going to get a bunch of Chris, we have a grant from Google, with $10,000 per month in advertising. And we’re going to advertise this resource. And we can advertise it ongoing. And we’re gonna get a lot of people finding it. And they can’t access that Google grant because they’re not a nonprofit. And so you’re you’re bringing so much to the table for this company. It’s really easy for them to be like, Wow, this is awesome partner of ours. We want to keep working with them and they didn’t just come to us like that. asking for our help they can bring so much to the table, in fact, maybe even more than we’re bringing to them. And you’re helping them tap into new audiences, of course, and hopefully they’ll be helping you do the same. So now you can, how do you how do you take this collaboration and build on it? How do you turn this into a long term relationship? How do you open this up to financial support from a company? Well, you talk about your cross promotion and and how you guys are going to promote it and how they’re going to promote it gets them to share it with their employees internally, if they’re willing, especially if they had a hand in creating it. Ask them to share it in their social media, thank them publicly on social media, just just make them feel really appreciated and seen and let them get that positive, bloodless publicity from you. And then talk about what can we do next? And can we do something again, but can we reconnect in three months or six months and do something again, and then the key thing to do here, whether you do this when you’re wrapping up the collaboration project, or whether you’re following up with them in a month, and letting know we’ve had 50 people, or 100, people download this, so far, we’ve had this many people see it, is ask for an introduction. And the way to do that is to say something like this, who formed your company’s values, or who’s in charge of how the company your company lives out its values, I would love to see how we can partner more to help your company even more further in and live out its values. And and I think our causes is something that you guys care about to would you introduce me to the person who’s in charge of your corporate philanthropy. And so now instead of coming as an outsider with a well polished swatch of sponsorship packages, you’re coming in as an insider, a personal introduction, and that person is saying, You need to meet Chris, their organization, we’ve already worked with them, they’re awesome, we’re going to do more with them. Look at what we put together here, something tangible we’ve actually worked on together. And we should support them, we should we should put them on our shortlist of organizations that we should be supporting financially. And so you’re the whole point of this approach is to build for long term partnerships. And if this approach seems valuable to you, and you want to take it more step by step and go through this process, go download our corporate partnerships attraction kit, and it’ll take you through the process, step by step. Again, in our experience, we see about a 30% or higher success rate. And I’m going to now open it up to q&a, because I’m sure there’s a lot of questions. And you can also contact me after the session, and ask me any questions that we don’t get to. But I really appreciate your time. So yeah, what questions do we have? Now, I’m gonna go through them, Shawn, if you want to

all a lot of reactivity to the recipe book. I think that’s that’s probably one of the biggest takeaways for a lot of people getting the community involved.

Awesome. Yeah. And I will say something important. A lot of people react well, or a lot of people have given great feedback about the rest of the book, don’t feel like your organization should create a recipe book. It isn’t. For every organization, I have organizations that have tried the same thing, because they heard about this, and it didn’t work as well for their audience. So just make sure it’s really the right fit for your audience what they’re looking for. All right. I’m gonna go through some of the q&a, if you see one.

Sure. I’m scrolling through trying to find some good ones here.

Brianna, you wrote, how do you recommend that a nonprofit goes about forming these partnerships if they have a smaller audience and social media? Hi, assume bye. If they have a smaller audience, you mean the nonprofit, your audience doesn’t matter? The audience does not you’re not bringing that into the conversation at all. You are bringing your expertise and knowledge to the table and you are saying we want your we want to feature you company we want your subject matter expertise to our audience. And and we want to work together to kind of share this with with both of our audiences. And even if you’re not bringing a large audience to the table, you they can still happily share the content they’ve created already or need to create with you.

Here’s here’s another good, good one that I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on. From Randy Jackson. What is the suggestion when email doesn’t seem to work or connect with people, even people that they seem to know?

That is a great question. So a couple things. We I almost always in my experience, a follow up is required. If you might write a perfect team meal and someone might really like it. But they just don’t you caught them on a bad day, they were out there on vacation, they had a, you know, emergency quote, unquote to deal with and they couldn’t get to you. And so sending a little ping follow up a couple days later or a week later, maybe a couple follow ups is really key to getting a response. And then sometimes I’ve sent people a message on on usually LinkedIn, if I didn’t get it, hear from them via email. And then you know, if you don’t hear from them for what, like, you’ll hear from all like, go back to them in six months, and Dragon. That’s one thing I learned in my 13 years of sales, like follow up is really, really important.

Social media, the modern email, not in our q&a, but from the live chat. Carrie Neff asks, if you have worked with a corporate partner in the past, and they’re not very responsive in the future, even if you’re an insider now, is there ever a point where you just decide to walk away?

Um, it depends on how valuable that relationship was, you know, for all the different reasons. But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of companies out there. So if you just really aren’t getting a response from them, and they, you just can’t get through to anyone, then yeah, I mean, or again, put it on the backburner and come back to it next year. And try again.

Give them a little space, come back to it later. See what Adam curves asking, have you ever incorporated AI into your email verbiage? Like Google Gemini? And if so, what are your thoughts on utilizing that for communication, so that was,

um, so the problem, the only real problem with the cold email, and the format that you want to follow is the key is that it needs to be personal. And so the AI cannot do the homework for you, that will take the time, you know, the company and show and prove that knowledge in some way to build that trust and anchor. So it can help you in like the wording to help you maybe simplify or just save a little bit of time. But usually, these aren’t very long emails, either. So the longer the time consuming piece is that building the anchor, but the actual email, you can follow a fairly similar format. In terms of each piece, like those four pieces I mentioned, actually, is for hooks, I think you could get you use it for hook ideas, actually.

Great points, great points, great points. Slow adopter of AI myself, but it is a great tool to use. And unless you see any other questions, Chris, we are at time.

Yeah, I mean, any other questions, please feel free to email me and I will be happy to do my best to get back to you and give you a helpful answer if I can.

Okay, excellent. Well, thank you, Chris. And thank all of you for attending Chris’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways. Next session will begin at 1250. We have cheryan Koshi with Spark the journey igniting donor passions for lifelong engagement or Scott Rosencrantz from donor search with AI and the future of fundraising. No matter what session you choose. You will not miss any content since we are recording everything we’ll see in a few take everybody