Companies routinely express to us a desire to do more, to do better. At the same time our non-profit partners regularly share their struggle to develop meaningful, long-term relationships with the private sector. In a world that feels saturated with conversations and buzzwords around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Corporate Responsibilty (CR)/Corporate Shared Value (CSV) it feels like this struggle should have already been resolved. In reality, though, it remains an ongoing challenge for companies and non-profits to find win-win propositions.

In this masterclass we will gain a deeper understanding of the challenge and then put together a range of tools to develop your own long-term, high value partnerships. Along the way we will address a number of key questions including:

• What/Why engagement vs fundraising
• What is Corporate Shared Value….really
• Survey of the various potential corporate audiences
• What companies want/need in a partnership
• Helping companies to partner better without teaching
• Managing value for effort with corporate partners
• Building partnerships that last longer, make more impact
• Strategies even if you aren’t talking to the CEO
• Win-win case studies

Learning outcomes

• Understanding the various possible corporate audiences
• Finding your unique contribution to shared value
• Designing your own strategy for long-term win-win relationships

Who should attend: Ideally suited for those with limited to moderate experience with the private sector seeking to understand the corporate perspective and how to engage companies beyond fundraising focused activities. Those with more corporate experience will benefit from new perspectives and strategies for how to develop longer term and more impactful corporate relationships.

Winning a partnership is a marketing job. Partnership with the corporate sector can be long-term using the corporate social responsibility route, or through the sponsorship route or even the emerging advocacy route. Doing your homework to get attention and action from the corporate sector to join hands with your ideas to do good and impact communities is an art.

In this workshop, you’ll be amazed at how both easy and how difficult is to inspire corporations to do good in the emerging responsible business world. To make an impact on potential partners, its vital tobuild socially responsible employees, view customers and stakeholders as partners to doing good, reach out to your audience to influence them for social action, take a position for a cause, and tap into the power of social media.

Corporate advocacy is also an emerging phenomenon that could be harnessed for building a common purpose for specific action. That needs thinking out of the box toward harnessing the power of corporates toward social action. That requires packaging and out of the box thinking and action.

The nonprofit sector’s most successful grants programs are underpinned by strong organisational governance and performance measurement. This interactive session focusses on building the knowledge and skills required to meet funder expectations around outcomes and impact measurement and effectively communicating with grant-makers to exceed their expectations. Emerging trends in impact investment and outcomes measurement in Government and philanthropy require that nonprofits be capable and resilient enough to ‘fail fast’ – to learn quickly when interventions are not working and re-focus them when they are not. Funded programs and interventions must be flexible enough to adapt when performance indicators are not being met or perverse outcomes arise. Evaluations are an essential part, therefore, of project planning for grants funding. This requires an understanding of performance measurement and program evaluation as a leadership and fundraising competency. Participants will then be provided with the crucial steps and organisational processes required to develop and emplace effective performance management and evaluation into project plans, and ensure the data captured is relevant to projected outcomes and impacts.

Learning outcomes

• The current lay of the grants land from both government and philanthropic grant funders
• Emerging grant trends including impact investment, social benefit bonds and the focus on outcome measurement
• What constitutes best practice relationship management and reporting – a charity case study (and review of a number of successful grantor / grantee partnerships)
• The importance of and the how to – embedding evaluation into the project delivery plan
• The importance of the service delivery team and fundraising team to work together – Is internal education / restructure needed?
• Evaluation tools, how to capture what data and how to present it to funders is a meaningful and relevant way.

Who should attend: Leaders, management and those establishing NGOs