As the Marketing Director and Board Member for an arts nonprofit, I often partner with local organizations to advance the arts in our community.
The three most recent cause-related marketing campaign partnerships have been wonderful experiences for us.
Why?
Because in each case, the sponsoring company made it easy for us to participate by supporting the campaigns with proper staff and/or volunteers who did much of the heavy lifting for us. The campaign implementation and systems on their part were thoughtful, thorough, and very much appreciated.
Here’s what I mean:
Images – providing high-resolution, pre-sized social media-ready images is nirvana for a busy, all-volunteer nonprofit board like we are. I log in, grab the images I want to use for our social media and any print needs (extra kudos for also providing .eps files), then drop them on our Google drive for my board colleagues to access. One company took it a step further and created customizable images too with space to drop in our branding. Easy peasy.
Posts – by creating a templated post for each social media platform to simply copy/paste is heaven as well. And, by including their own social media handles for each platform, means I don’t have to chase them down and I can easily tag them to give them the public shout out and thanks they deserve. These too are easily shared with colleagues on our Google drive. Another thoughtful time-saver for a working board.
Press Release – the first time I saw this, I was surprised and very grateful. I hope other companies think about adding a template for this too. It’s so easy to simply fill in the blanks and send off a release to your press list. This can be especially helpful for boards without dedicated marketing and/or PR expertise.
Campaign Monitoring – in two of the most recent campaign partnerships, the company used a nonprofit donation software program that allowed me to set up a log in and monitor the progress. This gave us interim fundraising stats to see the success in real time means we didn’t have to wait until the campaign’s end to learn the results. In another instance we received an email a donation update half-way through the campaign from a real-live human who was our dedicated program manager.
Many companies partner with nonprofits large and small. Some simply write a check (always needed and appreciated) others get more deeply involved. Both are wonderful and for those companies that do this as an ongoing commitment to the causes they believe in, making it easy for the recipient nonprofit (especially a small one such as ours) to help spread the word is beneficial to both parties. With a little thought and planning on both sides, a cause-related marketing campaign can be a great success for everyone involved.