Man, I am wicked scary excited by all of the cause campaigns coming up this year. Aren’t you?!

With Halloween tomorrow, and Thanksgiving and the holidays just around the corner, it’s prime time for cause products, signature partnerships, point-of-sale fundraising and yep – Giving Tuesday. You probably have a few partnerships of your own waiting in the wings!

Nonprofits such as Wounded Warrior, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Be The Match, and the Arthritis Foundation all agree: now is the perfect time to measure the success of your year-end partnerships and to package them as great case studies to help you raise more money in 2020…

Last month, I wrote that the key to corporate partnership success is audience-building because brands look for audiences to tell them what's popular, profitable and good in the world. In short, audiences are a magnet for companies.

For example, two weeks ago I covered Carson King's Venmo fundraiser for Iowa's Children's Hospital. After Carson raised $250,000, Venmo stepped in and offered to match donations. Then Busch Light offered to match donations AND put Carson's face on its beer cans. Why? Because Carson had built a passionate audience of supporters and funders that Venmo and Busch wanted to align with and tap into.

I've been looking for examples of nonprofits working on audience-building. With Halloween coming up, I found a good one thanks to Bat Conservation International.🦇…

This past week, I got a great question from a reader asking when and how to clean your email list. You know I'm a big believer in email and newsletters - and with good reason. Campaign Monitor just came out with a report that showed "across the board, donors prefer email. Nearly 42% said they prefer to hear from a nonprofit via email from the organization, and 20.5% said an email from the organization would inspire them to give again."

Email works, people. Now on to the question!

Q. I look forward to receiving your email each week! Any recommendation for email list cleaning services and when to remove the disengaged constituents that don't open the emails?

Is your program or partnership in need of a refresh, or a new, innovative idea to take your impact to the next level?

Whether you are a company or a nonprofit, we can all use an infusion of new strategic ideas to drive greater awareness and engagement for social impact efforts. With the launch of Cause Booster, Selfish Giving's and Rocket Social Impact’s new offering to create fresh action or revenue-driving concepts for clients on a tight budget or timeline, we’re sharing five ways to give your program a boost!

Does your program or partnership in need of a refresh, or a new, innovative idea to take your impact to the next level?

Whether you are a company or a nonprofit, we can all use an infusion of new strategic ideas to drive greater awareness and engagement for social impact efforts. With the launch of Cause Booster, Rocket Social Impact’s new offering to create fresh, action or revenue-driving concepts for clients on a tight budget or timeline, we’re sharing five ways to give your program a boost!

Thanks for your patience waiting for the results of the 2019 Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey many of you took back in May.

Karen Wu of Perlman & Perlman and I received a lot of questions about corporate partnerships and the law. On the surface, this was great! But we did need to establish a process for answering everyone’s questions. That’s taken some time, but we think you’ll enjoy the results.

Over the next few months, Karen and I will be releasing a four-part series on the four key legal issues for which you requested guidance.

Today, we’re answering five questions on advertising disclosures…

Thanks for your patience waiting for the results of the Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey many of you took back in May.

Karen Wu of Perlman & Perlman and I received a lot of questions about corporate partnerships and the law. On the surface, this was great! But we did need to establish a process for answering everyone’s questions. That’s taken some time, but we think you’ll enjoy the results.

Over the next few months, Karen and I will be releasing a four-part series on the four key legal issues for which you requested guidance.

Today, we’re answering your questions on advertising disclosures. The FAQ’s below were taken directly from the survey - although Karen and I modified some of the questions for clarity and for other questions that come up….

About the same time last week I was speaking at the New Strategies Program at Georgetown University about audience-centric fundraising, Mark Hrywna at The Nonprofit Times was preparing to release an article that highlights just how much nonprofits need to focus on audience-building and raising more money from individuals.

Here's the one sentence that blew me away 🤯...

Overall, 80 cents of every dollar of nonprofit revenue in the United States comes from government grants or contracts and fees for services.

Less than 10% comes from individuals and less than 1% of revenue comes from companies.🤭…

I need to be brief this week as I'm busy teaching at the New Strategies Program at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. The attendees are my guinea pigs as I'm testing a new presentation called Future Proof Your Nonprofit with Audience-Centric Fundraising.

You might be thinking, "Whoa, Joe is talking about something else besides corporate partnerships." That's not true. But I am thinking more about the best to way nonprofits can attract corporate partners.

Too often we talk about what happens after you've landed a prospect. "Yay! I have a partner. What can I do with them?" Frankly, that's the easy part. The real challenge is getting a corporate partner in the first place, right? I would argue that an even more pressing challenge is developing something that raises money from both individuals AND companies. 🤭Wouldn't that be ideal?

Here are the results from the snap survey you took last month on SEO and corporate partnerships.

As you can see, 42% of respondents don't even have a corporate partnership page for Google to rank. Why? As one respondent explained:

"Absolutely agree with SEO being under-resourced and smaller non-profits being under-staffed. We have been operating without a dedicated MARKETING staff member for almost four years. We split email, social media channels, and communications work between our two development staff members and two of the program staff. Our budget is close to $2M so I don't know where these prioritized decisions come from."

A second question in the survey asked if respondents would be interested in learning more about SEO and corporate partnerships via a detailed blog post or webinar…

Last week we talked about SEO for corporate partnerships. This week let's talk about social media.

One of my favorite experts on the subject is Jay Baer of Convince & Convert. In his newsletter to weekly subscribers last month, he offered this advice: think small. The future of social media is not broadcasting but narrowcasting. Instead of communicating with 500 friends, we'll talk to seven with channels like Facebook’s Messenger, Instagram direct messages etc.

To prepare for Q1, 2020 and the rollout of new features from the social media giants, particularly Facebook, Jay suggests to think more about "what you would do if 'social media' allowed you to reach only a few people at a time. What would you offer? How would you be useful and relevant?"

Jay also recommends that we focus more on eliciting comments from supporters, as "likes" ❤️could be eliminated or downgraded on most social media sites.

You ask, "How will this impact my corporate partnership efforts?" Great question….

Like most things in digital marketing, SEO (i.e. Search Engine Optimization) is getting harder. According to SEO leader Rand Fishkin, less than half the searches on Google will result in a click.

What does this mean for you and your corporate partnership program?

It means that even if you've done the work to create a corporate partnership web page and filled it with all sorts of keyword rich content - like case studies - that earn you a top ranking on Google's coveted first page, most people still won't end up clicking through to your site. There are several reasons for this, and I suggest you read Rand's excellent article on the subject.

What's a corporate partnership pro to do? Well, I posed this very question to Rand...

While Americans are fighting to wrestle machine guns away from domestic terrorists, in England and Wales the Home Office, in partnership with 210 chicken shops, is asking diners to go #KnifeFree.

The campaign has sparked a serious (and at times not-so-serious) debate, which you can follow at the #KnifeFree hashtag.

One group, Word on the Curb, is turning this cause campaign around and sending the chicken boxes back to the government agency that spent £57,000 to launch it.

The survey results are in on asking corporate partners for a minimum revenue commitment (MRC). There are four parts to this post.

1. The graphs showing the results. I took these right from the Survey Monkey survey my email subscribers completed in July.

2. Two of the three survey questions included a section for comments. There were some great insights from respondents so I’ve included a selection beneath the respective questions.

3. I asked the team at Accelerist, my partner in the survey series (check out the results of our salary survey here), to offer their perspective on minimum revenue commitment based on their additional research on the topic. These insights are very helpful…

Newsletter reader Robyn had a great question last week. Here's the question and my answer.

Q. I am trying to find out how local businesses partner with us to raise funds. For example, we have some local businesses that want to help us raise funds the week of Boulder Pride (i.e. where they ask for a donation at the register). However, these businesses don't know how to set this up and neither do we? Do you have any information on what is the best way for a business to do this?

A. Thanks for writing, Robyn. Here's the key with point-of-sale fundraisers. Whatever point-of sale (POS) system the business currently uses to process sales, use that same system to process the donation….

I write case studies for organizations and many have the same challenge: they don't have a lot to say. Getting a few quotes from the partner is expected (and important!). But wouldn't it be great if you had some hard data that the partnership actually worked? That it was actually win-win for both partners.

It's for this reason I'm partnering with Accelerist for a special case study offering for August. Here's how it works.

1. Pick a partnership. You can pick a current, future or even a past partnership (up to 300 days in the past - and not a day more!).

2. Analyze the partnership. This is where Accelerist will work its magic! They'll measure the earned and shared media [What the heck is this?]…

Some lucky nonprofits don't even have to build an audience from scratch. They can just tap into an existing one that's growing around them. That's the case with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Due to the climate crisis and rising ocean temperatures, more seals are visiting the balmy waters of the Cape and they've brought company: lots of great white sharks.🦈

With the seals came the sharks and with the sharks came....tourists who are eager to learn about these powerful apex predators.

With t-shirts and mugs for sale that say "Nice to Eat You” and "Seals Taste Like Chicken," shark commerce is big on the Cape this summer. Smartly, AWSC has thrown out a line…

Let's get clear on the difference between a charity partnership vs. marketing partnership.

A CHARITY PARTNERSHIP is when a company partners with your nonprofit because they want to support the mission of your organization. Some of the reasons companies will do a charity partnership include...

1. They love what you do and want to support you! Yay! This is the best, right? 😊

2. They love what you do, but are happy to take any benefits that may come with partnership. For example, a company could just make a donation to your nonprofit. But instead, they sponsor your golf tournament. They may get some business from the event, but that's not their main goal.

3. They want you to go away….