When businesses and charities come together, brilliant things can happen. People out of work can find jobs. Young people can have their eyes opened to opportunities they never expected to be within their grasp, or even knew existed. The nation’s natural spaces can become greener, cleaner and safer. People with the least can find themselves with the things that they need the most. Across the country, in towns, cities and villages alike, lives can be changed.
This transformation can happen when business-charity partnerships are at their best. In the best collaborations, businesses find their employees not just inspired, but gaining skills, more engaged at work, more productive, and even less unwell. Firms can benefit from a ‘charitable glow’, where their purposeful credentials burnish their brand and act as an attractive force to customers and potential talent alike. For charities, the benefits can also be manifold, as the vast resources of the private sector open up skills, spaces, services, goods, networks and funds to put to achieving their missions.
But not all business-charity partnerships are created equal.
When businesses and charities come together poorly, opportunities can be wasted and harm can be done. Charities and businesses alike can squander precious resources meant for good. Power imbalances, short-termism, inadequate funding, poor senior and managerial buy in, badly designed processes, undefined purposes, mismatched expectations and the triumph of PR over purpose can mean that charities end up taken advantage of, and businesses fail to have the impact they were seeking. Ultimately, the people they were both intending to help lose out the most.
The worst offenders of this world are the cookie-cutter partnerships – the off-the-shelf programmes that businesses and charities both put together without a lot of thought or tailoring. These partnerships provide a sugar rush of feel-good activity for businesses, but ultimately aren’t good for either party. Short-term Charity of the Year efforts which are highly competitive and burdensome to apply for are an example of these, where charities are picked up and dropped, and serious money is wasted when charities are pitted against each other. Similarly, some charities are still inventing work for corporate volunteers to do, in order to secure the donations which accompany the activity.
Gold standard business-charity partnerships are built on real, meaningful joint purpose. This can be around a theme: the charity supporting homeless people into hospitality roles is a natural partner for a restaurant, while a chain of beauty and chemist stores has a clear reason to want to tackle hygiene poverty. Joint purpose can also be about place: a Cornish hotel can be just as motivated to clean local beaches as the environmental charity that it supports. And business-charity relationships can also find a stable footing on the deeply personal. A CEO’s husband recovering from cancer may kickstart dedicated support from the top, while enabling employees to volunteer and incentivising them to donate to the causes that matter to them can create a myriad of invested relationships, and ultimately lead to the largest businesses helping thousands of charities a year, and smaller firms helping dozens at once.
When businesses and charities are driven by a genuine joint purpose, they are more likely to be undertaking partnerships that are sustainable, adaptable, respectful, long-term and – ultimately – more impactful.
To understand how business-charity partnerships can be placed on this impactful footing, Pro Bono Economics, with support from Benefact Group and in partnership with FTI Consulting, Shoosmiths and Pilotlight, consulted with dozens of charities, businesses and the intermediary organisations that work between them. The conclusions from that consultation were clear. Businesses and charities should base their relationships on real meaning. They should prioritise clear, two-way communication. They should establish structures and a strategy early on. And they should adopt a long-lasting focus, because societal change is rarely swift.
If more partnerships between businesses and charities prioritised these traits from the beginning, they would change more lives for the better.