For a corporate organisation a partnership with a charity is expected to bring about many benefits, the main one being more favourable coverage. Looking at some of our own clients this is definitely the case, with charitable partnerships having a very significant impact, and really boosting strongly favourable coverage, and therefore, reputation. Job done!

But what is in it for the charities themselves? Apart from the huge financial rewards of course…. According to nfpSynergy 61% percent of charities they asked said that raising income is the main reason for corporate partnerships.  In the same nfpSynergy survey, 55% said that they use these partnerships to raise their profile. Here on the Govt/Nfp team we have many charity clients who are lucky enough to have a corporate partner, some even have quite a few. After a bit of good old ‘data interrogation’ it seems that these charities benefit just as much as the ‘corporates’ in terms of positive media coverage. But why I hear you ask?

For many smaller charities it can get them high-profile pieces in national publications, which they may never reach on their own. These partnerships can also be a great medium to communicate the key aims and messages of the charity, and be endorsed by a big name. Message delivery is often boosted by stronger spokesperson presence, with representatives from both the charity and its partner widely quoted in coverage. PR-led partnership events provide a great opportunity for a partner to explain their choice of charity, another useful means of driving favourability and message delivery. News of a partnership launch can generate attention-grabbing headlines that mention both company and charity.   

So how do you measure this impact? Metrica was lucky enough to evaluate coverage generated by Tesco’s Charity of the Year Partnership with the British Red Cross, which raised £4,428,000 over 2007, the largest amount generated through a corporate partnership in just one year. An examination of volume and tone of event coverage, rates of message delivery, spokesperson presence, prominence and impact revealed a well directed media campaign. Tracking spikes of coverage over time against hits to the partnership website further demonstrated public engagement with a campaign that reached a good proportion of the UK adult population.   

But choose your partner carefully! The charity's reputation may risk being tarnished by association with particular corporate organisations. A charity promoting labour rights would easily be compromised by a relationship with a company whose manufacturing ethics were subject to investigation. Anti-sweatshop activists criticized the Product Red’s links with Gap, despite Product Red's assurance that its products are not manufactured in sweatshops.   

So the moral of the story is gaining a corporate partner can be a fantastic opportunity for a charity, just make sure it’s the right one!

Edelman PR recently published their latest Trust Barometer report, which details findings of their global survey on trust and credibility. I think the results are very interesting and relevant to our sector and for many of our clients.  In terms of their UK findings, there were some results which you may find surprising.   

I work on the Government & Not for Profit team here at Metrica, and so am particularly interested in how much trust the UK public places in such organisations. Perhaps contrary to what I expected there appears to have been a ‘Trust Bounce’ for Business, Media, NGO’s and Government. Significantly, trust in Government has more than doubled from 16% to 34% over the last year. This is despite recent data ‘scandals’, where various government departments have lost huge amounts of our data. This may be because Edelman focus their survey on the ‘opinion forming elite’ (mainly educated, well read, professionals, who are highly engaged in the media).

The younger generation of these ‘elite’ have been found to generally be more trusting than their older peers. They also place much more emphasis on social and environmental issues and a company’s integrity, rather than financial performance. They are ‘re-shaping the trust landscape’ and this will have to be taken into account by business and government when engaging them as an audience.

To put the UK into context, we have the lowest trust in media in comparison to all other countries in the survey with just 38% of people placing a high amount of trust in media to do what is right. People would rather trust the advice and opinions of ‘people like themselves’, which is probably why word of mouth scored very highly as a source of information.

Surprisingly though, blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace score rather low as a trusted source of information about companies. As an avid user of Facebook myself I know many people are suspicious that company profiles on these sites are a shameless way to ‘place’ themselves on the site and plant favourable comments about themselves. Some even write fake blogs posing as members of the public to appear in a more positive light to a media-savvy audience. 

Then again, am I just not ‘trusting’ my sources enough?