Ecommerce Master Class Step 3: Establishing a Co-Marketing Relationship with a Nonprofit

Now that we have identified your donation personas (Step 1) and chosen your first charity (Step 2), it’s time to reach out to the nonprofit and establish a relationship. 

This is Step 3 in the process. If you haven’t completed the previous steps, please go back and walk through them. This process is simple, but it’s necessary to follow each step sequentially to optimize your results.

1. Picking your donation persona
2. Choosing the right charity
3. Establishing a co-marketing relationship with a nonprofit
4. Choosing and testing the best donation option
5. Conversion best practices
6. Compliance
7. Improving LTV and Average Order Size
8. Marketing the relationship overall
9. Multiple personas
10. Effectiveness audit

In Step 3 of this Master Class, we are going to teach you how to:

• Reach out to your target nonprofit
• Help your nonprofit envision the impact you may have
• Propose a short-term test (120 days live)
• Send them a draft co-marketing agreement
• Enter into a commercial co-venture

Reach out to your target nonprofit

Having run the choosing of your first nonprofit process in Step 2, you should have a clear list of your prioritized nonprofit(s).

We keep a detailed database of nonprofits. If you want to learn more, schedule a meeting here. We can help you identify the persons, roles, and emails/phone numbers of the target nonprofits for you to kick off your communication.

You can also go to LinkedIn and search for the person at the nonprofit that you want to contact and send them a DM. However, we’ve found that the email method, as we outline it below, is more effective.

The four job titles you should look for in your nonprofit search should be:

1. Vice President, Fundraising (the highest title you can find)
2. CEO
3. VP, Corporate Development
4. VP, Giving

Many of these titles will be manager and director, so don’t limit yourself to vice president titles.

If the nonprofit is smaller and local, you will likely only find the CEO.

Here are some talking points you can use during your first call with a nonprofit.

Next, we recommend crafting an intro email to the VP, Fundraising role. You should also CC the CEO and any of the additional two titles above. The goal is to get as many people on the email as possible – up to four. 

Additionally, make sure you copy at least one other VP-level person at your company. (You’re copying a VP just to give your email a little more “heft” for the nonprofit. It shows you are serious and that this is a top-level initiative for your company.)

Intro email template

Subject: [name], can we discuss a donating relationship with [your company name]?

Body:
Hi [name],

We’ve done a thorough search looking for a nonprofit partner.

Specifically, we looked for a nonprofit that is attractive to our customers and aligns with their interests.

After completing that search, we identified [nonprofit name] as a potential fit.

We would like to discuss establishing a partnership.

Is that of interest?

Here is a link [link to your website] to an overview of our business.

I’d love to talk to you about this further. Are you available to meet on any of the following days/times?

• [Time/Date]
• [Time/Date]
• [Time/Date]

Please let me know what time works and I will send a calendar invite.

Sincerely,
[your name]
[your title]

Send an email message 3-4 times if you are not receiving a response.

Follow-up messages should be sent every two days.

Follow-up email template

Subject: [name], reaching back out about my previous email

Body:

Hi [name],

As I emailed a few days ago, I’d like to discuss establishing a partnership between [nonprofit name] and [your company name].

Are you available to meet on any of the following days/times?

• [Time/Date]
• [Time/Date]
• [Time/Date]

Please let me know what time works and I will send a calendar invite.

Sincerely,
[your name]
[your title]

Remember to always CC the other recipients in the email. Doing this will increase your response rate.

‍Pro Tip: As you send your initial emails, send a DM from LinkedIn the same day, asking to connect. Your content in your LinkedIn DM should be close to, or the same, as your email content. This will increase your odds of connecting with the nonprofit.

Help your nonprofit envision the impact you may have

During the first meeting with the nonprofit you selected, you have five objectives:

1. Ask them what they are looking for in a corporate partnership.
2. Explain to them who your core customers are (your personas) and ask them if they think they are a good fit for their nonprofit and their typical donors.some text
3. If you have done your research well, this will really resonate with them and they will start getting excited about the partnership.
   1. If it’s a miss, stop the process, go back to Step 2, and contact your 2^nd choice of nonprofit.
4. Tell them that you are new at partnering with nonprofits (also called cause marketing) and that you are trying to build company engagement and commitment.some text
   1. This is important because you are going to ask your nonprofit for a lot of flexibility at the outset to test and drive donations.
5. Tell them you want to do a test and see what kind of impact it can have for their cause as well as for your company’s customer engagement.
6. Ask them to consider a 120-day test where you can try out a few methods such as round-ups, donations at checkout, donation matching, and percent of sale campaigns and see what the economics are for both parties.

If the nonprofit seems amenable to all five of these items, propose a relationship and send them a draft term sheet document for their review.

If the nonprofit is balking at anything you are proposing, you may not have a good fit culturally. Some nonprofits have strict standards and guidelines for partnering with for-profit businesses. This can include donation minimums, limited logo usage rights, or volunteer expectations. If you run into a nonprofit that has these requirements and your business is not able to meet them, your time is likely better served finding nonprofits that are more willing and flexible.

Find a nonprofit that is HOW: Honest, Open, and Willing to work with you. 

You are in a “dating process” with your nonprofit, and if they are “just not that into you,” then it’s time to move on. If things go well, this will be a long term relationship for both of you and you don’t want to be wasting energy convincing someone that your stream of donations (whether direct from you or from your customers) is anything other than appreciated and welcomed. Almost always, you will find that most nonprofits welcome and honor any effort to donate and support their cause.

After going through the above five questions, your nonprofit should now be fully engaged and buying into the vision that you have of creating this partnership. 

Now is the time to talk to them about a very specific test that you want to run during the first 120 days of the relationship.

Propose a short-term test (120 days live)

Now that you’ve achieved some alignment or at least strong interest on the part of the nonprofit, you’ll want to give them a simple proposal on a term sheet of what you would like to do in the first 120 days of the relationship. 

Here's a template you can use with your nonprofit to kick off the term sheet discussion.

Regardless of your company’s history of working with nonprofits, you’ll want to communicate to the nonprofit that you think their cause and mission will resonate with your customer personas – but you can't know that for sure until you run a test together.

So, we would like to have the freedom to run anywhere from one to four tests over the next 120 days to see how our customers react to our alliance and the nonprofit’s cause. 

Here are the four tests that we want to have the freedom to be able to run:

• Roundups at checkout
• Donations at checkout
• Matching donations at checkout
• Percentage of sales
  

We want to emphasize to the nonprofit that we may not run all of these tests, but it’s important to have the liberty to run them to see which one has the greatest impact – both for the nonprofit donations and for your overall business.

Additionally, we want to make sure that the nonprofit understands that we want to communicate with our customers and prospects through social media, emails, and other forms of communication about this partnership.

We want to do this to entice or incentivize our customers to come to our site and make donations to the nonprofit either on a standalone basis or in the course of a commercial purchasing action. 

The objective in this initial term sheet is to make sure that you get as much freedom as possible for you to test the nonprofits' cause with your customers to see if it resonates and drives additional revenue and conversion improvements.

As we've mentioned, if you partner with a nonprofit and you use our best practices, you should be able to see an improvement in website and cart conversion anywhere between 30% to 55%.

But it's possible, although unlikely if you followed the process that we recommend, that the nonprofit you chose just does not resonate with your customer personas.

If that's the case, the last thing we want to do is make a long-term commitment to a nonprofit that involves minimum dollar donations and a partnering relationship, that doesn't have the accompanying improvement in conversion and sales benefit that you're trying to drive with your business. 

As a reminder: improvements in conversion as they relate to deploying cause marketing with a nonprofit are always correlated with increased donations to a nonprofit. This is not a Machiavellian approach: we're talking about optimizing results for your business while simultaneously optimizing the results for the nonprofits' cause.

Let's make sure we never forget the win-win characteristics of deploying cause marketing with a nonprofit.

Send a co-marketing agreement

A co-marketing agreement does not have to be lengthy and complicated, particularly when you are doing a test for just 120 days.

Click here for a FREE sample co-marketing agreement.

Note: we aren’t your attorneys and we do not represent your business. The sample co-marketing agreement linked above helps you get the document off and running. Your attorneys may and likely will want to change or adjust the agreement to meet your specific needs.

But don’t make this too difficult for you or the nonprofit. 

It’s a simple, 120-day test.

If things are working well after the first 120 days, consider extending the test another 120 days while you put a longer-term partnership agreement in place.

Enter into a commercial co-venture

The last step in solidifying your relationship with the nonprofit is to enter into a commercial co-venture.

If you are working with a nonprofit and it has the capacity to influence customer purchase decisions (it does), then you are in a legal status known as a commercial co-venturer, or CCV.

Several states require legal filings for CCVs. It’s very likely that you will be a CCV, depending on what you will be doing for this 120-day test.

To review a checklist of what qualifies you as a CCV, visit this blog post.

We’ll save the effort of reading the blog. There is no getting around the legal requirements and this test will require a CCV agreement.

Managing the various legal fees – or even finding an attorney who knows how to file the required filings and reports, for that matter – can be difficult, expensive, and daunting. However…

Don’t stress! ☺

We’ve created a turnkey solution which handles all of your legal compliance and filings.

You’ll want to make sure that you and the nonprofit both agree that a CCV is established and determine how you will go about doing the necessary filings.

Here is a CCV agreement document that you can use to agree on the filings and regimen so that the legal requirements goes smoothly.

Summary of Step 3

Completing this portion of setting up a nonprofit relationship can be daunting, but if you follow the path we've laid out, you’ll be surprised by how quickly it falls into place.

Our mission is to help businesses and nonprofits prosper together.

We will hold your hand through this process.

Just reach out, book a time to talk and we can get you started.

Set up on our system is always FREE.

We’ll set you up for success and create an economic win for you and your nonprofit.

Now, let’s go on to Step 4 and choose the best donation options for us to test.