118 – How To Get Corporate Sponsors with Deborah Forrister

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Want to land more sponsors for your non-profit? Deborah Forrister reveals how to attract the right business partners. Make your website sponsor-ready and turn existing assets into real opportunities. Stick around. You’re going to learn how to grow your partnerships and grow ones that actually pay off.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking sponsorship strategy, partnerships, and website assets. I’ve got Deborah Forrister here with me. Deborah helps non-profits and service-based businesses grow online through smart SEO, Search Everywhere Optimization, we will probably jump into that a little bit, authentic partnerships, and systems that actually convert. Coming with 15 years of experience, she’s here to talk about attracting meaningful business partnerships.

Deborah, thank you so much for hopping on the show with us today.

Deborah Forrister: What a great introduction. Thank you for having me. That’s a lot to cover in 20 minutes. Hopefully, we can be inspirational to your audience.

David Pisarek: So speaking of inspiration, what inspired you to specialize in helping forge partnerships?

Deborah Forrister: Like you said, I’ve been helping businesses for about 15 years, and we wanted their marketing to be improved, and a piece of that is just information about how you get found and how you get selected.

Through the years, we will talk with businesses about what they can do to leverage the partnerships that they have, the volunteer work that they’re doing, the partnerships, and use that to help them and benefit them online, just to add trust and credibility.

Then, we had a non-profit client. One of my team members was like, “Wait, why don’t we just make their partner and sponsorship section much more findable? Why don’t we put some basic optimization into this?” And it was really helpful to that non-profit because people were reaching out to them, and it was easy for them to get started. I think that’s really when it clicked, is that, both sides, they are focused on their mission, or focused on their product, and that there is a natural way that both can help each other, and it doesn’t really take that much effort. For people who are looking for that type of partnership, make it easy for them to select you. And when I realized, “Oh, wow, there’s two people that have goals that can support each other, but they’re not noticing each other,” it was really exciting for us because it’s such an opportunity.

David Pisarek: Yeah, one of the things, and the folks listening to this, if you’ve listened to several episodes, you’ve probably heard me say:

You need to run your non-profit as if it was a business. I think that’s a really interesting concept to always keep in mind: it takes money to make money.

Everybody’s probably heard that at some point in their life, and it’s very true. You need money coming in as a non-profit, even if you’re a startup. Usually, founders end up paying for everything out of pocket for the first few years, maybe the first few months, until they start getting donations or corporate sponsorships or any grants, things like that. But you need to have the money sitting there so that you can invest in the organization, so you can start marketing, you can start telling people about what you’re doing, or you could start buying things that you need. If you run an arts program for adults with some disability, you need supplies, such as paintbrushes, chalk, or paper, or whatever is needed. It’s not free. You need to create these relationships, these partnerships, and think about it in a way that, “Okay, this is going to help me grow.”

It’s not selling out your organization. That’s not it at all. It’s about getting people to help you.

Deborah Forrister: Yeah. I think that one of the first steps of that is really understanding it from a business perspective that there’s another type of supporter or another type of sponsor that maybe might be less invested in your vision, but is definitely invested in working with you.

If you can understand what you can offer, maybe you both want shared visibility, you want shared alignment, and you want shared credibility. There are different things that someone can be looking for, and it’s a different lane for how you would attract that person, how you might nurture that relationship, and slightly different motivations for following up with them. It is so parallel to what you do in business, right? Because you’re looking for what it is that I offer? What can I offer?

And if you can recognize, “Oh, well, I have maybe access to constituents. I can have someone who can help me who wants to create resources. I have credibility because I have been around for a long time,” and just how that benefits other organizations.

David Pisarek: And look at some of the larger organizations, you can look at the World Wildlife Fund, or you can look at the Canadian Cancer Society, they have pages on their websites that talk specifically about the corporate sponsorships and ways that you can be involved or seek involvement from corporate sponsors. I also have a webinar, actually, it’s more of a workshop on how non-profits can secure corporate sponsorships. But we’ve got some notes about our conversation today on the show. A lot of that is very similar, and we didn’t talk really at all about this beforehand.

I love that you mentioned; let’s create a prominent page that discusses corporate sponsorships. What are the opportunities? What are the benefits? Why should they help? Why should they care?

Deborah Forrister: Yeah, great. The first step is to know what you offer. I think the next step is making sure you can be found.

So, from the agency side, when I’m working with a business, sometimes we use a broker, so you can register with a broker, but sometimes we’ll go to Google and we’ll just be like, “Hey, how can I find partnership opportunities that benefit families in the Denver area? Because I, for my business, need some local links for my new location.” Or “I’m looking for… I work with a psychiatrist, and they work with veterans. And so they’re looking to be acknowledged as someone who helps with mental health. They want to be helpful, they want to be trustworthy, and they want access to share their knowledge. And so we’re looking for people who have that kind of partnership opportunities and the level that you want, and the involvement might start as small.”

It’s so helpful if you can go to a website, and they’re using those types of keywords, the words that people are searching for, which is two parts of that. One is the page that has partnership opportunities in Denver, and how we support families in our community. You’re using some of the phrases, so if someone tries to find you, you have the likelihood to show up.

I think on the other side of that is archiving and mentioning past events. Because what we find is that if I’m, I don’t know, I use the example of a law firm, and I’m looking, and I’m saying, “My competitive law firm is a sponsor of your past event, they’re on your sponsor’s page. They’re getting recognition from two years ago.” I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, that has so much visibility. I’m also going to want to be involved.” And so, this public recognition of past events and keeping up some of those archived pages both make it easy for someone who’s looking for those opportunities to find you and recognize that ongoing value.

I know that was a long-winded answer, but

There are so many ways that you can just update your website slightly to say, “Hey, here’s how you find us,” and just start that conversation about how you can be working together and how you guys can support mutual goals.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. And I love that you mentioned, “Hey, go to Google and search for this, this, this, this.”

Also, take a look at Perplexity, ChatGPT and Gemini, and do some searching. Those AI platforms are free. You can use them to help with research. One of the things I think is a really great way to think about researching is to ask the question: “My organization is this: I need you to act as a business development officer.” It’s crucial in prompts that you inform the AI of the role you want it to assume as a persona. “I need your help to identify businesses whose values match ours. Here’s a link to our Mission Vision Values page, or here is the quick summary, the two, three bullets of what we do, why we do it, who we do it for.” And let that be the foundation for the research.

Deborah Forrister: Right. Such a good point. I think that one of the things you can do is get an idea of where you’re at. So you can go to Google, go to different chat platforms with the AI and ask it, “Hey, what do you know about me? How do you get a sponsorship with me now?” Because that’s going to be someone else’s experience of how easy it is to understand how to get started with you. But those are such good resources, right?

David Pisarek: You can even say, “Hey, our competition is this, or other similar organizations like ours are this. Who have they had sponsor events?” And then you could, I’m not going to say poach the sponsors, but you can approach the sponsors and try to have some conversation because if they’re willing to help this organization that helps with dementia, if your organization helps with Alzheimer’s or memory or rehabilitation, they might be willing to do that because, at the end of the day, there’s a reason people, either corporate or personally, pick the organizations that they want to support. It’s usually that they themselves have been afflicted by something, one of their loved ones, family members, or close friends has been. Those are usually the two main reasons. Let’s use that to empower them to help support your organization as well.

Deborah Forrister: You’re right.

The other thing that I was thinking about is that your actual sponsors and your competitors’ sponsors, I guess I’ll call them competitors, but oftentimes I know they are not; they’re a resource.

And I think that the one place, if you don’t know where to start, can be to reach out to your existing sponsors and to be asking them, “Why did you choose us? What could we do to offer more value? What other projects would be valuable for you to support?” And then, you’re learning from them what they believe you have to offer. I think that allows you to develop a sense of what future people that you’re approaching would want to talk to.

Because you’re right, once you have a profile of what that partner looks like, oftentimes, I know that one of the clients that I have, they’re a safety non-profit, and they had one insurance company that they talked to. And then they realized, “Oh, almost anybody who has fleets, who has incentive insurance, they have a similar motivation. There’s a similar profile there.” So, yeah, that it’s so interesting to think about, that asset of where you can find information to make your message even stronger.

David Pisarek: That was a really great example. Do you have any other examples of a non-profit sponsorship that really exceeded their expectations? What would have made that so successful?

Deborah Forrister: I do have some examples that were really powerful and unexpected.

However, I work closely with lawyers, including one non-profit organization, a mass tort firm with which I have collaborated. What they found is that cleft lip and palate issues, sometimes caused by different pharmaceuticals the mother was taking. They were like, “Okay, well, how do I let people know that there’s more information that they need to know?” They’re reaching out to non-profits that support families with children who have cleft lip and palate. And those families need a lot of resources; they need specialized medical, they need surgeries, they need time off. So that non-profit was helping those people. And so, you have the for-profit business that’s saying, “Okay, we’ll come in, we’ll make a donation, and as part of sponsoring your newsletters, we’ll just put in a little bit of information that can be helpful.” And it benefits both, and you suddenly have access to information that’s really helpful for the families to realize, “Oh, wow, there’s a reason for this happening.”

It was just really impactful to both the for-profit business and the non-profit to have those funds come in to support the community.

David Pisarek: From a business’s perspective, what are companies, corporations, freelancers, and contractors maybe looking for, from your experience in terms of non-profit sponsorships?

Deborah Forrister: When businesses are looking, I think there are four things that they look for; it’s not always the case, but

Sometimes they want some visibility, some recognition for the work that they’re doing. Perhaps they want to be able to post about it on social media and receive a visible thank you. Often, links are involved. That’s really helpful to show that you’re connected to the community. Sometimes it’s about alignment to say that we value the community, we value something that your non-profit values, whether that be safety or family. I think a lot of it’s credibility and trust. You have that the non-profit has some credibility.

You have that the non-profit has some credibility. Maybe they run a podcast, maybe they run specific kinds of events, and there’s an infrastructure. Some businesses need to do different, or want to do, different types of donations for those reasons. Sometimes, they’ll also have a requirement; certain states have a requirement that law firms have a certain number of pro bono hours. And all things being equal, they’d rather go to a non-profit that had aligned values.

So I think that there are multiple ways that it can benefit. The other one that was really interesting is when I see businesses that are wanting to align with a non-profit because it helps their culture in their business, because the teams working together, it helps them feel like that they’re working together towards a different cause.

So yeah, lots of reasons why it can be beneficial. In your experience, I know you said you spoke recently about how corporations can benefit from working with non-profit organizations, what were the ones that you found?

David Pisarek: Before I hop into that, there are other opportunities, right? So, having a link on a website is really great in terms of being able to be ranked. So, one of the Google factors that they look at is something called domain authority and backlinks. If you have websites that have higher domain authority and they have a link back to your website, as long as it doesn’t have a no-follow on it, you’re going to help them ultimately start ranking higher in search. There are benefits to that. There are organizations that have golf tournaments or silent auctions. They post stuff on social media. There’s a lot.

When you think about all of the marketing that your organization does or could do or is thinking of doing, keep this in the back of your mind. You have annual reports that you need to file. There could be a donor section in there. You could include a section about corporate donors or sponsors. So there are lots of opportunities for non-profits to promote “Hey, these are the people that help.” It doesn’t have to be just putting their name on the side of the building or a plaque on a wall somewhere.

There are other opportunities, and really, how much is it going to cost you to put a link on your website or to put a social post saying, “Thank you to so and so for helping with X, Y, and Z,” or Z, if you’re in the States, right? It’s not a lot, but the social perception, when somebody who isn’t familiar with that company, organization, lawyer, accountant, whoever they are, it helps build their credibility as well. Not necessarily that it will for sure translate into business, but there’s something called brand awareness. This is all part of that, building the persona of the sponsor.

One of the things I discuss in my workshop is helping the sponsor understand the benefits they will receive by sponsoring you. People typically don’t really, I know this is going to sound a little bit weird and not so great, but they don’t particularly care about why they’re doing the thing, they care about the outcome at the end of it. If the outcome is that they will be seen by the community as, “Hey, they’re here to help.” That goes a long way. That’s honestly one of the reasons why a lot of the big banks donate and sponsor, because they want people to have a better opinion of them. Something to keep in mind.

But you asked me, I ran a master class at a digital marketing conference, and there were some non-profits there, but it was mostly for-profit businesses. I flipped it on them and said, “Because I have a workshop, I’m talking about how non-profits should reach out and find corporate sponsors.” I went, “Okay, how do I convince these people who are attending this conference that they need to partner with non-profits?” And ultimately, it comes down to numbers, right? Because businesses care about where they’re spending their money, how they’re spending their money, and the benefit at the end of the day.

There is, over the next 15 to 20 years, something that I call the “Silver Tsunami.” You have these baby boomers that are retiring, they’re passing away their estates. There is 83 or 85 trillion dollars in North America that is going to be passing down to millennials and Gen Z over the next 15 to 20 years. Currently, millennials and Gen Z are the largest purchasers. It’s the biggest buying group. And 83% of millennials and 76% of Gen Zers want to support businesses that actually take a stand on matters meaningful to them.

A little bit of a, “Okay, we need to connect with them so that we can get them to buy our stuff.” Very capitalist point of view over there, but the other part of that is, okay, you’re going to have these sponsors, these businesses, these corporations, these solopreneurs, whoever, reaching out to join your forces to help you with whatever. And honestly, it could just be having somebody be on your board of directors, have somebody review something that you’re thinking of doing. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be monetary.

Deborah Forrister: I think that’s such a good point that there’s a generation of people who care about the social impact of different products and that care about how you’re treating people as a business, and that that’s impacting buying behaviour. So that is becoming even more important.

And to your point, you’re right; we work a lot in local SEO, and the links have value. Even more than that, those donations can be a simple first step. We talked about how non-profits, and if they function a little bit like businesses, they might approach different kinds of relationships differently. And when we’re working with clients, we talk with them about, make it easy to have your first yes. So, that can be something like, “Okay, yes, I want to be included on your sponsor page in a really quick way that someone can, basically, check out. Here’s my money.” And just a really simple way to get started.

Then you take your research to say, “Okay, here’s the value I have. How can I develop that first connection to see if I can get more involvement?” Maybe that’s recurring, a recurring donation. Maybe it’s, “Hey, we have this other big project, and we’d like to sponsor it, and it’s going to have this visibility. Here are the other sponsors.” You can then approach that person to increase engagement as you demonstrate your value to them. I think that’s something that a lot of people will do in the business world, and I’m not sure if it’s always developed in the same way for non-profits.

David Pisarek: I don’t think it is. I think it’s just the mindset of people that are running the non-profits that they’re like, “All right, we want to do this, this, this, but how are we going to get there?” You need to bring people along with you on that journey. You need to connect with empathy. You need to get people to care about why you started your organization in the first place.

We talked about benefits to the non-profit. We talked about benefits to the for-profit; if you go into a bank, you need to bring a business case with you to go, “All right, we need a $10,000 loan, $100,000,” whatever it is. They want to see what’s there. From reaching out from a non-profit’s perspective, what should you have in a package of some kind that you can bring with you when you’re meeting with potential sponsors to get them to say yes?

Deborah Forrister: I think it starts with, maybe even starting back on the website, where you say, “Hey, here’s our packages, and here’s the most entry-level way that you can get involved. And then stepping up from that, other ways people can get involved, like an invitation to a specific type of event, co-sponsored press release,” and I think showing what you’ve done in the past.

So, “Here was a client who was at this level of sponsorship. Here’s the project that we worked on. Here is the PSA that we created, or the information that was created. And here’s the type of press and publicity that got.” So, you’re proving what you’ve done and showing them the type of offers, and then learning what will have value to them.

I think that’s the step, having a couple of different levels of engagement, one that is pretty easy for people to get involved in, and then examples of the type of offers that you have, with a general idea of what kind of… I hate to say return, but that’s what you’re saying, right? How much visibility are you going to get? How much engagement are you going to get from that? Not every sponsor will directly care about that, but for the type of relationship where it does have value, being able to help them understand what it is and how that partnership can benefit them, I think, can be an important factor in their decision-making.

David Pisarek: If it’s a new organization and they haven’t done anything before.

Start with something, start with making a list. Here are the different options available: social media, which is super easy; a link on your website, assuming you have one. If you don’t, please get in touch, and we’ll get you one. But, a link on your website, if you have emails that go out, great. Start with these things. You can talk about the metrics that you have. “Here’s how much website traffic we have, here’s how many people are on our email newsletter, and if you sponsor the newsletter, you will get this many people seeing it.”

Some might ask you later on, “All right, how many people did this go to? How many people actually opened the email?” They might be interested in those numbers. Chances are, probably not, but they might be. So, make sure that you have some tracking and analytics in place, not just an email merge, and it doesn’t just disappear into the ether. Use a platform of some kind that can give you data, not specifically for corporate sponsorships, but just in general, because it’ll help you make smarter decisions across your organization over time, which is actually a very important thing to be thinking about is, is the time that we’re spending doing this thing worth it But I think it’s an important piece to think about.

And to your point, Deborah, having some different tiers, right? If you’re a brand-new organization, here’s what $250 will get you. The other thing that I wanted to mention, actually, I’ve got two things I want to mention:

One is that it’ll take 10, 15, 20 no’s before you get a yes. So don’t let that discourage you. Keep pushing forward. Somebody will say yes. Just get there. Keep moving forward. It’s not a personal thing; it’s likely maybe a budget thing on their side, or they don’t see the value in it. If you keep getting no’s, take a look at what you’re doing and how you’re talking to people. You might need a little bit of sales coaching or support around that. “Oh, instead of seeing it this way, say it this way.”

I don’t like to talk about in my agency about budget, I like to talk about investment. Maybe there’s some words like that that you can flip. Do you have any thoughts around that, Deborah?

Deborah Forrister: Yeah, the messaging is important. I think also businesses aren’t always in the market.

They haven’t always identified how a non-profit will help them until someone says, “Hey, we should have a team building event and work with a non-profit,” or, “Hey, we need local links. What’s a good non-profit?” Or, “Hey, our reputation, it would help us if we were more visibly involved in the community or were already involved in the community. Why aren’t we talking about that?” Being visible, even if you’re getting a “No, not now,” doesn’t mean that business is never going to want to support you. I think that’s my first thought. I think the second is;

it’s great if you can be in a position where you’ve optimized your website in some way so that when they do come to look for a business, they look for a non-profit to support, that your non-profit is showing up, and hopefully they’ll remember that you’ve reached out, remember what you’re doing for the community, and make you the obvious non-profit to connect with when they’re ready to have that partnership.

David Pisarek: As you were talking, I just had another idea is: if somebody says, “You know what? Now is not a good time,” or, “You know what? I’m not interested,” right? “Oh, would you mind if we add you to our email list so you can just stay up to date with what’s going on?” Okay, sure. It may feel bad about not being able to sponsor. “Yeah, okay, sure. Here’s my email. Add me to your list or whatever.”

Do whatever you can to try to stay top of mind with them. Ideally, if at minimum, make a spreadsheet with information with dates and follow-ups. Ideally, you would have a CRM in place, Customer or Client Relationship Management Tool. There are some really good free ones out there. There are a lot of paid ones. I would start with free. If you’re a Google-centric business or organization, and you are using Gmail and stuff for your email, there’s one called Streak. It’s free for one person.

As soon as you add a team in, it gets super expensive, so I wouldn’t bother with that. But just keep it.

If you’re a small team, just keep it to the one free license and put everybody in there and build your pipeline so that you know, “Okay, here’s when I should follow up with these people. Yeah, they’re not ready now. Okay, four months, five months from now, I’m going to follow up with them.”

End-of-year giving is a great opportunity because not only do individuals have the chance to make donations and receive tax receipts, but businesses do as well. There might be some good opportunities to help them use up some budget that they want to spend before the year’s end, both wins.

What could anybody listening to this, Deborah, walk away with and do tomorrow?

Deborah Forrister: The one thing you can do is think from the perspective of a potential for-profit business that wants to have a partnership. Can they find you on Google? When they get to your website, is it clear how they would get involved? Is it easy for them to take a first action? So I think the first thing is a little bit of a step away from your main mission, and to say, what’s the experience of this other type of business? And can they engage with me? Am I sending signals that I’m available to have partnerships? And that we would encourage those, and that we’ve thought through what that would look like? Because that makes it so much easier for that for-profit business to actually take that step to reach out and to start learning more.

Because the decision-makers, they have a goal in mind, and the faster you can help them get to that goal, the faster you’ll be able to start connecting and planning for how to build that partnership.

David Pisarek: Deborah, amazing insights about building strong partnerships, starting to think about getting corporate sponsorships and unlocking all of that opportunity. I hope that everybody listening has been able to get some really great advice and some pointers from you. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Deborah Forrister: Yeah. So my website is envoca.com; you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Happy to answer specific questions. I know we talked earlier about how we have a checklist. It’s like five things that we think non-profits should do to make their websites more findable and make their packages and offers more approachable. We’ll share that with you so you can have that incorporated in your resources.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Thank you so much for joining in, Deborah. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. Everybody listening, if you want any of the links, we just talked about Envoca, we talked about finding Deborah on LinkedIn. We’re going to have all of that on our podcast show notes page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com, click on this episode for all the details.

So until next time, keep on being successful!