Five Minutes With: Charles Moore, Executive Director, CECP

“As businesses also work to be more strategic in their giving, they are often looking to nonprofits to offer opportunities for employee engagement and volunteerism, as well as long-term, sustainable development rather than one-off projects.”

And Moore argues that one of the smartest ways for nonprofits to ensure a long-term commitment of resources — financial and otherwise — from corporations is to be forthcoming when it comes to establishing expectations and providing results.

“Best-in-class nonprofits … take advantage of involving strong measurement practices to share metrics with their corporate partners on the success of their collaborative efforts,” he says.

Moore adds that corporations often seek to invest in a nonprofit’s mission because they can greatly improve relations with the communities in which they are situated, opening channels of communication that had been closed, tapping into markets that previously had gone untapped.

“Corporations benefit from their nonprofit partnerships through strengthened community relations and the building of good will; providing opportunities for employee involvement, which often lends to improved recruiting and retention efforts; and business strategy opportunities such as building new markets for the business or creating new products via philanthropic endeavors.”

And Moore explains that a genuine symbiosis between nonprofits and for-profits can exist no matter what the organization’s size. That, in fact, smaller nonprofits might have an edge up on their larger counterparts when it comes to being able to hone in on the concerns of a particular community.

“While large nonprofits may typically attract more corporate resources, smaller nonprofits are often more closely tied to their communities and may have a better grasp of local needs and demands,” he says. “Therefore, small nonprofits have the potential to more intimately engage in philanthropic projects that address specific local community concerns.”

Because of the intense competition that more than 1 million nonprofits in the U.S. alone face for corporate funding, Moore says organizations need to conduct a significant amount of research in order to arrive at an understanding of the “natural fit.”