The following blog post was written by Victoria Gandy, the Outreach Associate for GlobalGiving’s Business Development Team.
Since its founding in 2002, GlobalGiving has formed partnerships with companies across a variety of industries in order to get more funding to your projects around the world! We work with companies in a variety of ways – everything from getting employee donation matching funds for your projects to giving larger corporate grants to a few select projects.
2010 was an especially exciting year for developing corporate partnerships at GlobalGiving! Through our corporate relationships, projects posted on GlobalGiving have been exposed to millions of employees, customers, and individuals and have received $1.3 million dollars in donations through GlobalGiving’s site.
Nike’s WE Giving Portal brought $1.1 million to GlobalGiving Projects
Last year, GlobalGiving partnered with Nike to engage its 32,000 employees worldwide through the GlobalGiving-built “WE Giving” employee portal. The portal integrates the ability for employees to give their time, their skills, their voice or their money to the causes of their choice. All GlobalGiving projects are available to Nike employees through the WE portal and we highlight major GlobalGiving.org events – challenges, promotions, disasters, matching days, etc – on the homepage. Additionally, Nike has a non-traditional matching program so, instead of being matched directly, employees receive a GlobalGiving gift card in the amount of their original donation and can direct those funds to the same organization or to another project that inspires them. To date, over $1.1M has been donated to GlobalGiving projects through the WE Giving portal.
Neutrogena Campaign Provided $200,000 for Global Change
Neutrogena’s “Wave for Change” campaign is a great example of a cause-related marketing campaign that actively 
utilized crowd-sourcing and social media to actively engage its consumer-base in charitable giving. Neutrogena pledged $200,000 ($1 for every product sold) divided across three themes – education, environmental issues, and disaster relief – and allowed their Facebook fans to decide how much each cause would receive. GlobalGiving was asked to refer organizations that were active, highly ranked and responsive to participate; giving them increased exposure and access to a new donor base. Neutrogena ultimately picked three projects to receive the $200,000. Neutrogena also teamed with Made, a show on MTV, to highlight several additional GlobalGiving partner organizations. The increased media attention helped promote GlobalGiving as a reputable platform for accessing a network of innovative grassroots organizations that provide donors a transparent, high-impact giving experience, ultimately helping to increase donor traffic and increase GlobalGiving’s credibility with other potential partners.
National Geographic Exposes GlobalGiving Projects to 60 million Customers
Our continuing partnership with National Geographic, the Global Action Atlas, launched in beta in early 2010. There are currently 100 GlobalGiving projects on the platform and it continues to expand. Action Atlas accesses our project database through our Application Programming Interface (API). Initially, projects were invited to join based on their ranking and activity level on GlobalGiving. A major launch is currently in the development stages and, across all National Geographic-related media outlets (online, magazines, television, partner channels, etc.) it will reach approximately 60 million viewers worldwide. The Global Action Atlas will serve as the platform for viewers to engage when there is a call-to-action from National Geographic’s issue-related stories. This platform will be another source of donor traffic for participating organizations to access information about and donate to high-impact grassroots organizations.
What can you do to benefit from corporate relationships?
GlobalGiving is working hard on your behalf to bring corporations, employees, and customers to our site. But it’s your job to make sure that they see your project. Learn how to improve your project’s visibility on the site and write a great project description to attract more donors to your project here. The best thing you can do to increase the changes that your project will get attention from a corporate partner is to submit regular reports (at least four times a year!) and stay engaged with GlobalGiving and the campaigns that we run throughout the year!
For more information about GlobalGiving’s corporate partners listen to a recent training given by Victoria Gandy or visit our corporate partnerships section.
