“I think the biggest change we made at that stage was putting family stories at the heart of the pitch. You know, time and time again in your training, Rob, you talk about the importance of stories, and it is so true. And this pitch really, really taught me that. And all the way through, stories are what sell your charity.”
Many charities see the advantages of creating strategic, long-term partnerships with companies, rather than applying for those intensely competitive Charity of the Year partnerships.
But how do you initially approach companies where there is a good fit? Even after you get that first meeting, how do you inspire them to want to partner? And how do you solve the challenges in bringing your two organisations together to achieve something that works really well for both parties?
It’s not easy, but it’s less daunting if you can hear insights from someone who has already done these things.
So I was delighted to be able to talk to Pippa Hind-Walsh, a smart fundraiser in a fairly small charity called Family Fund. She talks us through the process of approaching and building a fabulous, strategic partnership with McCain Foods, which has been worth well over £1m to the charity. Two years later the partnership is still going strong.
If you want to share this episode because you think it will help other charities – THANK YOU! – we are both on LinkedIn and on Twitter I am @woods_rob.
Episode overview
[03:15] Pippa shares the story of securing a £1 million partnership with McCain Foods, and the details of the partnership including the marketing campaign and product packaging collaboration.
[11:09] Pippa tells Rob how they prepared for the initial meeting including the research and preparation beforehand, understanding their brand, previous charity preferences, and competitors.
[16:37] Pippa and Rob dive into the power of storytelling in fundraising, and how they used using stories when meeting the potential partner. Pippa showed their organisation’s impact using a personal story from one of the families they’ve helped.
[19:31] Pippa shares how the partnership progressed, from initial concept meetings to virtual collaboration, and the growth of the partnership’s scope and potential impact. They also share insights around relationship building, how they solve differences and find common ground; and solving the thorny issue of deciding / negotiating the value of the partnership.
[27:46] Finally, Pippa emphasises the importance of dreaming big, conducting research, and maintaining open communication to negotiate and put a number on the partnership. As well as the impact the Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programme made.
Want to share / deepen the learnings?
Check out blog in which I explore 6 lessons from this successful partnership: https://brightspotfundraising.co.uk/building-a-million-pound-partnership/
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Transcript of Episode 141
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:00:01) – ‘Dream big. We did a lot of research into other charity partnerships or the big charity partnerships, similar sized brands and what their partnerships look like, and we did come to the number that we thought was maybe even a little bit too big.’
‘If a company is a family brand, then they’re going to want to partner with something that’s similar that speaks to that family brand side of things, in the same way that if it’s an eco brand, then they’re going to want to partner with a charity that speaks to their customers in the same way.’
‘I’ve got a really great relationship with the account manager, so I could have some honest conversations with her of, you know, we might find this a challenge or we might find this aspect of it a challenge. But, you know, how can we work together to try and achieve that?’
Rob Woods (00:00:53) – Hey there folks, welcome to episode 141 of the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast. My name is Rob Woods, and this is the show for anyone who works in fundraising and who wants ideas, and maybe a little dose of inspiration to help you enjoy your job and raise more money.
And if you’re a corporate fundraiser or a fundraising leader looking to build strategic, valuable partnerships with companies, then I hope you’ll find this one really interesting. It’s one of my favourite ever interviews. It’s such a great example of fundraisers aiming high and being proactive step by step to build something wonderful. We originally published in June 2021 and I’ve decided to share it again from the archive now, because I know there’s a good chance that people who started listening to our show in the last year or two will never have heard it. My guest is a smart, determined corporate fundraiser named Pippa Walsh, who at the time worked for Family Fund. I had the privilege of working with Pippa through our Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programme and the Bright Spot Members Club. She and her colleagues put together a fabulous, valuable partnership with the food company McCain. And I’m happy to say that when I look this week, this partnership is still going strong. I really hope you find this story helpful.
Rob Woods (00:02:10) – Pippa Hind-Walsh. Welcome to the podcast.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:02:13) – Thanks, Rob. Honoured to be here.
Rob Woods (00:02:15) – Yeah, thank you so much for making time for this. I know you’re extremely busy at the moment for various reasons, but I’ve so wanted for quite a while to get a chance to talk to you so that our listeners can hear some of the things you’ve been up to in the last two years, especially in terms of corporate partnerships, and hear some of the interesting lessons you’ve learned just before we get into the content. Your job title is Corporate Partnerships Manager, and you work for a fairly small charity called Family Fund. If I got that bit right.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:02:43) – Yeah. That’s right.
Rob Woods (00:02:45) – Great. And I met you quite a while ago. You joined the (Bright Spot) Members Club, and then you went on our Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programme. And it’s been a privilege to have various chats along the way about various things and occasionally to touch on this topic. Most of today’s interview, I would like to talk about this spectacular partnership that you and your colleagues have worked on over the last couple of years. To start us off, could you tell us, top line, what is that partnership and roughly how does it work?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:03:15) – Yeah, of course, our new partnership is with McCain Foods. It’s been a couple of years in the making, but you may have seen some of it on your TVs recently, things like that. So it’s a £1 million partnership over three years. That’s a £1 million donation from McCain themselves with any other employee fundraising and any other public fundraising on top of that as well. But alongside the incredible monetary donation that they’re giving to us, they are also putting the partnership at the centre of their marketing campaign at the moment. So you may have seen the dedicated adverts on TV or heard them on the radio. There’s also been lots of bits and bobs on social media. There’s been an influencer takeover on social media called Tea Time Takeover. They included celebrities such as Kimberley Walsh and got one. We also had some really, really lovely short animations that focused on family stories and families that we’ve helped over the years, so it was three different stories that were animated and shown on Sky TV and voiced by David Walliams, as well as the advert focusing on the partnership, which features six of our families that we’ve helped over the years.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:04:24) – And the final piece to that puzzle as well is that you might have seen in the freezers, and you might even have in your own freezers is the takeover packs. So McCain have dedicated a number of their product packs to their partnership with Family Fund. We ran a competition for the families that we had helped for the children to redesign the packaging. And yeah, our winner was a lovely young man called Charlie. So you’ll have seen his lovely hand-drawn packs with our logo.
Rob Woods (00:04:48) – Well, congratulations to all involved and thanks for getting things started with the top line shape of the thing. And goodness me, these kinds of things are not sorted within three weeks. I know that in normal times it would have taken a while to put this all together. And I think happening as it did during the pandemic, that can only have slowed it down. Yeah, I would love to go on to find out about particular tactics or lessons learned, because lots of our listeners are aiming to do really ambitious things in their partnerships, but if they’ve not yet managed to do one, it’s just quite hard to get our heads around.
If these kinds of conversations are different from what companies are currently saying to them. So I would love to get into that. But maybe the next thing is, could you give me a top line timeline for the stages it took to get to the point where you were able to go public with this partnership?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:05:46) – Yeah, so you’re absolutely right, Rob. It was a very long time in the making. So we actually started initial conversations with McCain back in, oh, it must have been spring 2019, the end of spring, beginning of summer 2019. And we finally launched the partnership publicly. Well, we started talking about the partnership in February 2021 with a full launch in. 2021. So yeah, a long time to get to where we were. The initial conversations took time as well. There was a period in the middle that did get frustrated by Covid as well, but I think a minimum time frame would have been 18 months anyway to get to where we were with the launch. So yeah, the partnership started with managing to get ourselves an initial meeting with the marketing director of McCain.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:06:36) – Now, it wasn’t a charity of the year application, and it was just us pushing through various connections to be able to get that meeting. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned. You know, I bounced into this role very fresh and very enthusiastic and was like, oh, you know, we’ll contact companies and we’ll, you know, they’ll buy into what we do. But what I’ve definitely learned over the last few years is to use any connections you have is absolutely key in order to get in front of the right people and to be able to pull off these, these kinds of partnerships. So after some persistence, we were very lucky to be able to be invited to a meeting with the marketing director. You know, we really believed in the fit. We’ve done a lot of research. Just to put it into context, McCain’s brand for the last few years has been based on their We Are Family slogan. We’re Family Fund, a charity that puts families at the heart.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:07:31) – Our mission is to improve the lives of families raising disabled and seriously ill children. It seemed like the perfect fit, really, and we really believed in it. So then it was a case of getting them to believe in the facts. But absolutely, for us, you know, we had lots of smaller, very loyal and amazing small, smaller partnerships. You know, traditionally they’d sponsored things like black tie dinners, done their own fundraising events for us, got involved in various things. But this was the biggest scale partnership we had ever gone for. You know, it was part of a strategy refresh internally to be able to diversify our funding. And this was our first big, big chance really to make a mark. And so we got the initial meeting, we prepped for the initial meeting, did lots and lots of research and it went well. It went very well. But we did come away with some questions. You know, probably one of the things I learned at that stage was that maybe we went in a little bit too technical and not emotive enough with some of the information that we put across.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:08:40) – But after that meeting, they were interested, they could see the fit, but they asked us some questions. They sent us away with some challenges. One of them was about diversity in general and how important that was to them, and how we could fit into that, as well as some other things around their campaigns and what they wanted to focus on. So we took all that away and we reworked our concepts. We worked the way that we were approaching the pitch. And I think the biggest change we made at that stage was putting family stories at the heart of the pitch. You know, time and time again in your training. Rob, you talk about the importance of stories and it is so true. And this I mean, this pitch really, really taught me that. And all the way through stories are what sell your charity. So we listened to what they were looking for. And we tried to find appropriate stories. You know, we’re very lucky that the variety of grants that we provide gives us quite a wide scope, because we look at all aspects of life and, you know, the sort of social model of disability.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:09:48) – So we could look at grants that we provided that related more closely to meal times and ease and pressures for families around that. We also try to create a visual as well and something tangible. So just bring it to life a little bit more. So, you know, you talk about some very creative concepts in various podcasts, Rob. And I’m not professing that this was very creative at all, but it was just something.
Rob Woods (00:10:17) – What was it that you left with them?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:10:18) – So we just had a very, very simple, nicely presented box. I got our design manager to help me out because I’m not blessed with creative skills in that way. And we just put together some family stories that were really, really relevant to what they were looking for. On some, like large cue cards with a picture of the child that we’d help with their grants, and just a little bit of information about how we’d help them and how supporting us could help us do more like that. And we just left the box with them afterwards.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:10:51) – And it was funny. Later on, through the process, as we met more and more senior people throughout McCain and we were assigned an account manager, every single one of them said, oh, the box landed on my desk. And yeah, it was just something really simple and it wasn’t expensive to do.
Rob Woods (00:11:09) – And so that first meeting you had researched, then you did your best to listen as well as you could for what they might be looking for philanthropically and potentially also to do with their brand. And you had prepared some things, and you were able to give your view of where the money would go and how it might also be good for their brand. But at that stage, it was really just about what we have in common and how it might be good for each other, rather than anything tactical about what this could turn into in the partnership.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:11:40) – Yeah, absolutely I mean we did put some concepts forward of what it could maybe look like. But I think we were always keen to be flexible and open minded.
Obviously there’s an amount of internal management you have to do around that as well. But yeah, we were very, very aware that they would have their own priorities and their own agenda. You know, we went into this without any kind of brief. So we had to be quite general in our concepts initially and, you know, all the way through, I guess, help them visualise what it would look like to be our partner. But yeah, we did an enormous amount of research before we went in. We researched their brand, their previous branding. The adverts tried to sort of really get under their skin and understand them and understand what they were about and what’s important to them. Looked at their previous charity preferences, although they’d never had like a big charity partner before, they’d always been quite active through various customers and that they have corporate customers that they have through their charities, you know, through food waste and things like that. We also researched their competitors because, you know, we were aware we’re meeting the marketing director.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:12:48) – There’s going to be an element of that’s a problem for him. So what could we learn about their competitors and what they’ve done, whether that’s around charity partnerships or other kinds of branding and where they sit? Also researched who we were meeting, I think is a massive part of it. And just remembering, I think it’s very easy. I remember various times when we were putting this presentation together and it’s very, very nerve wracking, and you feel like, oh, you know, I just come from this, this small, unknown charity. You know, these are very clever marketing people. They seem very scary, but actually they are just people. You know, one of the concepts you teach in the mastery course is analysis. And actually doing that is really useful. And, you know, remembering that these people, they have families themselves, a lot of them have kids themselves. So how can you bring that to life in a way that’s meaningful for them?
Rob Woods (00:13:39) – Hi, it’s Rob. I’d wanted to jump in quickly to tell you about our two flagship training programs. That’s Major Gifts Mastery and the Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programme. These programs help you make serious progress through a combination of master classes with me and individual coaching or mentoring support. A key ingredient that makes them effective is that in addition to the techniques we teach, we also put great effort into helping you build your confidence and proactivity to reach out and set up conversations or project visits or so-called test drives with potential supporters. We’ve found that almost everyone who does these programs manages to at least double their results in this crucial area. To give you a sense of how powerful this can be. Here is Lily Whitlam, Partnership Development Manager at Great Ormond Street Hospital children’s charity, talking about how it helped her.
Lily Whitlam (00:14:31) – I had a session with my mentor and we had a discussion about, you know what, what can I do to really press on those test drives? And it was just a case of chasing, chasing, you know, doing, putting together all that activity in December, knowing that in January it would pay off with these test drives.
And once I’d had them, I yeah, as I said, I had six in total. And one of them has actually led to $1 million donation from a company, which is absolutely unbelievable and something that we didn’t think would happen, you know, but I think it’s just a testament to that and that motivation, that clear focus that I had from the program and that focused activity between December and January. And that’s something I’ll kind of carry with me, knowing that if you put in that effort in December for January, when it’s traditionally a quiet month, people don’t have much going on. I mean, I had the busiest January of my working career, and that was because I had that motivation and that focus. I knew what I was doing and just the energy I felt from it. And again, I’m not going to forget that energy. So I think it’s only going to make the work I do next stronger, because I know what that feeling was like. And it’s something that, yeah, can celebrate and feel really proud of.
Rob Woods (00:15:39) – To find out more about either Major Gifts Mastery or Corporate Partnerships Mastery, go to brightspotfundraising.co.uk/services. For now, though, back to the interview as they asked Pippa to explain how she prepared for the second meeting with McCain.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:15:56) – We did a lot of work around what stories we could present to them. They’re really fitted with what they were asking us. We tried to relate that back to some of that, their branding and that we are family campaigns and meal times. Just. Making it a little bit more streamlined for them. And the more research we did, and the more we altered our concepts, the more we believed in the partnership as well, which I think really, really helped. By the time we went back in, we were like, this is a really good partnership. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like yet, but this is how we could work together. This is how our brands could look well together. This is some of the scope of things we could do.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:16:37) – But absolutely, you guys are the experts on this side. Let’s work together. Let’s see where we can get basically. So the second meeting was very much about going back and answering their concerns and the questions that they’d asked, but then also just continuing to to inspire and use those stories. Everybody at every stage was just really, really keen to hear the stories. You know, I mentioned it before, but it seemed to really bring it home to them and really make them understand what we were about. You know, every time we talk about it, we give this many grants. We, you know, we answer this many phone calls, all of this. They were like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was the stories that really got them. And I remember sharing a story that one of our families, she’d done a speech at one of our birthday dinners, and she kindly let me read it out on her behalf at this workshop. And, you know, some of them have got tears in their eyes when she was she.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:17:30) – I mean, I probably didn’t do it any justice as she did, but she just talks about some of the day to day challenges that she has. And I think also just bringing it back to reality for people of, in terms of what we stand for, what the families that we help, this could happen to anybody. And I think bringing that home to people was, was really, really important. And bringing in the concept of how helpful these grants are was really important. So we did this exercise that was basically, again, really simple. That was just a picture of an item that we were granted. So, you know, either a whiteboard or a food processor or an iPad or something like that, and just said to people, what is this? And some people tried to be clever and they’re like, oh, it’s, you know, it’s just other people just like, well, it’s a blender. But actually then telling the child story through that of, yes, it’s a blender.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:18:31) – But for that child, that was the first time that they’d ever been able to eat the same meal as the rest of the family, because they are on a liquid diet. That has to. It has to be so fine to be able to go through the tubes that a standard blender can’t blend to that level. You have to have a very expensive blender to be able to do that. But this family doesn’t have the money to be able to afford that. So this blender has actually changed their life because it’s the first time that the child can ever eat the same meal as everybody else. That’s not just pre-prepared specialist food. It’s the first time they’ve ever been able to go out for dinner as a family together, and the child is able to pick something off a menu and all those things that that opens up for families. And it was that that really, really hit home.
Rob Woods (00:19:17) – And so that workshop that you did with various people from both sides sounds like a real step forward in getting closer to what the partnership actually would end up becoming. What happened next, and how did you move it along?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:19:31) – Yeah. So there were various other meetings after that, lots of different people involved. And basically between McCain and the agencies drew up some concepts of what they ideally would like to do with us, to fit this into their brand and their campaign. And what was this possible with those? What could we do? What couldn’t we do? And how could we support that? And it became, I think in that workshop, it became very clear very quickly that they really wanted to invest everything into this partnership. They wanted to put it at the heart of their marketing campaign. This wasn’t just a sideline, it was a real strategic partnership. So we had several meetings, several concept meetings, lots of backwards and forwards. Obviously at that point the world started changing. So after a couple of face to face meetings, everything then became virtual and over teams. And yeah, it was just a case of working together, understanding everybody’s boundaries and possibilities.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:20:31) – What could be done? Dreaming big? How could we stretch this? How could we support each other? And yeah, it went from there. Really it feels like a lot happened very quickly, but lots of things developed as we went. And, you know, we went from having an agreed donation and what the partnership had maybe looked like to that growing as we went on, as more and more people bought into what we did and how much of a difference they could make, and you know, how they could help us in terms of not just the money that they were donating, but also by giving our families a platform, you know, and shining a light on heroes in our families through through their campaign. So yeah through that it went from having the takeover packs was the first big thing for us. And we were like, that’s amazing. You know, the kind of exposure we’re going to get from that. And then there was talk of the advert and we were like, that’s even more amazing.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:21:36) – Like, you know, that kind of we would never spend that amount of money on marketing to have that opportunity to have our logo on TV, on prime time TV was just incredible at first. And then, you know, the concepts continued to develop with the animations and with the social media influencer side of things. And, you know, hopefully there will be more growth throughout the rest of the partnership. This is a partnership for another two years. So there’s lots of scope for the things to do together. It’s a constant partnership, constantly working on things together and understanding each other’s challenges and successes and everything else.
Rob Woods (00:22:19) – One thing I would observe, and I’ve seen this in every really valuable strategic partnership I’ve studied, which is what you ended up doing, was really different from what either of you could possibly have talked about or designed on the first meeting. What you did manage to do was get your foot in the door and have a conversation that was productive enough for both parties that the main thing from the start is you could have this sense of commonality.
We have common goals. There’s loads of reasons why we should meet again, but somehow you resisted the pressure. Charities often feel at this point to start talking about money, and I don’t know if on this occasion your prospective partner asked you, well, how much do you want? I sense they might not have done so, but given how often charities can feel under pressure early to put a transactional number on. But my view is that’s never going to work because if they end up, partnership is so different from what you think it might be at the start, how can you possibly put a number on it from the start anyway? But what advice would you have for a charity that wants to have, or is having some initial valuable conversations with a partnership that might suit them, but they’re feeling under pressure to commit too early to what it looks like, and or especially commit too early to how much money are you looking for us to donate? What would you say?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:23:41) – Yeah. And absolutely, you know, that was me two and a bit years ago.
You know, we were agonising over valuing this partnership. What should we value at, you know, what should we ask for? We don’t want to over ask and scare them away. We don’t want to under ask and undervalue ourselves. But yeah, I think what we really took away was they bought into the fear in the same way that we believed in it. And in order for a partnership to be really, really successful, it’s about that you don’t know all the answers, you don’t know their brand inside out. They don’t know our brand inside out. Let’s work together and work out the best way of being as effective as possible. Remember that it isn’t just about money necessarily. The money is obviously amazing and there’s a lot of pressure around that. But for us, there was also an enormous amount of added value in the marketing that they were offering. That kind of in-kind giving. You know, it’s absolutely a benefit for them because it’s, you know, their marketing campaign.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:24:43) – It builds their brand, it strengthens their brand of how they want to be perceived. But also there’s a huge benefit to us as well, because it’s something that we wouldn’t be able to do without that partnership. I think the best partnerships absolutely come through negotiation.
Rob Woods (00:24:59) – And it is a very real risk, isn’t it? If you’re any size of charity, but especially if you’re a smaller charity, a major risk is to not fully comprehend just how valuable we might be to the other party. I think on my courses, people often worry that if they’re not a well known charity, they won’t be valuable to a company, because look how we’ve got a tiny audience, we’ve got no audience to bring to them. Whereas as I understand it for you, McCain wasn’t talking to you because of who your audience were, but because of what you represent. The story of the kinds of families you help, not how many you help or not, how many you support, supporters you help. Whereas it’s what you represent.
Rob Woods (00:25:46) – Yeah. They really wanted to help that. But they understood that it’s valuable for them to be helping that and their customers would be pleased with them and would appreciate that. And therefore, I think that’s a different understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the size of a charity. Have I got that broadly right in your case?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:26:07) – Absolutely. Yeah. It was, you know. In the workshops we did, we looked at who their target audience is as well. And yeah, we talked about, you know, we’ve got this many followers on Facebook and things like that, but that’s absolutely not what they were interested in. And, you know, lots of companies do lots of research about their customers, what their customers care about and their buying habits. We all know about cookies and things like that, and they have an idea in their mind of who their target audiences are and who their customers are and who they want to expand to, and they absolutely buy into the concept of this is something that we’ll talk about to our audience.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:26:51) – If a company is a family brand, then they’re going to want to partner with something that’s similar that speaks to that family brand side of things, in the same way that if it’s an eco brand, then they’re going to want to partner with it with a charity that speaks to their customers in the same way. And yeah, that’s absolutely true. Two years ago we were like, oh, well, our audience is really, really small. But I think once we realised that actually it’s not about that, it’s about what we stand for, and it’s about how we can add value to the people that that any company wants to target. That’s how we then hone down who we wanted to approach.
Rob Woods (00:27:29) – And Pippa, so yes, one of the hardest things is however, well, the negotiations are going and both parties can see this is really going to happen. It’s going to be great, but sooner or later you still need to put a number on it somehow. Do you have any tips for how we might do that?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:27:46) – Yeah. Firstly, dream big. You know we did a lot of research into other charity partnerships or the big charity partnerships and similar sized brands and what their partnerships look like. And we did come to the number that we thought was maybe dreaming a little bit too big. But at that point, I guess we built up the relationship enough to feel a bit more confident to go back with that. And, you know, you get those insights as you go from them as well of what they’re trying to achieve. But yeah, we did. We did lots and lots of research into what if we had a magic wand, what would we like this partnership to look like? You know, you look at all the big ones out there like, you know, age UK and Cadbury’s. That was a big source of inspiration for us. And yeah, just just doing that research, doing the research of various brands, but definitely dream big, as you say in one of your other podcasts, Rob, punch above your weight .
Rob Woods (00:28:45) – Yeah, well, you’ve clearly done that in terms of the various challenges that come with this. And there are many, aren’t there? And there would be for a larger charity, especially for a smaller charity this time frame and how much resource it must have been taking up long before there was money to show for it, to help pay for your services. That’s always a tough thing, isn’t it, for a corporate or a major gifts fundraiser to be doing all the right things for something that absolutely seems like jam tomorrow, you’ve still got to fill in. You know you’re this quarter’s target and how much you’ve raised. So in terms of that risk and those handling those internal conversations or any other of the difficult risks, what would you say you learned?
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:29:33) – Yeah, a massive thing for me was just communication. Like it’s all about communication on both sides, you know, building the relationship with your corporate partner and perhaps your account manager there so that you I got to a position where I’ve got a really great relationship with the, with the account manager.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:29:52) – So I could have some honest conversations with her of, you know, we might find this a challenge or we might find this aspect of it a challenge. But, you know, how can we work together to try and achieve that? But selling it internally as well is a massive effort. This was the biggest partnership that, you know, we’d ever come across. You know, there’s lots of other risks involved, especially when we started talking about putting families really at the heart of the campaign. That was a massive step change in terms of risk internally. You know, we’ve always championed Family Voice and tried to get our family’s voices heard. But it was on a much, much smaller scale than national TV, radio. And, you know, influencers were even, you know, for, for, for me was like a big area, as you know, we need to learn about this. We need to understand the risks, but we also need to be bold because, you know, a big thing for me is, yeah, there’s a risk of doing things, but there’s also a risk of not doing things and you should take those opportunities.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:30:59) – So we just had to be super organised really, and look at trying to listen to people’s concerns and keep the channels of communication open, understand who the key people were that needed on board. You know, this was a massive team effort. Yes, I’m the only corporate partnerships manager there, but a lot of the work that we did in the build up to the campaign was family focused. So actually our communications team was a massive support to me. You know, I couldn’t I couldn’t have done this. They were basically the bridge between McCain and the families and managing all of that, you know, and they’ve got other pressures they’ve got to fulfil. You know, life isn’t just about this partnership and the charity. It was the biggest thing to ever happen to us. But there’s also a lot of other pressures, especially in Covid. So, you know, there’s lots of lots of other things going on. So yeah, just having regular meetings, setting out exactly what, what we’re talking about, giving people opportunity to raise concerns and ask the questions and then managing that back.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:32:03) – You know, a big thing I learnt was a lot of fear and inflexibility around risk in organisations comes from a lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding. So actually if you keep those lines of communication open, then it’s a lot easier to manage those things and be flexible and then achieve something beyond your wildest dreams.
Rob Woods (00:32:29) – Well, I think it’s a truly brilliant partnership, Pippa, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast to explain about this journey and some lessons we could take from it. I look forward to staying in touch for now. Best of luck with your fundraising and will catch up with you soon.
Pippa Hind-Walsh (00:32:46) – Thanks, Rob. Thanks. Bye.
Rob Woods (00:32:53) – Well, I hope you found this story helpful. Pippa is now an independent corporate partnerships consultant, and if you want to drop her a line, you can find her on LinkedIn. For a full transcript and a summary of the episode, go to the podcast section of our website, which is brightspotfundraising.co.uk and if you’re interested in improving your skills, confidence, and results in corporate or high value fundraising, then I’d really encourage you to check out the Corporate Mastery Programme.
Rob Woods (00:33:21) – That’s the one that Pippa did, or the Major Gifts Mastery Programme. To find out more, go to brightspotfundraising.co.uk/services. And then click on the link for Corporate Partnerships Mastery or any of our other training courses. Before we finish, I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s been spreading the word about this show to colleagues and on social media. I really appreciate your help in getting these stories out there to help more people, and we’d love to hear what you think about today’s episode. As I say, we’re both on LinkedIn and on Twitter or X, I am @woods_rob, we’ve got lots more interesting shows planned for the coming weeks, so if you don’t already follow the podcast, please do that today so that you never miss an episode. Finally, thank you so much for listening. Good luck with your fundraising and look forward to sharing more bright spot examples and ideas with you very soon.
