In these times of economic belt tightening, it’s tough to respond to every local organization looking for a donation for a worthy cause. Fact is, even in economically good times, it’s tough to respond to every request that comes into your company.

Sure, you want to have a positive posture in the community, but there’s no reason why you can’t expect a little payback from your philanthropy as well.

Here are some suggestions I give clients when they ask me about corporate giving.

1)Choose a handful of activities or groups where you can really have an impact and where your donation will be large enough to gain media coverage.
2)Find out which charities and organizations either have marketing and communications capabilities or a policy of doing media relations on behalf of those who give them donations. You really should get something in return for your largesse.
3)Work with those organizations to develop news releases and photos for dissemination to the media. And see if they’ll send the release out on their letterhead and/or contact the media about your participation. You have a much better shot of getting coverage if a charity or community organization sends the information to the media.
4)Work with their executives to come up with a unique way of making the donation. Newspapers absolutely hate pictures of people giving a giant oversized check to a charity. Find a better way to develop a visual for the media.
5)If employees want to volunteer their time for a charity event, make sure you get pictures of them working with the charity. And better yet, if you’re working on a fund raiser with a charity, gets pictures of your employees or yourself “planning” the activity or event. The media likes to cover an activity BEFORE it happens because it’s timely and the media likes to give coverage to make people aware of an upcoming activity so they can participate.
6)And even if you decide to give smaller amounts to more causes, investigate whether they have an online newsletter or some form of printed communication—even a flyer—so that you are acknowledged for your time and money.

Conversely, if you are a small charity, consider all of the above. You won’t have to work as hard next year when it comes time again to ask for another donation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.