The entire travel industry is focused on the moment when travel fully returns. As we collectively reimagine the way people move and engage with one another around the world, we’re collectively experiencing a tremendous opportunity to use travel for good.  

We’ve arrived at an interesting inflection point: business good and social good are now inseparable. The catch is that corporations aren’t positioned to do good community work themselves. They need partners that they can count on. The challenge lies in the fact that there’s no real recipe for finding, building, and sustaining strong and impactful cross-sector partnerships. On the other side of the equation, social good organizations are abundantly resourceful, resilient, creative and entrepreneurial, but most nonprofit organizations don’t have the knowledge, experience or structure to collaborate effectively with corporations. There’s never been a more critical moment — a global pandemic, exposed endemic inequality and racism, and threats of climate change, among other things — that requires cross-sector collaboration. On one side we have a heightened desire to contribute, and on the other tremendous need. The solution is alignment and collaboration.

Early in my career I was terribly intimidated by corporate dollars and corporate partnerships. I thought that there would be 1 million strings attached to $1 million dollars. When I finally closed my first major corporate partnership, I dutifully waited for a long list of instructions that never came. It took me a full year to realize that they were waiting on us for direction, that we were the experts in our community work. 

At Global Glimpse, we’ve spent the last five years developing world-changing partnerships with Fortune 500 companies in the travel space that are deeply committed to aligning business and social good. Companies want to give back more than ever and there’s so much work that needs to be done. Therefore, I want to share some of the knowledge that we’ve developed along the way. I hope this will serve as a guide for nonprofit and corporate leaders to collaborate more effectively in the future. 

Recipe for Impactful Cross-Sector Partnerships

  1. Alignment: Look for clear alignment between a nonprofit organization’s mission and work and your company’s values and core business functions. Mutually beneficial partnerships flourish when there are multiple collaboration opportunities — e.g., cash, storytelling, and engagement. People often tell us that our partnerships with United Airlines and Away are amazing because they just make sense and they make everyone feel good.
  2. Executive buy-in: Executive leadership must fully support socially good work and embed these values across the company. Relationships are critically important to partnership development at every level, and it’s important to make inroads across an organization. Lean on your nonprofit partners to help you make the case for partnership to leadership. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively new field, and the people assigned to these roles are often defining new pathways in the company and fighting uphill battles to make the case for investment. They shouldn’t have to define the breadth, depth and impact of the social good work — that is the role of the nonprofit organization. It’s the nonprofit’s job to educate the company about the work and potential impact of a partnership.
  3. Strong relationships: Invest the time to build strong relationships. They are the conduits to the work and they will define your impact. The easiest pitch I ever made was to the Community Affairs Executive Team at United Airlines for a multimillion dollar partnership because the work sold itself. By the time we made the final pitch, we had worked for well over a year to build a strong relationship with the senior director in a position to make a recommendation to the executive team. She knew our work inside and out, and she made the pitch for us. If you’re in this role, take the time to understand the work of the nonprofit in depth so that you can ground this work within the needs and goals of the company.
  4. Clear needs: Ask nonprofit partners to share their needs comprehensively so you can clearly understand the strongest avenue for impact. If you’ve done your research and relationship building effectively, by the time you receive an ask all parties should be well aware of what’s on the table. It’s not fair to be vague or coy in these conversations; nonprofits have finite resources and their time is the most critical. I recommend requesting proposals in a standard format with three key benefit areas: impact, storytelling, and engagement. These are the three things that companies care most about, and they need to be spelled out for most nonprofit partners. The dollars might feel most important, however, equal weight and consideration should be given to each area. Structuring an ask in this way allows the nonprofit to be honest about the resources required to deliver on the partnership goals.
  5. Integration for good: Once you’ve closed your initial partnership investment, integration and authenticity are the name of the game. If a partnership is going to be truly impactful, it needs to become part of the company’s DNA. It’s the nonprofit’s job to make it as easy as possible for the corporate team to integrate their brand, story, mission and work across the company. This shouldn’t start with big press releases and a 10-foot check. Take time to get to the photo opp and it will be infinitely more meaningful.
  6. Strategy first: Successful partnerships start with thoughtful learning conversations about needs and dreams. Once this foundation is established, it’s important to have transparent discussions outlining the resources required to support partnership initiatives outside of standard programming. Finally, you’re ready to launch mutually beneficial, meaningful storytelling and engagement strategies that elevate the work and increase impact.
  7. Intentional storytelling: Be intentional about how you craft and share your partnership story. Corporate marketers are corporate storytellers and brand stewards, but they don’t often have experience navigating the communities, stakeholders and complexities of nonprofit work. The most effective partnerships develop when corporations clearly share core messaging objectives, language and metrics, and then support the nonprofit to own the overall story, strategy and delivery. In our early corporate storytelling endeavors we made some blunders, and these incidents helped us to learn the more human pieces of storytelling. A camera operator rarely has the skills to connect with a shy teenager, the presence of three videographers and a large microphone impacts the flow of a workshop, and even confident people need coaching and support to feel comfortable telling their stories. Nonprofits are best positioned to connect with their communities; lean on your partners to do this in a way that honors and respects the community.
  8. Engagement with integrity: Engagement opportunities are critical to expanding awareness and integration, and they must make sense for both parties. Nonprofits often feel that they will have to dramatically alter their mission to fulfill the requirements placed on them by a corporate partner. It’s tempting to create big events that check immediate boxes, however, this distracts from the larger goal of building a sustainable partnership. Engagement activities should add value for both corporate employees and beneficiaries of the organization. A good engagement increases awareness, inspires action, and requires minimal time and financial resources outside of traditional organizational programming. 

In the social media era, brands are defined by their actions, not their words, especially when facing hard times. At Global Glimpse, we call our stakeholder relationships our bank of goodwill. We invest in this bank with authenticity and integrity every day because it’s the right thing to do. And it turns out it’s also the right thing for business. Consistency builds trust that cushions the fall when we have to respond to more difficult situations. 

Global Glimpse is woman led and each of our corporate partner’s CSR teams is also led by women. Women are changing the face of travel and catalyzing a movement to use travel to build a better world. As we invest our time, energy and resources into bringing back the business of travel, we can also flip the script on who travels, how they travel, and the impact on communities near and far. Companies like Away and United Airlines give me hope for the future and the role that we can all play.