No-go zone

Corporate partners favour media-friendly charities. Do less appealing causes find sponsors as well? Andrew Thomas goes where journalists fear to tread

Although the Cheshire Building Society had been involved with boccia for 14 years, their involvement had become increasingly distant. The initial reason for funding boccia, a sport originally developed to be played by people with cerebral palsy, was a personal connection to the condition. After the acquisition of Cheshire by Nationwide Building Society three years ago, both the personal connection and a community basis for sponsorship became even less pertinent.

“It was quite an old-fashioned view of sponsorship,” said David Parry, a member of Nationwide’s corporate communications team and the man responsible for the corporate communications of its regional brands, including: Dunfermline, Derbyshire and Cheshire building societies. “We would give them some money to go off and run their events, and then turn up on the day and give out the gongs.”

But corporate sponsorship is changing. Increasingly, organisations are following a different model from the philanthropic motivations behind corporate sponsorship. Organisations like John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Nationwide itself are still looking for a personal connection between the organisation sponsored and the company sponsoring

However, rather than this connection being imposed by management, the decision is now being democratically decided by either staff or customers. Boccia no longer fit into Nationwide’s grassroots-driven way of doing things.

“Nationwide doesn’t have the same approach to sponsorship as the Cheshire Building Society. We’ve put far more of the decision making in the hands of the staff and customers,” says Parry. “It does mean, however, that the charities with children or those centred around cancer do get preference.” In 2011, Nationwide announced the termination of its involvement with the National Boccia Championships, its primary sponsorship activity for the last five of those 14 years. Although the final outcome for boccia was not quite that dramatic – as Nationwide’s sponsorship of the championship continued (see breakout box) – if the media perceives a cause as less than glamorous, is it always going to lose out to the charities that journalists prefer covering?

“Not necessarily – in fact, media coverage is often low on the organisation’s agenda when considering where to invest its CSR budget,” says Pippa Collett, a director at Sponsorship Consulting and vice chair of the European Sponsorship Association, partly because customer engagement is often not the prime reason of sponsorship; but also because the press is notoriously fickle in what it deems glamorous.

“Today’s media no-go may turn into tomorrow’s media darling,” adds Collett. This transition from zero coverage to hero status is certainly something that Beating Bowel Cancer is hoping to achieve. Although bowel cancer is the third most common cancer and the second most- prevalent terminal cancer, it still struggles to get cut-through in a landscape dominated by breast and prostate cancer charities.

“There is an initial anxiety from companies in getting involved, because we are talking about blood. And bottoms. And poo,” says Mark Flanagan, CEO of Beating Bowel Cancer, a man whose conversation, by necessity, is peppered with references to blood and bottoms and poo. “There are questions for potential sponsors on how we can translate that into an engaging campaign”

Flanagan, however, thinks that the challenge his charity faces today is not dissimilar to that faced by breast cancer charities 15 years ago. “The attitude from companies was that you couldn’t talk about breasts in their boardrooms. The chairman genuinely believed that people would giggle or not take it seriously. I don’t think anyone would say that now.”

Although inroads have been made into turning breast cancer into a media friendly cause, Flanagan reckons that the type of cancer is only marginally relevant. “Once we can get acceptance by a company at the corporate level, we will have acceptance by their staff,” he says, citing the surpassing of Bowel Cancer’s income target, as set by John Lewis when the organisation was the Partnership’s charity of the year in 2011. “We are a cancer charity and one in four people have a reason to support us because one in four have encountered bowel cancer. So our arrival at John Lewis was heralded with their staff telling us that their mum had died or their dad had died, and suddenly we were effectively giving them permission to talk about the subject.”

Regardless of who benefits from the charity the need for resonance is important. The question is from where the resonance originates.

“A lot of cause-related partnerships have little obvious business case, often because a senior executive in the company has a personal connection to the cause. But these relationships are likely to be short-lived and unlikely to deliver long-term value to either partner,” says Ben Tuxworth, head of sustainability at communications agency Salter Baxter. “A cause that’s directly related to the core values and business strategy of a company, with senior buy-in is a better basis for a real partnership.”

Tuxworth is a keen supporter of the approach taken by Nationwide. “It’s important to work with the grain of what people care about within the business – and so giving all staff a say in what charities get supported can work well. Nationwide’s approach takes this a step further – democratising the choice online so that their customers can come forward with charitable propositions and bid for Nationwide staff engagement.”

Sponsorship Consulting’s Collett, however, thinks that a connection can often be useful, “I think it is always important for an organisation’s leaders to have a level of interest in the causes the organisation supports.”

Collet also feels that focus is more important and is not a strong believer in the scattergun support of a number of partnerships that often result from community matchboard programmes. She believes it is much rarer to have that kind of focus in larger PLCs. “In privately owned organisations, it is somewhat more open to question as to why any specific cause is chosen. For public limited companies, there is a responsibility to shareholders to invest their money wisely, and that includes taking a more strategic approach to philanthropy,” she adds.

The worry for some, however, is when strategy equates to size. “One of the problems for us is that we’re a small charity, and it’s quite hard to break into the market of the Santander’s, the Tesco’s, the Andrexes,” says Beating Bowel Cancer’s Flanagan. “People often say that we should approach Andrex or be in partnership with them. Getting into the room with Andrex, and having a conversation with them is difficult. Not because they refuse to listen, but because we are very small. We are a £1.3m charity. We should be 10 times the size, and that means it’s quite difficult to get headspace and attention from these larger organisations.”

Flanagan feels that Beating Bowel Cancel could become a household name if they were able to put £500,000 of their own money into a campaign to guarantee upfront that they could enhance their profile. It’s a brave investment for any organisation.

Tuxworth, however feels that media profile is not the stage that companies should be chasing. “Brands that enter into these types of cause-related activities only for the value they can generate – whether in terms of increased sales or media coverage – are approaching it from the wrong direction and will likely be disappointed by the outcomes,” he says. “The real value comes from building long-term partnerships that are authentic for the brand, build credibility and provide an opportunity to show that their belief in the cause goes beyond simply opening the chequebook. Of course, quantifying these less tangible benefits is more difficult.”

For some companies, quantifying their involvement is less important, particularly when there are a number of causes with which a company is involved.

KPMG, and the KPMG foundation, have had a fairly long-standing relationship with the Refugee Council. However, they have two staff charities, Shelter and Action for Literacy. It is these causes that will receive the most attention over the next two years of fundraising and pro bono work. Through those relationships KPMG can engage the whole firm by allowing its entire organisation the opportunity to get involved.

However, the Refugee Council is different. “The Refugee Council is a much more specialist thing, which only a limited number of individuals within KPMG have direct contact. We don’t really compare our involvement with the Refugee Council with the main charities we support,” Mark Hamilton, deputy head of communications at KPMG, says.

Although KPMG’s involvement with the Refugee Council has been somewhat limited, it is notable for a company to be involved with an organisation that seems to be the bête noir of the mainstream media. Fortunately, the partnership is not part of a media coverage plan. “I don’t think we’ve ever tried to get any publicity through our involvement with the Refugee Council,” says Hamilton. It is clear that his main focus is on KPMG’s staff charities and that the company is loath to dilute that. “There simply isn’t time to devise communications campaigns around everything we do,” he adds.

KPMG have provided one person on secondment to the Council for the past couple of years and have helped support some of the Council’s projects on a pro-bono basis. Additionally, the KPMG Foundation donated money to fund a piece of research. KPMG’s strongest area of support, however, has been to assist the Refugee Council in its work helping people with refugee status to requalify in the UK. Says Hamilton, “We have provided coaching support and mentoring for refugees to retrain, and this fits in with what we do. It’s a professional services type relationship, an area where we can actually bring skills that we have to help them.”

Only a small number of KPMG employees have participated in this aspect of the partnership, however. “It’s in the single figures,” acknowledges Hamilton. “Whereas of the 11,000 people who work for KPMG about a third of the workforce have been involved with our main charities.”

Like John Lewis’ involvement with Beating Bowel Cancer, however, KPMG’s involvement with the Refugee Council is limited to the internal audience. The question remains whether that limited audience will always be the purview of sponsorships that are at best ignored and at worst castigated by the media. According to Collett, it depends on the objectives the company is trying to achieve. “Strategic philanthropy can be used successfully both internally and externally,” she says. “Messaging and channels should be selected to reach and resonate with the programme’s key target audiences which may include staff, analysts, the media, other organisations or customers.”

In many companies there is a latent pride that they are the organisation to be involved with causes that the media won’t touch. The press officers and comms teams won’t admit to it – the last thing they want are accusations of smugness. But regardless of the extent of the involvement, there is a pride that they were the ones brave enough to get involved in an area that the press would not follow.

In much the same way as attitudes have changed towards breast cancer, yesterday’s media no-go areas can become today’s front page news. This certainly happened with the coverage of disabled sports during last year’s Paralympic Games. The International Paralympic Committee’s (IPC) head of communications, Craig Spence, said that media coverage exceeded his “wildest dreams.”

It seems, however, that old prejudices need more than 500 hours of Channel 4 broadcasting to die out. Despite unprecedented coverage, Spence still expressed disappointment that tabloid journalists were less keen to cover the games then their broadsheet counterparts, and without pickup from the red tops, the Games will still struggle to achieve mass market sponsorship.

This summer’s IPC World Athletic Championships will, perhaps, show whether the Paralympics really did create a media legacy. Will coverage continue and extend, and if so will that translate into increased corporate sponsorship on the road to the Rio Games in 2016?