A new approach to select partnership alternatives for Christian Aid
Christian Aid is undergoing a period of transformational growth. Having recognised that the role of businesses as development actors is indispensable for delivering maximum benefits to the world's neediest, the international development charity has decided to engage more fully with corporations. Within its charitable causes scheme, Cogentus provided the services of a Senior Analyst, Santiago Castro, to assist Christian Aid in developing a structured corporate partnership strategy. As many Non-Profit and Non-Governmental Organisations are increasingly considering private sector partnerships, a key strategic concern is deciding on an efficient way to actively chose the best companies to engage with and maximise the impact and influence of activities.
The challenge
Even if private sector partnerships present potentially significant income and partnership opportunities for charities, developing such corporate partnerships strategy implies a major challenge: Corporate partnerships should not compromise the Non-Profit Organization's main objectives or alienate their identity. The Cogentus Framework fitted perfectly into a process needing to start from the values and objectives that were already established for the organization as a whole.
Added value of the approach
The strategy had to establish, primarily, that any potential partners met the ethical requirements of Christian Aid. Only after this check was carried out were suitable organisations considered. The Cogentus Framework enabled a coherent analysis of potential benefits and risks to provide the best fit for Christian aid given limited resources.
As part of the Framework, a structure to organise and keep track of the available information was created. This allowed for the collection of data on each company and established an internal database that offered a 360 degree view of Christian Aid’s relationships with business. The information can be retrieved according to a number of different categories (e.g. by sector of activity, triple bottom line factor, geographical area, objective of the engagement, etc)
Finally a computer model was created, fed with the information available in the database. This model offered a very comprehensive mapping of all the possible combination of engagements and produced a ranking order that allowed Christian Aid to maximise the overall benefit of the corporate partnership strategy.
The approach was transparent and auditable and it offered a solid base to take decision that were defensible with real evidence.
