Corporate-Nonprofit Partnerships on Sustainability: The Bar Keeps Rising

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

Just in time for Climate Week NYC, the World Economic Forum published its first Chief Sustainability Officers’ Outlook report. At a high level, the report highlights a mixed message: 

Overall, 63% [of CSOs] expect progress to hold steady or accelerate over the next year, while over the medium term, a stronger business case and cheaper, more applicable technologies are the leading expected accelerators. At the same time, policy uncertainty, short-term pressures and geopolitical volatility are making progress more uneven across markets and sectors.

The good news for CSOs is that sustainability continues to move deeper into business planning and operations. AI provides new capabilities and efficiencies, and more companies are seeing the potential for business value creation in areas including competitive advantage, corporate resilience, and product, service, and technology innovation. 

However, CSOs still face hurdles, such as strengthening the business case, integrating the function more deeply into the business, turning AI potential into tangible gains, and working effectively through business and geopolitical uncertainty.

From a nonprofit perspective, the corporate outlook raises the bar for building effective partnerships. It’s not a new challenge, but the report emphasises the need for nonprofit leaders to focus more strongly on the business value proposition they’re putting forward, alongside their work, to achieve social and environmental progress. 

In addition to the traditional approaches that highlight “giving back,” brand enhancement, and employee engagement, nonprofits seeking to build corporate partnerships must identify the concrete ways that partnering can help solve specific business challenges, such as innovation or competitive advantage.  

Here, of course, is where an account-based approach can be most useful: Deeper research on potential partners, tighter focus on the most mission-aligned companies, more customized value propositions, and stronger proof points to support the propositions. Armed with these details, nonprofit leaders can speak more confidently and effectively to the primary challenges and concerns of corporate sustainability leaders as they continue to evolve their mission and programs to meet the needs of the day – and of tomorrow.