What Nonprofit Leaders Should Expect and Prepare For When Building a Corporate Fundraising Program

If you are an Executive Director or board member, you may quietly wonder: How do others make corporate fundraising work?

You see peer organizations with corporate logos on their websites, sponsors at their events, and well-connected boards. Your team may be asking when you will get started.

Discouragement can set in quickly when expectations are high, and your team is already stretched thin.

But remember, those visible successes did not happen overnight.

Corporate fundraising is a learning process. Recognizing this early allows leaders to:

• Set realistic expectations and protect team morale.

• Approach corporate fundraising as an investment in your organization’s future, not as a one-time experiment.

• Focus on building the structure and systems that support long-term progress, not just short-term wins.

With this context in mind, this article offers a practical roadmap for executive directors and boards preparing to explore corporate fundraising.

To begin your planning, anchor your expectations in several core truths that determine whether corporate fundraising succeeds or stalls.

Truth #1: Corporate fundraising grows; it rarely “launches”

As a leader, set the right pace. Early on, foster sustainable growth and allow staff consistent, long-term, well-supported effort. Avoid signals that foster hustle culture or unrealistic goals; they discourage staff and increase risk aversion.

To build stable efforts:

• Set the right expectation for the level of effort. Dedicating a full-time person to this work is rare, and even 50% of someone’s time can be hard to find. For many small nonprofits, 5–10 hours of concentrated weekly effort, combined with well-defined goals, a roadmap, and leadership support, is usually sufficient.

• Account for and acknowledge the early, small wins. The beginning may not yield funding or generous sponsorships. Early successes may look like volunteer days or corporate mentors. These are not distractions; they are foundational steps in building lasting corporate relationships.

Truth #2: Real leadership prioritizes quality over quantity

Corporate fundraising success depends less on the amount of outreach and more on who you engage and how thoughtfully you follow through.

Few nonprofits can dedicate a full-time position to corporate fundraising. Here, making real progress is more important than simply doing more, so leaders should measure what matters most, not just the amount of activity.

To support this approach:

• Choose a time investment that your team can maintain. Corporate fundraising needs to work with your main programs, not against them. Well-defined limits help staff stay energized and focused.

• Be selective about relationships. A smaller number of well-aligned companies will produce better outcomes than broad, unfocused outreach.  

• Leverage your existing infrastructure. Corporate fundraising works best when it’s shared, so engage staff already involved in grants, volunteer engagement, or mentorship; they possess the expertise needed to grow these relationships.

Truth #3: Corporate fundraising is a shared responsibility

The rules are straightforward:

• Board members should connect and open doors to new relationships, not manage logistics or close deals.

• Staff should never feel solely responsible or only report progress. With the right conditions, empower them to handle program logistics and shape partnerships to fit the organization.

The two principles that matter most:

• Shared ownership. Everyone plays a different role, and all contributions matter. Framing corporate fundraising as a collective effort sustains momentum.

• Address skepticism directly. As with all new efforts, it is normal to hear skeptical voices from the board or the leadership. Recognize that skepticism is part of good governance and invite those voices into early conversation where you share the broader benefits of corporate partnerships and showcase examples from peer organizations. Ideally, though, you want to neutralize this resistance early, so do not postpone this conversation and be ready for it.

Step One: Assess organizational readiness honestly

Before outlining outreach or building systems, pause to ask: Is this the right moment for us?

Corporate programs are not right for every organization or growth stage. The most important step: honestly assess your readiness.

• Programmatic appeal: Do you offer initiatives that naturally appeal to local industries or company values?

• Resources and systems: Do you have time, staff bandwidth, and effective processes for stewardship and reporting?

• Culture and leadership: Are board members ready to champion introductions?

If some answers are "not yet," you have identified growth areas before starting partner outreach. Work on them, but also begin soft partner conversations and introduce the idea among close contacts.

If you feel ready but still unsure, remember no one is ever fully ready. To reduce risk and set expectations, take a pilot approach. In your first 12 months, focus on learning, testing, and adjusting with a handful of company events or partners, rather than aiming for large numbers immediately. You don’t need 20 companies to have a successful program; focus on five high-quality partnerships, instead.

Step Two: Build the “team of many”

Build a team of leaders, executors, and connectors. You need people who open doors and those who implement. Consider this team structure:

• Board members should primarily serve as connectors and advocates, engaging new corporate champions and leaders.

• Executive leadership sets priorities, protects focus and direction, and ensures staff have resources to succeed.

• Staff manage relationships, logistics, and follow-up; they execute the program and own this process.

This creates trust. The rest comes from thoughtful coordination and ongoing growth conversations.

Step Three: Define success before doubt sets in

While revenue will eventually be a goal, it should not define early success. Identify what progress looks like at the 90-, 180-, and 365-day marks. Examples may include:

• Increased number of volunteer engagements or mentorship matches.

• More comfort and fluency in conversations with company contacts.

• Better understanding of your organization’s value proposition for businesses.

• Improved internal systems for tracking partnerships.

In the first year, develop a measurement table to track progress beyond funding, including new relationships, media visibility, engaged volunteers, and in-kind donations. Remember, success is multifaceted and includes more than monetary gains.

Especially for your first 90 days, your focus should be on:      

• Defining the roles of the board, leadership, and staff

• mapping out local partners who will be open for informal introduction and soft asks

• focus on developing high-quality engagement opportunities (vs. asks)

Step Four: Think in roadmaps, not snapshots

Having an end goal, having a success picture, and defining what it includes is critical for your measurement and for identifying what success looks like for you.

The problem with focusing entirely on it, especially as you are starting, is that you lose flexibility and nimbleness. This is why I suggest that you approach your plan as a roadmap - and accept that you may take the wrong exit, that the road winds, and that there might be unexpected delays.

I know that one of your main roles is risk mitigation, and this approach keeps your organizational learning active and significantly reduces the risk of wasted effort and resources in the wrong direction. To encourage this process, regularly ask questions such as:

• What surprised us in our initial outreach?

• Where did we experience enthusiasm or resistance?

• What adjustments do we need to make to better align with corporate interests?

Step Five: Identify risks early and create safety nets

Mapping risk is one of my favorite exercises. It shows courage, leadership, and it helps your organization enormously. I strongly encourage you to consider all variables before you begin, and think even about the ones that perhaps have a low probability of happening:

• What if our programs change and they are no longer offering corporate appeal?

• What if staff availability changes? Do we need to have Plan B?

As you work through these questions, look for ways to build in safety nets for potential risks.

Preparing backup plans early supports resilience as your organization grows its corporate fundraising.

• Cross-functional benefit: If corporate fundraising supports other functions such as volunteer programs, annual giving, or brand visibility, can this be the foundation of your back-up plan should staff time or program design and focus change?

• Capacity check-ins: Ask staff directly how stretched they are, and what time commitments you did not encounter in the beginning. Just because there is change, that doesn’t mean you need to abandon it - but you should act accordingly to compensate for this gap.

• Market awareness: Monitor how local companies respond to your outreach. Enthusiasm, even modest, signals alignment worth nurturing.

The quiet truth: What if you are doing everything right and still feel stalled?

Here you are, six months in this new venture, and it is slow, and you still haven’t seen your first corporate gifts.

You followed all the right steps, you had all the right people in your corner, and yet, the results are uncertain. And your optimism for this pilot begins to shift into worry that you wasted valuable time and staff resources.

But here’s what’s true: If you are moving thoughtfully, even if the dollars are slow to appear, you have already achieved more than you realize. Somewhere along the way, you have:

• Learned how to build systems that engage your board members, leaders, and staff members.

• You have a blueprint for working with new audiences, building new relationships, and approaching sophisticated partners (because nothing is as hard as corporate partnerships!).

• I’m sure you worked on your website, clarified your message, and built a narrative that can be used for other purposes and donors.

• You strengthened your relationships - internally and externally.

And these are significant achievements. They form the foundation for all future fundraising, not just corporate partnerships. Even in moments of doubt, remember: corporate fundraising, when approached with patience and structure, is a leadership investment that builds credibility, resilience, and long-term community trust.