Newsletter: Corporate Giving vs Cause Marketing 🥊 ; Haunted Car Washes for Halloween are Cause Marketing Gold 💛 ; The Big Value in Small Niches 🤏🏻
Note from Joe: Some of you have asked for something you can share with your nonprofit's leaders to explain why cause marketing beats traditional corporate giving. Well, here it is. Of course, you should do both, but cause marketing requires a different approach and resources that many managers may be reluctant to provide. I hope this helps you make your case! Let me know what else I can do to help.
- - -
Halloween and Day of the Dead are over, but I’m still talking about dead things—like corporate giving. The tombstone’s already engraved:
Here lies Corporate Giving—small, restricted, limited, and wicked dead.
Corporate giving sounds good in theory. You picture a company cutting a big check and everyone going home happy. But in reality, it’s slowly dying.
Companies donate around 1% of pre-tax earnings to charity—down from over 2% a generation ago—and even that small slice is under pressure. Next year, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, the first 1% of what companies give won’t even be tax-deductible. If that’s not a scary headline, I don’t know what is.
To make matters worse, most of those dollars are restricted. Say you’re applying for a corporate grant. You’ll probably read something like:
Our grants are restricted to educational nonprofits serving youth in communities where we operate.
Translation? Only registered 501(c)(3)s. Only youth. Only in their footprint. If you run a homeless shelter in California and the company’s based in the Midwest, tough luck.
And here’s the real kicker: as much as one-third to one-half of corporate giving isn’t cash at all—it’s in-kind products. Great if you can use them. Not so great if you need to make payroll.
Even sponsorship money, which looks a little healthier, is a grind. You have to create an event—big enough, flashy enough, and valuable enough to justify a company’s investment. That’s a ton of work—tents, volunteers, logistics, porta-potties—for something that can disappear the moment your corporate contact changes jobs.
Now compare that to cause marketing. Like sponsorship, it’s a partnership for mutual profit—but flipped. Instead of companies cutting checks to reach your audience, you partner to reach theirs.
That’s where the real money is. Cause marketing isn’t capped by a corporate budget—it taps into the eye-popping $400 billion individuals give each year.
Think about it. There are tens of millions of businesses in the U.S., yet only a fraction of a percent engage in cause marketing. If just two to five percent participated, nonprofits could generate billions in additional fundraising each year. The potential is enormous and still largely untapped.
Cause marketing is everything corporate giving isn’t: lucrative, unrestricted, scalable, and efficient. Businesses raise the money for you.
Cause marketing is alive and growing. Corporate giving is failing and on life support. It's heading for the boneyard.
The choice isn’t hard. Go where the heartbeat and the money are. 🙌
✍️ Partnership Notes
In my "Partnership Notes" section, I share stellar corporate partnership programs and show you how to do your job better!
1. Luxury retailer stitches purpose into fashion with PBS partnership.
💡 A luxury cashmere brand known for its hand-embroidered sweaters just teamed up with PBS on a 21-piece capsule collection. The brand will donate 20% of every sale to support PBS and its member stations. The line celebrates public broadcasting’s legacy while turning fashion into a statement of civic pride.
2. Haunted car washes for Halloween are cause marketing gold.
💡 Car washes across the U.S. are turning spooky season into serious money, with many reporting earnings up to 10x their usual revenue from haunted drive-thru experiences. It’s proof that Halloween activations aren’t just fun—they’re lucrative. For partnership pros, that’s a cue to explore cause tie-ins like “Scare for a Share” weekends, where a portion of every wash supports local charities. Start now so you are ready for Halloween in 2026.
3. Big value in small niches.
💡 To win with corporate partnerships, you don’t need a massive audience—you need the right one. The NHL Players’ Association (NHLPA) proves it: just 750 players, but what a powerful niche. Their sponsors know exactly who they’re reaching—high-profile, influential athletes with loyal fans. Most nonprofits don’t have a roster like that, but the lesson still applies: small isn’t a weakness when your audience is concentrated, credible, and valuable to the right partners.
🤑 Marketing Your Cause
In my "Marketing Your Cause" section, I share strategies for growing your brand and audience—two key ingredients for securing more partnerships.
1. Have something to say? Put it on a flier. 🎁 (Gift Article)
💡 You know I suggest email + 1 for your marketing. And while email is non-negotiable, maybe your +1 is…fliers. A New York Times story found that paper fliers are making a comeback. Why? They feel real. In a world of AI-generated everything, fliers prove a human was there. Someone printed it, taped it up, and cared enough to share it.
The takeaway for nonprofits? Authenticity is your unfair advantage. A clever, well-placed flier with a QR code can connect the physical world to your digital one and make your message stand out in ways no algorithm ever will.
2. Wounded Warrior Project gives brands a head start on honoring vets on Veterans Day.
💡 The partnerships team at WWP just dropped a wicked smahht toolkit to help companies celebrate and support veterans — a full two weeks before Veterans Day on November 11. It includes conversation guides, ready-to-post social content, and a workplace calendar packed with ways to honor veterans year-round. For partnership teams, this kind of early, plug-and-play content is gold — and incredibly helpful. How are you making your cause turnkey for your partners?
3. Subscribers don’t matter—relationships do.
💡 My main man Josh Spector says newsletter subscribers are overrated, and he’s right. The real metric isn’t who signs up, it’s who talks back. Replies, conversations, and genuine engagement beat vanity numbers every time. For nonprofits, the same rule applies: Stop chasing list size and start building relationships. A smaller, loyal audience that listens, shares, and acts will always out-raise a giant list of ghosts. 👻
😎 Cool Jobs in Cause
In my "Cool Jobs in Cause" section, I share open partnership positions so you can discover your next adventure.
1. Director of Development & Strategic Partnerships, Paws of Honor, Williamsburg, VA
2. Sponsorship Sales Specialist, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, NYC
3. Corporate Partnerships Director, Meals on Wheels, Arlington, VA
🧠🍌 Brain Food
In my "Brain Food" section, I share things that spark inspiration, fuel curiosity, and bring a smile to your face!
1. When AI gets too specific, it starts lying to you. Here's how to stop that.
💡 My go-to guy on AI, Boston’s own Christopher Penn, says the more specific your AI prompt, the more likely it is to “hallucinate” or make things up. His fix is simple: zoom out. Give AI a broader context—who you are, what you’re doing, and why—not just a hyper-detailed command. For partnership pros, that means telling AI, “act like a nonprofit partnerships manager writing a cause marketing pitch,” not “write me a 100-word email.” Context beats control every time.
2. I love a good ghost story, but I don't (really) believe in ghosts. Do you?
💡 Gallup’s new poll finds that nearly half of Americans believe in ghosts, haunted houses, or psychic powers. What do you do when something goes bump in the night? I never have to worry about turning on a light. Mine’s already on. 🙃
3. I spent Halloween week visiting graves and creepy houses.
💡 Alongside my stack of October horror reads, I dove into a fascinating book on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughters (I’m a sucker for Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and all things related to New England Transcendentalism).
Ellen and Edith lived in eastern Massachusetts, so I went exploring and found a great local nonprofit connected to the Emersons, the Forbes House Museum, the grave of one sister, and the site of her old mansion in Milton. This proves that curiosity and good stories often lead us to a cause worth supporting!
Pictured left to to right: The book on Ellen and Edith (which I highly recommend), a turn-of-the-century image of the now-Forbes House Museum, Edith Emerson Forbes’ grave in Milton Cemetery, and her former mansion—definitely haunted, since both she and her sister died there.
