Newsletter: Your Next Partner May Be Hiding in Plain Sight 👀 ; Is Your Partnership Program Easy to Buy? 😌 ; Congrats! Your AI Agents Need a Manager 🤖

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with Gore Place, a historic country estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, to explore how it could attract more corporate partners.

I approached Gore Place because I’ve been interested in how I might help historic houses and museums strengthen their corporate partnership programs. In all my years working with nonprofits, I’ve never really worked with these types of organizations. But I love history, so I wanted to share my experience in exchange for the chance to learn more about their challenges. A win-win!

And I discovered something interesting. Gore Place has a potentially valuable corporate sponsorship opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Every April, the 50-acre estate hosts its annual Sheepshearing Festival, a beloved tradition dating back to 1987. The festival features sheep shearing, herding dogs, live music, historical reenactments, and more than 100 craft and fiber artists.

Depending on the weather, approximately 6,000 people attend annually.

That’s a substantial audience for a historic site. And potentially an attractive one for companies looking to connect with local families, consumers, and communities.

But here’s the challenge: Having an attractive sponsorship opportunity and being able to demonstrate its value to companies are two different things.

After several conversations with Gore Place’s talented team and some research, I identified five opportunities to help close that gap.

Mine existing relationships. Before approaching strangers, review board members, donors, members, vendors, and volunteers. Who do they know? I've suggested a simple board exercise to uncover existing corporate connections.

Explore point-of-sale fundraising. A local or regional retailer could invite customers to donate at checkout in support of the festival and Gore Place's educational mission. Beyond raising money, the campaign could introduce Gore Place to thousands of potential visitors.

Get to know the audience. Six thousand visitors is impressive. But where do they live? What interests them? Why do they attend? A visitor survey could turn attendance figures into information that prospective sponsors actually value.

Document partnership success. Existing corporate partnerships could become case studies showing what sponsors wanted to accomplish, what Gore Place delivered, and what resulted. That’s much more persuasive than a list of sponsorship benefits.

Make the opportunity visible. A dedicated festival partnership webpage could bring together audience data, partner logos, testimonials, case studies, and sponsorship opportunities. Instead of simply telling companies why they should sponsor, Gore Place could show them.

None of these ideas is revolutionary. And identifying opportunities isn’t the same as implementing them. The next step is determining which improvements the team can realistically pursue and putting them into action.

We're starting with mining existing relationships!

Sometimes organizations don’t need to invent new sponsorship opportunities. They need to recognize, strengthen, and better communicate the value of what they’re already doing.

That’s what I’ve been exploring with Gore Place. And I suspect plenty of other nonprofits have similar opportunities waiting to be discovered.

The question is: What’s hiding in plain sight at your organization???

✍️ Partnership Notes

A partnership insight that matters.

🛒 ​Is your corporate partnership program easy to buy?​
Imagine walking into a store where you can’t find what you’re looking for, the salesperson immediately pounces, and purchasing anything requires three forms and two approvals. You’d probably leave. Sharon and Linda at Stellar Partnerships argue that nonprofits sometimes create the same frustrating experience for corporate prospects. Their partnership webpages don’t explain what’s available. Their proposals offer too many choices. And even when companies want to partner, internal bureaucracy makes getting anything done unnecessarily complicated.

Joe’s Take: We spend so much time thinking about how to make corporate partnerships more attractive that we sometimes forget to make them easier to buy. Here’s an exercise: Put yourself in the shoes of a company interested in partnering with your organization. Can you quickly understand the opportunity? Is there a clear next step? Can the partnership team actually deliver what it’s promising? How many people need to approve the deal? Sometimes the biggest obstacle to winning more partnerships isn’t the competition. It’s your own organization.

🤑 Marketing Your Cause

One move you should steal.

📣 ​Your media list may be too small​.
Getting mentioned in the newspaper or featured on TV used to be the gold standard for earned media. Those placements still matter, but MediaPost argues that the definition of earned media has gotten much bigger. Podcasts, newsletters, review sites, forums, Reddit, Wikipedia, and other third-party sources increasingly shape what people—and AI tools—learn about an organization. The article cites research finding that 84% of sources referenced by AI systems come from earned media, while traditional journalism accounts for just 27% of those citations.

Joe’s Take: If your communications strategy still begins and ends with pitching reporters, it may be time to expand your definition of media. Think about all the places where someone else could be talking about your organization: newsletters, podcasts, community websites, trade publications, forums, even Reddit. These mentions do something your own website can’t: They give other people—and increasingly AI—independent evidence that you matter. So don’t just ask, How do we get more press? Ask a bigger question: Where should people be encountering us when we’re not the ones doing the talking?

😎 Cool Jobs in Cause

Find your next adventure.

🤝 Deputy Director, Corporate & Civil Society Partnerships, ​UNICEF​, Remote

🤝 Manager, Marketing Partnership, ​Boys & Girls Clubs of America​, Atlanta

🤝 Vice President of Advancement & Partnerships, ​Student Veterans of America​, Washington, DC

🤝 Senior Director, Corporate Partnerships & External Events, ​American Museum of Natural History​, NYC

🧠🍌 Brain Food

One thing that is feeding my thinking.

🤖 ​Congratulations! Your AI agents need a manager​.
Remember when AI was supposed to eliminate all that tedious work? Well, Business Insider reports that some professionals are discovering an unexpected problem: managing AI agents can be just as frustrating as managing people. Agents drift from their instructions, make mistakes, and need constant supervision. Instead of getting more done, employees end up checking, correcting, and managing an entirely new workforce. Researchers even have a name for the resulting mental exhaustion: AI brain fry.

🔒 A paywall may stop you from reading this article. Just reply to this email, and I'll send you a copy.

Joe’s Take: This made me laugh out loud because it captures something we’re only beginning to appreciate about AI. We imagine a future where we delegate tasks to digital assistants and get all that time back. But delegation isn’t the same as elimination. Someone still needs to explain the assignment, review the work, catch mistakes, and decide what happens next. Before celebrating how much work an AI agent can do, ask how much work it creates for the person managing it. The real productivity breakthrough may come when AI needs less supervision—not simply when it can do more tasks.