I'm back from the Engage for Good Conference in Chicago! The conference was great, as usual. Congrats to David, Megan and the entire Engage for Good team.

I moderated two session at the conference and attended several more. A few highlights...

1. Chad Royal-Pascoe, National Vice President for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America outlined a comprehensive 8-point framework for working with corporate partners. The visual above is from Chad's presentation. Look at all the ways BGCA is striving to work with each corporate partner!

2. Lifestraw's Tara Lundy and attorney-turned-influencer Rachel Pitzel led an interesting conversation about getting serious about influencers. The big takeaway for me was that working with influencers is still very much a work in progress for many causes. The key is to stop talking about it and to start working with one or two influencers so you can test and learn from the experience….

I'm in Chicago at the Engage for Good Conference! Be sure to follow the conference hashtag (#EFG2019) on Twitter.

While I'm here, I'm moderating two panels at the conference, and you can learn from them whether you're in Chicago or not!

1. Today at 4:15PM CT, Karen Wu and I are presenting the 10 Commandments of Cause Marketing Law. If you are not at the conference you can still get your legal questions answered and a copy of the 10 Commandments by filling out our legal partnership survey.

2. Tomorrow at 1:30PM CT, I'll be with the National Park Foundation in a session that will explore how nonprofits can better position themselves to attract corporations from a variety of industries. The panel includes four corporate supahstahs: Coca-Cola, Union Pacific, L.L. Bean and Subaru. I'll be reporting back to you on all the nuggets of wisdom in an upcoming newsletter. Stay tuned!

If you are at the conference and want to meet up to say hi, just hit reply to this email. Or join me at one of the above sessions and we can talk afterward!

Just about every week I get a legal question about cause marketing. I'm not a lawyer - nor do I play one on TV - so I don't answer these questions. Instead, I call Karen Wu at Perlman & Perlman! Karen is a lawyer who specializes in cause marketing and corporate partnership law. She's also an outstanding person who goes out of her way to be helpful to the corporate partnership community.

Karen and I want to answer your legal questions!

This week I'm releasing some of the results from the salary survey Catalist and Selfish Giving conducted in April.

Below is the graph for 2019 partnership salaries for five positions. In the coming weeks, you'll see additional graphs on partnership salaries by geographic region, average duration of employment and fairness of compensation.

Stay tuned for more research! And be sure to take my latest survey on what you want to see more/less of from Selfish Giving in the coming year.

Speaking of what you want to see more/less of from SG, I'm already learning from what you are telling me!

First, I launched my latest survey last week on what you want to see more (or less) of from Selfish Giving in 2019. Early results are reporting that readers want monthly expert webinars. But is this true for you? What do you want in addition to my Wednesday newsletter? I want to hear form you.

TAKE MY NEW SURVEY

Second, you loved last week's story on Children's Miracle Network's and how they retained corporate partners for decades. And with good reason! Nonprofits report that 85% of their corporate revenue portfolio comes from their existing partners. Stewardship is critical.

Want to learn more? Sign up for this FREE live webinar next week on stewardship with CMN's Clark Sweat, Catalist’s Maureen Carlson and Lyft’s Veronica Juarez.

I'm pulling out the big guns this week and using my handsome pup, Charlie, to encourage you to take my NEW SURVEY!

This past weekend as I was crunching the numbers for the salary survey you took earlier this month (you'll be seeing the results soon!), I thought of another survey I should have done earlier this year.

This one is all about what you want to see more of (or less!) from Selfish Giving for 2019 and beyond. I did my first survey last year and the feedback was super-helpful. This new survey will make things even better! But I need your help.

Every organization defines stewardship just a little bit differently. They make it their own. They include activities that are both common to the fundraising sector and unique to their nonprofit at the same time.  It’s hard to come up with one single definition of what the word means, or create best practice tactics that work for all.

After 23 years working in several nonprofits, consulting for hundreds more, talking to corporate donors, designing CSR strategies, looking at constituent data, combing through research reports, asking questions, listening, following the marketplace and just plain observing, I’m going to give you a formula for effective corporate partner stewardship (and how to chop the word up into a more defined and digestible meaning.)

Last week, I discussed the importance of focusing on your website and building an email list. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, guest posting and SEO are all valuable, but they are all means to end: driving people to your website and signing up for email updates. I got several great emails back from people talking about what they are focusing on and why. Thanks for sharing!

This brings up another point: regardless of what you choose to focus on when it comes to content marketing, it has to be AWESOME. It has to STAND OUT. You simply can't publish stuff anymore to just...well...publish....

The people who read my newsletter are corporate partnership pros, but the section that is most popular with readers is not "Partnership Notes." It's "Marketing Your Cause" - and with good reason! You realize that the better you market your cause the easier it will be to recruit corporate partners. Since January I've been seeing a trend that I want to address...

At the beginning of the year, I explained why you should be on Twitter in 2019. I got some great emails from people that wanted to use Twitter more effectively. Mission accomplished!

Two weeks ago, I shared a post on what is and isn’t working on Facebook right now. You ❤️it and it was very popular. I'm glad because Facebook - while clearly evil 👿- is still important….

Three things this week.

First: Please, please head over and take the Selfish Giving / Catalist 2019 Corporate Partnership Professional Compensation Survey. This information doesn't exist ANYWHERE but is much-needed. As one reader wrote last week:

"A salary survey, umm, yes please! I have a hard time finding out what my salary should be, my peers aren't going to tell me and doing a google search just gives me a wide range! I hope a lot of people fill it out so we can get nice data."

The results of the survey could mean a big raise for you in the coming year!🤞

Have you ever wondered how much nonprofit corporate partnership professionals are paid??? Me too!

I asked this question to the gang of Catalist last week and now we both want to get to the bottom of how much nonprofit corporate partnership, sponsorship and cause marketing professionals make! We're looking for salary information for a range of positions - from coordinator to manager to director to vice president. So whatever your job is in corporate partnerships, we want to hear from you! 🙏

Take our completely anonymous survey. It's just five questions!

A big welcome to all of this month's new subscribers! I especially want to welcome all the new signups from Georgetown University's New Strategies Program and from Reading Partners' National Leadership Retreat. Last week, I flew coast to coast to, first, speak in Washington, D.C. at New Strategies and, second, to Oakland, California, to present at Reading Partners.

Whenever I jump on a plane and leave Boston I always hear three things from people:

1. "You talk funny." 🤪

2. "Boston sports teams %#ck!!!" 🙄

3. "Hey, that was a wicked awesome presentation!" 🙌

The grandaddy of 'checkout charity' programs is the MDA Shamrock ☘️Pin-up. The campaign has been around for 37 years. During that time it's raised a whopping $323 million. That's a lot of green! This month you can buy a shamrock at 20,000 retails locations. I bought mine at Star Markets in Newton, Massachusetts!

The good news with checkout charity (i.e. register fundraisers, charity pin-ups, round-ups and donation boxes) is you don't need 20,000 stores to raise a small fortune. Local programs that involve a couple dozen to a few hundred stores can post impressive totals.

A few weeks ago I got a call from a nonprofit with a dilemma. A company approached them about a cause marketing campaign on social media. Great, right? But there was one issue. The campaign involved some pretty strong language, and the nonprofit wasn't sure if they wanted to move forward. Should they connect their cause with cussing? I encouraged them to go for it, but they turned down the partnership.

So, I've been thinking: Is it ever okay to swear in your cause marketing?

Are you new to raising money from event sponsorships? Then I have the course for you.

For over a year now, I've been presenting How to Sell Event Sponsorships - A Step by Step Guide over at  CharityHowTo. During this time, I've been tinkering with the course and making it better and better. The course has always attracted a good crowd and gotten great reviews, but now it's hitting a new level of success and participation and I want to make sure you know about it.

In this 90-minute course, you'll learn:

1. The difference between charity sponsorships and marketing sponsorships and what businesses expect from each.

Everyone wants more hot leads (direct inquiries from potential partners). But what about warm leads (someone who shows interest in your organization)? Would you like more warm leads if I showed you two ways to get them???

Okay, here you go.

First, every nonprofit should have an email pop-up on its homepage. Most of you are familiar with the pop-up I use at Selfish Giving. (Technically mine is a welcome mat, but it serves the same purpose.) Yeah, I know pop-ups are annoying - blah blah blah - but the truth is they work for collecting email addresses. Ideally, you should use a pop-up to collect emails so you can send subscribers email updates, newsletters, etc. But even if you don't plan on sending subscribers anything you should still have a pop-up. Why? For the leads.

Two things today.

First, thanks to everyone for helping the Selfish Giving newsletter recently achieve three new highs. Last week's newsletter had a 52.6 percent open rate! (Most newsletters are lucky if they get a 20 percent open rate.) Yet another new high happened two weeks ago on February 6th when the newsletter had 1,009 clickthroughs on articles. That's the first time clickthroughs have exceeded 1,000. Finally, as the graph above shows⬆︎, the newsletter had a banner month in January with a huge jump in new subscribers - the most ever!

What do these three "highs" mean?

At Catalist we like to say that strategy is just opinion until it is grounded in data. 

To that end, instead of just giving you our opinion on what is evolving and trending in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for 2019 and beyond, we went to the professionals living that work every day. 

We reached out to more than 150 CSR executives and interviewed them, capturing their thoughts, challenges and predictions for the upcoming year. 

So, what did we find out?