For today’s corporate relations professionals in higher education, communication is key. In any given week, a corporate relations pro may have a meeting with the university president, presentations at corporate functions, and videoconferences with several alumni. And in between, they may be writing a concept paper for a strategic partnership. 

To build corporate partnerships, effective oral and written communication skills are crucial. Corporate relations professionals, as well as the many advancement professionals who work with companies as part of what they do, must be able to speak and engage with a wide variety of contacts—from human resources professionals to senior leaders to alumni at any stage of their careers. In my nearly two decades in higher education corporate relations, I learned that professionally designed communications materials hold an important place in the work. As a consultant, I walk clients through a process to identify where that place is for them.

Auditing Communication

First, it’s key to assess how you’re checking in with various partners. When does an email suffice and when do you need something more sophisticated? Always a fan of efficiency, I recommend thinking about the points in time that are common to all your relationships with all corporate partners. That list might include:

• Requesting a meeting
• First meeting
• Campus visit
• Engagement opportunity
• Proposal
• Acknowledgement
• Annual check-in
• Leadership transition, either at your institution or at their company
• Award or giving society
• Relationship anniversary (five-year, 10-year, etc.)

Do a communications audit to look at the materials (print and/or web-based) that you send at those points. Consider the times when you need to present a lot of information that will likely be shared with multiple individuals. These are the instances in which a well-designed communications piece makes sense. If properly crafted, it will get and hold your corporate partner’s attention and get your point across. 

In my experience, teams that go through this audit process land on a few key communications pieces. These are a must:

• A simple landing page on the university website that tells corporate partners how the office can assist them in navigating the university for purposes like engaging students or faculty or startups, sponsoring research, recruiting students, executive education, licensing and technology transfer, or co-location at research parks.
  
  This landing page can be brief. It should always provide contact information so that the prospective partner can call or email for the information they need. If a particular function resides outside the corporate relations office, be sure to provide current contact information for a person who can help with that topic.
   
• A one-page document that provides an overview of the relationship between the company and the university. This can be in print or digital. Such a document is useful for first meetings, corporate contact transitions, and annual check-ins.
   

• An impact report. This print or digital document is helpful for annual check-ins, leadership transitions, and relationship anniversaries, and handed out at ceremonies for awards or giving societies.

   

Working With Internal Partners

Relationships with corporate partners follow the same cycle that individual giving donors work through: qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. Who at your institution supports written communications for each of these stages? In many institutions, it is the advancement communications, donor relations, or alumni affairs team, or a combination of all three. I’ve worked at institutions at which first meeting materials and proposals, for example, are supported by the advancement communications team, impact reports by the donor relations team, and giving societies by the alumni affairs team. All of them had internal resources that included graphic design (both human resources and software) that we did not have within the corporate relations team.

If you are not working with these offices, it is worth exploring whether there is a mutually beneficial path to partnership. That’s what we are always seeking with our corporate partners: the sweet spot where a company’s goals and objectives intersect with the strengths and capacity of the university. This is an approach worth taking with our internal partners as well. 

Here are a few tips on how to enter into those conversations with internal teams. (Hint: It’s not unlike how you initiate a conversation with a corporate partner!)

Do your homework. Learn what you can about the mission of the office, what its reporting structure is, what metrics it tracks, and what communications materials it produces, whether web-based or in print. The more you understand what they do, the easier it will be to identify a path to partnership.

Understand what services the office may already offer your office. In one case, I met with a donor relations office and learned that their team was struggling to get contact information for endowment reports sent to companies. Our corporate relations team and the current liaisons at the companies were unaware endowment reports were sent. We were able to work together with the advancement services team to have the “stewardship contact” field on the corporate record that we maintained automatically populate the “endowment contact” field on the endowment record. And we further partnered to move the timing of endowment reports for active corporate partners to coincide with our corporate relations office’s annual outreach activities. That lightened the reporting burden for the donor relations team for a significant number of donors.

Collect examples from peer institutions that represent what you are hoping to do. It is much easier to show someone a marketing piece than to explain it.

Have an exploratory conversation.

• Emphasize your desire to understand their operation as you figure out how to move toward designed pieces for certain points in the donor cycle. 
• Make it clear that you are interested in learning from them what they do and what their goals are, so that if there are opportunities where you can work together to meet your goals you will know what they are and be able to act on them. Talk about the fact that you are having similar discussions with other offices.
• Get a sense of whether outsourcing design or writing is standard practice, and if so, which companies they work with. Anyone they are currently using for these functions will be preapproved not only by your university, but also by your fundraising office, which makes them potential vendors for your team.

• Discuss how you want to raise the professionalism of what you offer corporate partners and are exploring whether there are some pieces you can offer that could be designed once and easily adapted for different partners. 

  For instance, I was able to work with an advancement communications office to produce a one-page template that provided an overview of a corporate relationship. It had room for an industry-appropriate photo, as well as the name of the company on the front and some boilerplate on our office. The flipside had data points of interest to the company and a description of how to work with us in each area. When we met with a new corporate partner, or a new person within an existing partner company, we supplied the advancement communications team with the name and data points for the partner (such as total philanthropic gifts, total sponsored research, number of student recruiting events, number of alumni at the company, whether they were a vendor, and whether they engaged in executive education), and they produced the document with a week’s notice.

• Discuss their priorities—what they are striving to achieve in the next one to three years—and look for areas where you might be able to assist in achieving that goal. 

  One of my peers, for example, told me in an exploratory meeting that she wanted to begin impact reporting, but she was having a tough time landing on the right donor for the first one. I was able to partner with her to produce a corporate impact report by providing support for data selection and writing with the resources we had in corporate relations. Her office provided the design, branding, and production expertise. My knowledge of our corporate partners made the selection easy; our group’s experience in writing for a corporate audience and what data matters to them combined with her office’s experience in designing and producing professional reports within university style guidelines brought us the mutual benefit. She got her first impact report; we got an excellent product that highlighted the history and promise of a strategic partnership.

Once you’ve had exploratory discussions with peer offices, create a clear one-page summary of what materials you are looking to add to the corporate relations portfolio, what offices provide similar products to internal partners, how your office currently works with those offices, and where you’ve identified an opportunity to work together. This may show you that there is no opportunity to partner internally on professional communications materials—which is also useful. You now have the information you need for a budget discussion to source the materials externally.

Tips for Effective Communications Materials for Corporate Partners

Whether you have uncovered an opportunity to partner internally or discovered the need to outsource, there are certain principles that apply to any pieces you produce.

• Speak to your audience and support others in doing the same. When someone outside the corporate relations office provides the text, include parameters for speaking to your audience in the request for the deliverable. Consider creating a style guide for working with your office. Include your preference between words like “donor” and “partner,” or preferred visuals (for instance, photos that show students in a laboratory instead of at a football game). Employ storytelling techniques. Strong corporate partnerships with higher education are all about mutual benefit—and that is always a good story.
   
• Remember that landing pages and overviews are relationship-building documents, while impact reports speak to the importance of a corporate relationship to the university. The tone and word choice of each document should reflect the corresponding depth of the relationship. You are the expert on what this audience wants to hear and you know that providing direct, clear answers to their questions is what wins the day. 
   

• Your materials should articulate the benefit to the company. While impact reports in particular will also express the university’s gratitude for the partnership, the tone of the overall report should reflect the ways in which the partnership has achieved the mutual goals laid out at the beginning of the partnership. Documents that reflect gratitude and the impact on the university without articulating the benefit to the company will not resonate with corporate partners.
   
• Keep the company’s goals in mind. As the corporate relations professional, you know when support for an event on campus is motivated by the desire for brand recognition or interest in the content of the event itself. That is vital information to the person crafting the document—it changes both the words and the visuals they will choose.
   
• Remember that links and print material are likely to be shared within the company, expanding your audience beyond the initial distribution list. Be sure that anything you create includes contact information to lead these people back to the corporate relations office.
   

Ultimately, peers in donor relations, advancement communications, and alumni affairs teams can be extremely supportive allies for corporate relations offices. Getting to know them and what they do can deepen your ability to respond to your partners’ needs. The lagniappe—my favorite New Orleans word that means “a little something extra”—is that as your peers work with you, they will also begin including the needs of corporate partners in their day-to-day interactions, organically extending your message throughout the organization.