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Charity partnership - Unilever and the NCT
By Gordon Carson, Third Sector, 6 July 2010
Nearly New Sales are the single largest source of funds for the parenting organisation
For the best collaboration between a company and a charity for mutual benefit
HIGHLY COMMENDED
- Sky and Global Action Plan
FINALISTS
- The Co-operative Group and RNID
- Precycle Group and Age UK
- Royal Bank of Scotland and Macmillan Cancer Support
The scale of Unilever's three-year sponsorship of the NCT's Nearly New Sales is huge, involving 1,000 events, 500,000 customers and the distribution of 750,000 branded materials. But for the judges, the strategic partnership between the two organisations stood apart from the rest of the entries not only for its size, but also for the benefits it delivered to both parties, who have worked together for 10 years.
For Unilever, the alliance exposed its brands to hundreds of thousands of potential customers through its association with a well-known and respected maternity specialist. The NCT benefited from the savvy of Unilever's brand and procurement managers, who worked with the trust's commercial and branch fundraising teams, and its marketing, design and website staff, to develop the partnership.
Nearly New Sales are the NCT's single largest fundraiser and are an affordable way for new parents to buy products they need for their babies or for other parents to sell products they no longer need. The events are run by 12,000-plus volunteers in the NCT's network of more than 300 branches in the UK.
Unilever's Persil Non-Bio and Comfort Pure brands sponsored the events, which distributed 200,000 co-branded bags, 125,000 product samples and 40,000 branded reusable bags each year. The NCT also ran an online survey linked to a competition to win a year's supply of Persil Non-Bio.
This also provided perhaps the clearest statement to Unilever of the potential commercial gains in the partnership; 90 per cent of participants in the survey answered "yes" or "maybe" when asked if the partnership made them more likely to buy the sponsoring brands.
Meanwhile, the sponsorship has provided unrestricted income for the charity after the costs of events are met. The help from Unilever also enabled the volunteers to run events more professionally, use more effective promotional materials and spend less time sourcing local donations of items such as carrier bags and banners to support the sales.
One of the category's judges was Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Mandate Communications, the headline sponsor of the Business Charity Awards. He said the partnership between Unilever and the NCT triumphed because it best met three main criteria: Unilever felt the alliance had aided its business; NCT was able to achieve something it would have been unable to do on its own; and creativity was embedded in the joint approach.
"It felt there had been thought put into the partnership as it was established," he said. "The aims of both organisations resonated with each other. That's something that makes partnerships enduring. We were incredibly impressed."
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