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Corporate sponsorships, donations and grants make up approximately $3 billion worth of funding to the charitable sector in Canada (Corporate community investment practices, motivations and challenges (CSBCC) pp. 1). The following list of resources focuses on corporate community investment in charities and nonprofits, mainly development and fundraising through sponsorship, donations & grants, gifts in kind or employee volunteerism.

General Research

Research in this area in Canada is still very much in development. These are recent reports on the Canadian context:

• Insights for strategic corporate fundraising (Ayer, 2010)  [available online]
• Corporate community investment practices, motivations and challenges : findings from the Canada Survey of Business Contributions to Community (CSBCC) (Hall et al. 2008) [in print only]. Read the Executive Summary.
• Business contributions to Canadian communities : findings from a qualitative study of current practices  (Hall et al. 2007) [available online]
• A great book on this topic, Beyond good company : next generation corporate citizenship (Googins et al. 2007) [in print only], provides insight into where corporate citizenship is going.

Understanding Corporate Donors

Communicating with your donors, anticipating their needs, recognizing those that have the capacity to deliver gifts, and making it easy for them are identified as most important in raising funds (Donor centered fundraising : how to hold on to your donors and raise much more money (Burk, 2003) pp 96-112 [in print only]). Facts that outline the corporation’s experience:

• motivations to give are both because “it’s good for business” (increasing image, customer base, etc.) but also because “it is a good thing to do” (CSBCC pp. 29 )
• corporations have an interest in identifying unique niches for their contributions (CSBCC pp. 29)
• choosing where to give and tracking the impact of their donations (both for the community and their own business improvement) is challenging for corporate donors (CSBCC pp. 21-22)

Sponsorship, Cause Marketing & Gifts in Kind

• Cause-marketing for nonprofits : partner for purpose, passion, and profits  (Daw, 2006) [in print only]
• Mutual interest : options for cause-related marketing with the mutual fund industry : an interactive template for the voluntary sector. (2002) [available online]
• Canadian Heritage partnering framework : a corporate sponsorship toolbox.  (Canadian Heritage: 2002).
• Achieving sponsorship success : advice and tools for association executives  (Brown & Brown, 2006) [in print only]
• Regulations on reporting gifts in kind and other types of donations: see Charity Tax tools website “Gifts and Receipting” section

Agreements and Sample Policies

Here are some sample gift receiving, sponsorship and gift giving policies and agreements to use as guidelines (N.B. these have not been officially authorized by any party other than the authoring organization)

• Corporate Sponsorship Policy - Canadian Public Health Association

Corporate Volunteerism

Charity Village has a great number of articles on this topic on their Corporate Philanthropy and Volunteerism page.

Finding information on businesses in Canada

To stay on top of the corporate community there are a number of resources available to allow you to track the businesses where they are, financials and other public information.

• Imagine Canada’s Caring Company program: Companies in our program give at least one percent of their pre-tax profits to support at least one community investment project in their community, and publish one page of information about their corporate citizenship initiatives each year. See the list of participants here.
• Canadian Directory to Foundations and Corporations Online (by subscription). The fully bilingual, searchable Directory includes information on over 200 corporate giving programs.
• SEDAR provides access to most public securities documents and information filed by public companies. Search for publicly traded Canadian companies in their database.
• The Canadian Business Resource provides a database to Canadian businesses and executives.