Corporate Partnerships

How to Support our Work

There are a number of ways in which your organisation can support our work, but they usually fall into one of the five categories below:

• Put a team together to Fundraise for us at The Big Sleep Easy or another fundraising event
• Sponsor one of our fundraising events or projects
• Invite staff to Volunteer at one of our projects or fundraising events
• Donate directly to support our work
• Select us as your Charity of the Year and create a partnership plan for the year ahead

Fundraise for Us

Participate in our annual “Big Sleep Easy” fundraiser. Local businesses put teams together, raise funds and ‘sleep rough so that others don’t have to’. It’s a fantastic event for everyone involved. Click here to find out more.

You may wish to:

SkyDive, do a sponsored run or cycle ride

Organise your own event? See these fab ideas for inspiration:

• Wine tasting, or cheese and wine matching evening
• Treasure hunt, Easter Egg hunt
• Classic cake sale, or a Bake Off style competition
• Pub quiz or a comedy night – raising money can still be funny
• Offer office massages – ‘desk de-stress’

For more ideas click here

Sponsor an Event or Project

We are very grateful to any business that would like to sponsor an event or project; Lester Aldridge and Barchester Care Home, Parley Place were kind enough to sponsor our Big Sleep Easy launch event in spring, for example. Other companies have been good enough to supply us with complimentary goods, services or materials, such as Travis Perkins, Store and Secure, Dominos and Tesco Branksome have done for our school Sleep Easy events.

We’d obviously also welcome the security of a business sponsoring an entire project. The difference such a sponsorship would make to The Chatterboxes, our Holiday Clubs or our Child Contact Centre, for example, could not be overstated. So, if you are interested in an association with a particular project or venue, please let us know.

Invite Staff to Volunteer

Some companies provide corporate volunteer days in which they pay staff as normal but encourage them to choose a charity to support with their time. One such example is where staff from Nationwide Building Society have recently helped us to redecorate the residents’ lounge in our hostel.

Whether it’s redecorating, gardening, staffing an event or offering specific skills to help the people we support, there are plenty of ways in which businesses – both small and large – can support our work through staff volunteering.

PKF – Francis Clarke are currently in discussion re doing a gardening day at Sandyholme, Studland.

Donate to Us

The simplest way to support our work is to donate to us. With official funding and grants in short supply, we are hugely grateful for donations, such as the £500 from construction company Watkin Jones Homes earlier this year.

You can view our various donation options here or you can donate online now.If you do decide to donate, please let us know so that we can share the news and send you a proper ‘thank you’.

Select us as your Charity of the Year

Selecting a local charity as your company’s ‘charity of the year’ provides a clear message as to who you are supporting and a focused approach to fundraising. This year, we are grateful to Sturminster Marshall Golf Club who have chosen this option and have held a golf day and smaller fundraising events.

If you are interested in working with us in this way, please get in touch and we can give you plenty of ideas and all the materials and support you need to make it happen.

Benefits

Your reasons for supporting our work may have more to do with your personal beliefs and a desire to make a difference than the advantages your company gains from doing so, whether it be tax relief, staff-retention and morale, team-building or publicity.

However, it is interesting to note that a survey by Foresters found that 82 per cent of respondents said their decision between two companies offering the same service would be affected by whether a company engaged with charities and its local community. People like companies who are… well… nice!

Thank you

Where corporate partnerships are concerned, we believe in the power of publicity, both to raise awareness of issues such as homelessness and as an example to encourage other businesses and organisations to support their communities and charities which provide them with support.

For that reason, unless a company specifically asks us not to, we will maximise the public relations benefits our partners receive through the use our press contacts, social media, websites, events and promotional material. We will tell our supporters and the local community about the support we receive because we believe in saying ‘thank you’.

Get in Touch

If you would like to explore how your business or organisation could support our work, please contact our Head Of Fundraising – Christopher Wakefield FIH on the form below or call him directly on 07871 855184.