What's your favourite partnership?

I don't know about you, but there are certain partnership examples that the Fireside team keep coming back to in conversation.

You know the ones. Someone mentions them in a meeting and suddenly everyone is nodding along because it’s just such a neat example of how corporate partnerships should work.

For us, one of those examples is the partnership between Mamas & Papas and Tommy's.

At first glance it might seem like a fairly classic fit: a baby brand partnering with a baby-related charity. Shared audience, shared mission, all very sensible.

But the part we find ourselves coming back to again and again is the problem it solves that people often don’t think about.

When you work in baby retail, you’re not just serving excited first-time parents. Sometimes you’re serving people who are grieving. Someone who has lost a child might still have to walk into a store. A grandparent might be returning items that were never used. A customer might burst into tears at the checkout.

That’s an incredibly difficult moment for customer-facing staff.

The partnership with Tommy’s helps provide the sensitivity training and awareness needed for those situations. Suddenly the partnership isn’t just a logo on a website: it’s genuinely helping staff handle some of the hardest moments their customers will experience.

And because the partnership makes so much sense, it opens the door to everything else: staff fundraising, corporate donations, awareness activity and more.

It’s a brilliant reminder that the strongest partnerships usually start with solving a real problem.

Which brings me to something we’re very excited about behind the scenes.

Last year we released our research into Why Companies Give speaking to corporate decision makers about the motivations behind corporate giving.

This year we’re turning our attention to something slightly different: How Companies Give.

With our friends at Ziptrix, we’ll be looking at which industries give to which cause areas, what good looks like in practice and some of the best partnership examples out there.

And we’d love your help.

If there’s a partnership you always come back to as an example, please send it our way. Even if you think we’ve definitely heard it before… we’d still love to hear it. If you have any questions about how companies give, send those our way too!

Finally, a quick note for anyone trying to burn a little bit of budget before the end of the year (we know how that goes).

There are still places available at the Corporate Partnerships Conference with Fundraising Everywhere, where we’ll be talking about everything from setting realistic targets through to spotting warm prospects.

If you’ve got a very specific challenge you’re trying to crack, we’re also running half-day problem solving sessions where we’ll design a workshop around one singular need.

And if you’ve been considering Ignite, there are currently three places left on the next cohort.

So if any of those have been sitting on your “I should really book that” list… this might be your sign.

If nothing else, we’d love to hear your favourite partnership examples.