Building Great Partnerships

At its core, a great partnership holds mutual benefit at heart. These kinds of partnerships can bloom anywhere for your organization—even with the company creating your floral arrangements.

American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon has formed a great partnership with their florist, Geranium Lake, for their annual Liberty Dinner event. Over the course of three years, Geranium Lake not only provided centerpieces, they were cultivated into donors because ACLU saw the opportunity to support and form a relationship with a local, woman-owned business.

This year, Geranium Lake and ACLU worked together to make the event centerpieces something donors could take with them—a parting gift since most event bouquets are one-and-done. Both the florist and the organization wanted flowers to go home with guests as a thank you for their support of ACLU, but the vases needed to stay so that they could be used again. Owner Kim Foren designed the event centerpieces to match the theme of ACLU’s event, with the event logo as a wrap around the vase. She brought the flowers in pre-wrapped bundles wrapped with a ribbon that were easy for people to pull out of the vase and take home at the end of the night. In addition, each vase had plastic bags tucked underneath it to keep the bouquets from dripping on guests in transit. While Geranium Lake could have just been a vendor for the event, through cultivation ACLU found that Kim was also passionate about their work and in addition to flowers, she came to the dinner as a donor this year.

All of this relationship building and cultivation turned into a bigger partnership when Geranium Lake stepped in with an idea to host a 3rd party event for ACLU. A snowstorm hit town right around Valentine’s Day, leaving the local flower market completely overloaded with roses they couldn’t get sold. Instead of letting them go to waste, Kim bought them and put them into bundles selling them for $20 as a benefit to ACLU instead of simply throwing them away. It was a great success, and both ACLU and Geranium Lake saw tons of social media traffic as a result of the brilliant partnership and great idea.

True partnerships come from being in relationship with your supporters. They have to feel like they’re part of your story. And when you’ve cultivated your relationships well, they think of you when they have something to give back.

Photos by KLiK Concepts and Geranium Lake