Building a partnership with a major donor

We would never think what soil and cosmetics could have in common. At the beginning of this year, the company Weleda approached us with the invitation to join the #SaveEarthsSkin project and a lot has sprouted since then. For inspiration, we’re writing about what it is like to work with such a big donor.

Weleda is a more than 100-year-old cosmetics company that was founded in Switzerland in response to a medical course given by Rudolf Steiner. It is therefore linked with our foundation by its roots in anthroposophy and biodynamic agriculture. The shape of the company has changed during the time. However, we are very happy to meet the Czech representatives of the company, because we can feel from the communication that they really care about the soil. At the same time, it is great that both Nadace Pro půdu and Weleda have a similar target group. 

The whole cooperation came about thanks to Weleda’s #SaveEarthsSkin project, where they have distributed approx. 40 000 Euro among several Czech NGOs. They liked the mission of the Nadace Pro půdu so much that almost 30 000 Euro of this amount was donated to our project the Centre Konipas - a training centre for newcomers to farming. In addition to this donation, we presented the foundation at Weleda press conference for social media influencers, and now in September we have also launched a joint donation campaign targeting Weleda customers. For every donation in this campaign, donors receive a gift from Weleda. Some say that this way of donating might not work as people donate mainly because they feel good when donating. However, in this case, the target groups were so similar that we got many new donors as a result, and existing donors were happy about this cooperation as well.

In addition to these virtual activities, Weleda employees got involved in the work on the farm, which enabled them to make contact with the land and farmers from the Centre Konipas. So we are happy about partnership with Weleda and hopefully we will be able to extend the cooperation also for the next year.