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Background
The Global Corporate Engagement Team (GCET) is responsible for enabling and supporting corporate engagement across the WWF network as a promising strategy for achieving conservation results. Companies control over 70% of the choices along value chains and engaging them can help tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by reducing footprint of production and consumption, advancing protection and restoration of habitats, addressing policy and government inaction, and driving systematic change across value chains. Engagement is focused primarily on transformational conservation results alongside fundraising, behavior change and policy results.
The GCET is housed within the Global Conservation Division of WWF International. The team is led by a Senior Director who works with thematic and industry experts to support corporate engagement across the network. The team consists of 12 members located across 6 locations working with over 60 local and global experts across the network to enhance collaboration and over 500 members in the corporate engagement community in the WWF network.
The GCET is implementing a three-year Corporate Engagement Strategy developed in 2023 which together with the network’s common vision, guides the delivery of corporate engagement. The strategy clarifies the common vision for corporate engagement, the value proposition and corporate offering, the priority industries, the shared expertise of the network and engagement mechanisms for local priority industries. There are also comprehensive guidelines, tools, process and governance systems including the Global corporate engagement and Partnerships Committee (GPC), a Network decision-making body reporting to the Network Executive Committee (NET), that approves international and specific local corporate partnerships to ensure they maximize conservation impact against WWF Goals. The GPC balances the programmatic, fundraising, and communications opportunities against the associated risks and ensures the implementation of the strategy across the network. Lastly there are measurement metrics beyond fundraising that measure progress and conservation impact across value proposition domains.
The evolution of the strategy was informed by a corporate survey conducted in 2021. It found that 50% of network offices have local corporate engagement strategies. And 55% of the offices only had corporate engagement fundraising targets. Most of the partnerships were reactive and not systematic. Majority of the partnerships focused narrowly on large consumer facing industries with limited engagement with high impact conservation industries. Various innovative tools had been developed for driving the conservation impact of corporate engagement but were not consolidated and systematically used across the network. Therefore the new strategy sought to strengthen the corporate engagement approach by addressing these shortcomings.
The Strategy provides a framework that supports network offices to build their own corporate engagement strategies based on their specific national and regional corporate engagement priorities, as well as mature via the various phases of corporate engagement (Phase 1: Grow Corporate fundraising and build brand; Phase 2: Build Transformational Partnerships; Phase 3: Drive Multilateral Engagements for Systemic Change).
Curently, the WWF network has about 1,500 active partnerships with a wide range of corporate partners. In FY2025, these corporate partnerships contributed CHF120 million to the network, about 15% of total donated income to the network with 80% coming from Europe and the US (similar to other NGO’s). Projections show that corporate income in traditional markets is expected to peak in next few years, requiring need to deepen existing partnerships, adapting our value proposition and to grow other new markets using selected game changers.
Purpose and objectives of the review
The WWF network is at a critical juncture in its mission towards delivering conservation impact through Roadmap 2030. Corporate partnerships have emerged as an important approach for addressing biodiversity loss through sustainable corporate value chains. However, we have seen a recent decrease in corporate funding in key markets such as the US and others, largely driven by broader market uncertainty and instability although this does not yet suggest a structural trend comparable to those observed in PSP.
The next step in the evolution of these partnerships will require significant increase (and diversification) in corporate partnerships across all regions, higher number of global partnerships and expansion into emerging markets. GCET will need to build a pipeline of both local partnerships with in-country headquartered companies and transformational partnerships that are increasingly rooted in WWF priority landscapes, while navigating ever increasing operational, brand and ethical risks.This evolution is further accompanied by growing expectations from across WWF, spanning transformation, fundraising, brand positioning and policy impact, requiring the GCET to operate across an increasingly broad and complex mandate. The GCET will also need to overcome various operational and structural challenges with partnership development, stakeholder management, siloed working methods, communication and coordination gaps with other teams/broader leadership.
This review to be conducted in an independent manner, will evaluate evaluate the effectiveness, strategic alignment, ethical integrity and sustainability of the corporate partnerships team. It will assess the challenges, identify pathways for sustainable growth and provide recommendations for potential capacity enhancement for the GCET.
The review will be guided by the following ethical considerations: openness, broad participation of key stakeholders, integrity and honesty of the process, reliability and independence to ensure valid and trustworthy findings and conclusions.
The results of the review are expected to generate recommendations and learning that WWF will use to improve/strengthen corporate engagement within the network.
Submission instructions
Subject line: “RFP – Consultancy Review Global Corporate Engagement Function – [Bidder Name]”
Deadline: 7th Aug 2026 (Fri) by 23:59 (CET)
Currency :( ie) CHF
Late submissions will not be considered.
For RFP submissions, technical and financial proposals should be submitted as separate documents.
