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We currently treat corporate donors a little differently when it comes to naming rights - most of our corporate namings have an end date baked into the gift agreement, but the individual donors do not. I've been doing some benchmarking to see if other orgs do this or if most nonprofits are treating corporate and individual donors the same when it comes to naming rights - does anyone else have a different policy for corporate donors? For example, we currently ask corporate donors to maintain their annual membership in our Corporate Philanthropy Partner program even after their major gift commitment is paid off - or else the naming comes down - I'd like to move this to the same system for individuals to make it equitable (and easier to manage!) but wondering what others' experience has been. Thank you for your help!

Hi Jocelyn,

At Emory we don't have a specific policy difference for our corporate namings, but by and large they are shorter term - there just isn't an appetite for corporations to have their name "in perpetuity". Typically we use 5 years (the length of the pledge payment), but that would like be adjusted longer if we were talking about the name of a hospital floor or wing, rather than a conference room at the BSchool. 
When we have looked into corporate namings for larger items (buildings, stadiums, etc), the length of naming was closer to 20-25 years.

Again, not a policy difference for us (our naming policy simply states "for the life of the space unless otherwise documented"), so we are just explicit in the gift agreement documents about when the name will go up and when it will come down.

Cheers,

Emily Konisky

Executive Director of Gift Operations

Emory University