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Nothing I know of would limit this contact, in fact I consider vendors one of the 7 Foundational Fundraisers for today's school foundations.
 
Vendors can and should be challenged with a donation of 1-3% or more of their gross sales to your school or district. You can check with your bookkeeper to determine this amount. 

Now, with really large corporations, you are better off checking in on whether or not they have a foundation....check their 990 records on www.guidestar.org. Actually large corporations have more available philanthropic dollars in their foundations than they have floating in advertising or marketing funds, which is where companies will pay funds donations from. So check research each company first for resource availability.

Tactics for making the ask? Check with your fellow school personnel....who has the connections with these people....board members can really help you here, as one of their most important tasks is to either identify, cultivate or solicit potential donors.

I hope this helps!
Jim

There is an old fundraising adage which goes “People don’t give because of the school’s need to have; they give based on their need to give.” Always keep the donor’s interests in mind as you fundraise. Good fund raisers must determine those interests and try to match them with the needs of your school foundation. Far too many fundraisers are done without that research, so make sure you listen and respond to potential donors first. 
         
In Tanya Drollinger’s Purdue University study, she found the following factors were characteristic of the donors in her study.

“Religious affiliation, pro-social experiences, and favorable attitudes toward charitable organizations were statistically significant and positively related to being a volunteer. Age was not significantly related to the likelihood of donating, volunteering or holding positive attitudes regarding charities.
Others have found that the people more likely to give are better educated, religious, married with children, or women. Alumni donors were found to be wealthier, middle aged or older, and emotionally tied to their alma maters.
“Volunteerism was also found to be statistically significant and positively related to donating to charity.

Above all else, remember that people give to people…. Therefore, it takes knowledgeable and passionate individuals to aptly communicate the needs of the foundation and ask for support.

In answer to your question, yes I see some possible problems with the grandparent gift, but there are also some positives as well.

First of all the problems: generally, charitable giving principles and the IRS, with its “personal benefit” clause intend that individuals should not benefit personally (at least intentionally) from a gift made to a charitable organization. The only intentional benefit should be the "warm glow" as it’s often called in the literature: the satisfaction of helping others in need. 

The grandparents in this case would appear (and of course I don’t know their intent) to be donating expecting to benefit personally from this gift in two ways:
    1. By helping their grandchild with a monetary gift, and
    2. By making a tax deductible gift as well! 

To avoid this problem: set up a scholarship oversight committee or have the school foundation board establish written guidelines governing the awarding of scholarships. Establish criteria and then solicit donations accordingly. Your criteria may be fairly broad; however such criteria must be easily governed by you with the help of a set of guidelines or directly by your "scholarship oversight committee". 

For example, a scholarship for seniors wishing to major in secondary education is established by the school foundation, the grandparents donate, and if the grandchild happens to qualify, that's okay, but the scholarship awarding decision/activity should not be left to the grandparents. Scholarship merit, determination and awarding should be controlled by a third party: a neutral and unbiased committee following a specific set of guidelines. 

If you are responsible for awarding these scholarships, then you must follow a pre-written and approved set of guidelines which meet “charitable deductibility” standards of foundation. You may ask an attorney or CPA familiar with tax deductible procedures to review your guidelines before you publish your scholarship intentions with your community. The last thing you want is to damage or jeopardize your 501(c) (3) not for profit status with the IRS and the associated benefit of offering tax deductibility to donors.

Now the positives: These people want to donate so get to know them a bit more, learn of their interests. Perhaps they have a passion for preparing future secondary teachers and could get behind a campaign to develop such a scholarship.  There may be great donor potential here, so becareful not to quench any interest in giving to your foundation.

Hope this helps, please call if you have more questions or concerns.