Services

In the world of charitable giving, we know that 50 % of subscribers will become donors of $100/year and 1-3% of single ticket buyers will give $25. We offer consulting services to assist in helping your patrons to make that transition. One of the most effective fundraising tactics is to mail an appeal letter annually to inspire charitable giving. The objective of this letter, by design, is to solicit gifts for amounts that do not require a lot of advance planning. We refer to this as “checkbook giving.” This is not the same thing as a leadership level campaign gift, which we refer to as “asset giving.” We will walk you through this process step by step, ensuring that each and every letter mailed is done so strategically, in order to maintain and further develop your donor relationships.

Effective board leadership and governance are essential for the health of a non-profit organization. Palmer Westport Group offers many tools and resources to help find leaders for your board and maximize their support, expertise, and varying skill sets. Creating an effective board is a continual process that includes recruitment, engagement, development, and stewardship. In addition to Board development and training, will also work with your organization to facilitate board assessments and retreats, articulate board member rights, responsibilities, and commitment letters, and to set a new pace of 100% board giving.

We can assist your organization in targeting and cultivating the most influential and visionary community leaders to join your campaign team. An organization’s best chance at fundraising occurs when the right person asks at the right time, for the right amount, in the right way, for the right reason. If any one of these is incongruent with the donor, it is very easy to lessen the likelihood of receiving the gift you are seeking. All fundraising is 90% homework, 10% solicitation. Therefore having the most influential team of blue ribbon individuals is imperative for the success of a capital campaign.

The Case statement is perhaps the most important fundraising tool during a Capital Campaign. The visually compelling Case will tell the story of your project, with supplemental national context and statistics. It will highlight all of your history, organizational achievements, and collaborations with other organizations. It will articulate your project as a necessity that is truly a gift back to your community. It will inspire charitable giving because it will demonstrate that by investing in your project, the community is really investing in its self. With a multi-disciplinary artist on the Palmer Westport Group team, our Case statements visually transcend the realm of fundraising, allowing your project shine through a beautiful, colorful custom-designed presentation. We use PowerPoint so that at the completion of our engagement, you may edit the Case as needed.

The Palmer Westport Group will work with your organization to conduct a Planning or Feasibility Study, during which we will work with you, your board, other key leaders, and prospective campaign donors. The Planning Study will determine the overall readiness for an organization to take on a capital campaign. It will describe the following:

• Whether or not there is a strong enough case for giving
• Whether or not the community has confidence in the leadership of the project
• How much and how many gifts can be raised
• Whether or not the community’s top-notch leaders will take ownership of the project
• The overall strength of the organization’s capacity to take on the Campaign

We will interview 25-50 stakeholders in your community one-on-one to gather their input about your project. From their verbatim responses, we will organize data to make recommendations about how to proceed with your project.

We will work with your project’s leadership to build relationships, develop strategies to cultivate individual donors, and develop a strategy to engage the Board of Directors in the fundraising process. We offer both single day workshop-training sessions as well professional coaching and long-term fundraising consulting.

It is becoming increasingly important for non-profit organizations to be run as if they are for-profit businesses. This means that all aspects of strategic business planning are very much applicable to the non-profit sector. Palmer Westport Group specializes in creating Strategic Plans, Business Plans, and Master Plans. Our services range from single day on-site working visits to all-encompassing multi-year planning for your organization. Our recommendations are informed by both the national context as well as data collected specifically from your organization.

By utilizing data from primary and secondary market research, Palmer Westport Group can develop a customized programming slate that will be targeted at the specific interests of your potential patron base. Our team can provide a comprehensive market assessment, based upon data from the U.S. Census. We will also facilitate focus groups and phone interviews with similar venues to collect primary research data. This ensures that the programming recommendations that we make are informed by the existing behavioral habits as well as first-hand data testing.

Let Palmer Westport Group impose a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish. The processes are guided through initiation, planning, execution, control, and closing. From soup to nuts, we can work with you to ensure a healthy organizational structure is in place. Our approach is to begin by correcting the root of organizational disarray to ensure that our recommendations for project management solutions are long lasting. We can assist in assessing your existing organizational capacity, as well as articulating job descriptions for every position in your company and helping to implement an improved management structure.

The art of prospect research is one that Palmer Westport Group has found to be the most effective on a one-on-one basis. Through the interview process described in Fundraising Feasibility, we will help you construct an in-depth list of potential donors, identify the best possible solicitor for each, and develop a strategy for the most effective ask. This is generally a long-term process, during which we cultivate donors by asking for their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and objections about your project. By the time we are ready to make an ask, each prospect has been thoroughly researched and cultivated, and the project can be portrayed in a way that reflects their desires.

Palmer Westport Group can provide a one-day training seminar on how to be an effective solicitor. The training teaches how to overcome anxiety and fear over making an ask. We will work with participants to put them in the right mindset about fundraising, and give them the tools that they need to be successful. The training will include methodical call planning and organizing, systematic call appointment making, role-playing practice sessions, and a segment on the importance of prospect research. We will create custom materials for your organization to be used throughout the campaign. Our materials will contain everything you need from start to finish to make all of your important asks.