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.