CASE STUDY
Andrew Fleet learned how to assign fundraising responsibilities to his small staff in a way that was focused, efficient, and effective at raising more money through one-on-one coaching and training. This led to the financial growth required to hire their fundraising staff member within a year!
Andrew Fleet, Executive Director
Growing Chefs! Ontario
Andrew Fleet is the Executive Director of a charity that unites chefs, growers, educators, and community members in children’s food education projects across Ontario. They have a revenue of $1.1M per year and wanted to offer more services across more school boards as well as increase advocacy efforts at a policy level. Andrew knew they couldn’t grow the organization in this way or hire their first fundraising staff member before making their current fundraising operation more streamlined and increasing the revenue with the current staff team.
At the same time, he knew his current staff team was operating at capacity. There were simply no more hours in the day to add more fundraising tasks to anyone’s plate. He knew he needed to implement automations through technology, reduce redundancies, and find high-net worth volunteers existing donors willing to make introductions and help ask for donations.
Unfortunately, some of his board directors felt like if they hadn’t made progress with the things they had tried in fundraising before, and trying harder wouldn’t make a difference, which was preventing them from making changes that would increase revenue.
Andrew became aware of Growth & Co. through one of his board directors who was advocating for fundraising enhancements at Growing Chefs! and had worked with Larissa on another project.
Andrew scheduled a call with Growth & Co. and Larissa helped him pinpoint exactly what strategy he should implement so that his board could overcome their hesitancy and his organization could create a plan that would help them achieve their fundraising goals in a specific timeline. This included providing facilitated training to his board about fundraising strategies they were unaware of to ensure they were comfortable moving forward with completing an audit of the current fundraising operation and staff team and building a fundraising plan that would work for their size.
One of the most important strategies Andrew learned about during his coaching sessions was the creation of a fundraising committee compiled of high networth donors and others who had access to significant sources of funding. Creating this committee increased his person-power without adding additional salary costs to his budget, and opened doors to people who could make multi-figure gifts to the organization
Following our coaching, Andrew invited donors to participate in providing feedback about their experiences as donors as part of a fundraising audit. This resulted in donors replying that they would be happy to participate, as well as send in additional donations. One donor confirmed that they decided to match the donation amount of their family member who decided to also become a donor! As a result of the coaching with Growth & Co., Andrew had new ways to engage donors that were efficient for his team and also resulted in extra revenue.
As Andrew said about our work on the fundraising audit, plan, and case for support,
“Larissa is exceptionally knowledgeable about fundraising, but is also willing to listen and learn about the organizations she is working with to ensure that the knowledge she shares and strategies she creates will be applicable and relevant. Her personalized approach makes the work she does incredibly effective and impactful. She is also very mindful of working with clients who tend to be overworked and stretched thin. She is flexible in her approach to her work to ensure her clients can best utilize her time and expertise. I can not recommend Growth & Co. enough and hope we will have more opportunities to work with them in the future.”
A year after our work together, Andrew was able to get the organization into a financial position that enabled him to hire the organization's fundraising staff member, Paige. Andrew promptly contacted Growth & Co. to have them provide the Fundraising Intelligence training and coaching program to their new staff member. During this service, Andrew wrote to Larissa:
'I am following your updates as you send them. I am thrilled with how Paige is doing and how things are going generally. This whole scenario has turned out so well to date. HUGE thank you!'
Fundraiser Paige added,
"I appreciate these group calls more than you know, they are very much needed and appreciated!"