Advancing the Greater Good
OUR RESULTS
The Leukemia Research Foundation’s mission is to find a cure for leukemia, raising millions to fund innovative research and support patients and families.
The Impact
As a result of the funder research, LRF received several significant grants within a few months. Long-term, the most far-reaching impact of the LRF’s work with AltruNext was the creation of the major gifts program, which will ensure ongoing funding into the future.
The steps that AltruNext took to create the major gifts program left the LRF with systems and processes that set them up for long-term success. These steps included:
-
Identifying prospects
-
Creating portfolios
-
Defining moves management opportunities
-
Creating accountability structures
-
Clarifying recordkeeping in their CRM
-
Confirming key major gift messaging
Key Project Elements
-
Organizational Assessment
-
Policy and Procedure Review
-
Staff and Board Coaching
-
Prospect Research
The Client
The Challenge
The LRF had too many donors who were “one and done.” They wanted a way to develop relationships with top corporate and family foundation prospects whose missions aligned with that of the LRF in order to expand their funding. They also needed to develop a major gifts program to help explain the impact of transformational gifts.
With a development team of only one in-house person, the LRF needed a team of people to invest the time required to get these efforts off the ground. They enlisted the help of AltruNext.
The Collaboration Process
In the first phase of the project, AltruNext helped the LRF identify opportunities with corporations and family foundations that they were not tapping into from a grant perspective at the time. This required extensive time and research.
“Kristin asks a lot of great questions—if you really want to create a successful program, you need to ask questions and listen. She’s great at doing that. Once she listened, she could identify our pain points were and where we had opportunities to grow.” ~Cindy Kane
Once identified, AltruNext compiled helpful information about each prospect, such as their timeline for proposal submission and their giving focus. This allowed LRF to review all of the information and make priority decisions about which relationships to pursue
Then, AltruNext collaborated with LRF to build a customized “curriculum” to establish a major gift program from scratch.
The team identified and assessed major gift prospects, created cultivation opportunities, defined solicitation strategies and stewardship opportunities, and made honest assessments about the infrastructure of the organization to determine whether they had the capacity to do what they wanted to do.
Over several months of training and coaching, LRF was able to put into place a new process for major gifts that would help maximize their ROI and build the organization’s sustainability.
“The training was extremely organized… taking everyone through the process, recapping, providing great tools. She understood that there’s a big difference between a large institution and a development staff of one, and she could tailor it to meet our needs.” ~Cindy Kane
​
​
“Her role was very helpful–not only as a consultant but as a teacher. She was meeting us where we were in terms of basic and fundamental things. She talked about board roles and responsibilities, she asked us a lot of questions to uncover our strengths and weaknesses.”
~Cindy Kane/ Director of Development/ Leukemia Research Foundation