Client Services and Benefits

We help organizations realize their growth potential by offering a range of proven services that identify unique challenges and develop strategies for long-term improvement.

Organizational Assessment

Accurately discovering your organization’s unique strengths, weaknesses and underutilized assets is a necessary prelude to prescribing the steps for healthy growth.

We help organizations realize their full effectiveness and growth potential by offering a range of proven services that help to discover your unique challenges and develop executable solutions for long-term improvement.
Our individualized Organizational Assessments help clients assess their potential and address obstacles that limit them.

Involving an extensive process of research, employee interviews, analysis and strategic thinking, our Organizational Assessments provide a detailed executable plan for achieving your core mission in compelling and productive ways. Individually-tailored assessments cover these various areas:

Leadership
Development
Communications

Integrated Communications

Defining your corporate position, identity, and message is far more than finding an eye-catching logo or developing a snappy catch phrase for your materials. Clear organizational identity is the result of a process that ensures that who you say you are and what you claim you are doing, is in alignment with your mission and program activities.

We help you develop a message that clearly reflects who you are, what you do, and what your promise is to your audience. Then we help you incorporate this identity into a fully-integrated range of internal and external communications and marketing activities.

Strategic Ideation Process

Mission is the unique calling your organization fulfills, while positioning and
products are the marketable components of your mission that donors
identify with and support.

Whether your product offerings are ideas, materials, or services, they are your primary purpose and your mostpowerful link to donors. Your growth potential requires clearly defining your unique market position and donor relevant products, that resonate and connect with donors’ deepest values and needs.

This is achieved through the implementation with your key team of a Strategic Ideation Process, wherein we guide you through a step-by-step intuitive process including:

• Internal team Discovery Survey
• One-on-one team interviews
• External telephone interviews and/or meetings with defined constituencies
• On-site session, including planning, theme, and facilitation
• Strategic Ideation summary, key takeaways, and go- forward recommendations
• Identification of your:
  • Brand Demand
  • Brand Depth
  • Brand Desire
  • Brand Statement
  • Brand Promise
  • Brand Visuals
  • Brand Voice and Message

Non-Traditional Relational Marketing

Our pioneering projects with recognized leaders and well-known celebrities
(including musicians, authors, speakers, experts, and professional athletes) as well as our techniques for developing volunteer representatives have transformed the non-profit marketplace.

We can show you how to recruit, train and support a high-impact team of donor-advocates who take your message to new audiences in powerful, productive, and long-lasting ways.

Marketing Services

Once you have clearly defined your market positioning and core identity,
and developed product and packaging in ways that will encourage your
donors to respond, it is time to think about taking your product out into the
marketplace and recruiting as many new donors as you can.

The Elevation Group can help you develop a strategy that balances your marketing efforts, focusing your energy on the most profitable activities.

We will also help you enhance the effectiveness of those efforts by developing enduring relationships with individual donors, moving them from perhaps little or no awareness of what you do to becoming active donors and ultimately “citizens” of and advocates for your organization.

Product Development

Presenting your mission and programs into an overcrowded marketplace in ways that encourage and enhance donor response is both a science and an art.

Our staff has significant experience and success taking organizational activities and services, and packaging them into marketable continuity products that your supporters can easily identify with and
support.

Realizing your growth potential requires defining those products and packaging them in ways that build affinity with your audience. We will help you develop the most appropriate way to present your programs in a product-focused manner.

Communication Services

Execution of a fully incorporated, ongoing communications program
involves prudent use of suitable tools and services. Utilizing expertise in
the following areas, we will help you develop the right mix of resources to
achieve desired results and impact in the following areas:

• Identity Design
• Brochures
• Newsletters
• Direct Mail Appeals
• Websites
• Audio/Visual Productions
• Promotional Materials

Public and Media Relations

While many organizations pursue reactive approaches to public relations,
we can help you embrace a proactive approach that gets your message
out to as many defined audiences as possible.

Increased visibility and a positive public image will not only increase your potential pool of donors, but we will also help increase the effectiveness of marketing efforts and enable you to share your story with a world that is seeking good news.

We can help you create and craft those messages your organization
should deliver to varied audiences, and we can develop the activities and distribution networks to get the word out. This includes:

• Media relation strategies (editors, reporters and media outlets that would be a good match for your messages)

• Press releases and press conferences

• Ongoing strategies for positive and proactive public
  and media relations

• Crisis planning and management

• Press kits

• Community activities (celebrations, open houses, anniversaries, etc.)

Foundation Grant Administration

Non-profit organizations know the benefits of corporate and private foundation grants but often experience many challenges working through the entire development cycle. By effectively balancing your overall fund development endeavors, a strong grant administration program can serve
your organization well into the future.

The Elevation Group provides hands-on leadership in this complex and time consuming area of development that includes prospect research, strategy to approach the right foundation, relationship management, evaluation process, and packaging organizational programs for a foundation audience.

We not only help remove the mystery from an effective grant program, we will empower your team to manage the process successfully in the future.

Case Statement Development

An organization’s case for support serves as a foundational document for
all other fund development endeavors. Through a confirmed clear vision
and set of compelling needs, The Elevation Group will work with your team
to create a strong, persuasive, and understandable case statement that
guides the reader from the organization’s reason for establishment to
specific areas of financial need that accomplish your objectives.

We illuminate the societal need that your organization meets, your unique
objectives and activities as well as the measurable benefits that warrant
donor investment.

Major Donor Development

High-capacity givers are essential to your growth and require the highest
level of personal attention and accountability. We help you create practical
and effective strategies for developing major donors, sharing your mission
with them and deepening their commitment to the work you do.

Additionally, we will help you craft the right approach to meet their
increased expectations and communication needs. When managed well,
your major donor program should develop a group of highly committed
families and individuals that become your greatest advocacy group for
extending the reach of your message and mission.

Capital Campaigns

Whether you’re seeking funds for a brick-and-mortar building or a virtual
storefront, we’ll guide you through campaign feasibility studies, leadership
structure, and overall campaign implementation. As you move from vision
to reality we’ll help you increase current donations, develop new donors
interested in leaving a legacy, and broaden your donor base.

Corporate Sponsorship

By combining business smarts, marketing savvy, public relations sensitivity, and venture philanthropy we can help make cause-based marketing, traditional corporate sponsorships, and corporate philanthropy an important part of your fund development mix.

Whether it’s packaging your unique cause or demonstrating its benefits to corporate and/or non-profit partners, we’ll help you develop mutually beneficial corporate relationships that honor your organization’s values.

Donor Research and Analysis

Organizations that take donors for granted are neglecting one of their most valuable resources. We can help you understand who your donors are, what they care about, how they feel about your image, approach, and products.

Equipped with accurate “donor intelligence” you can serve existing supporters better, while targeting your marketing efforts to felt needs that increase response and lower acquisition costs.

Technology Integration

Technology is a vital component of a smooth running and efficient organization. However, it is often implemented without a cohesive strategy to fully integrate and leverage it across multiple departments and activities.

We can help you identify the appropriate technology solution for your needs and objectives and assist you with an implementation strategy that results in full integration with marketing, development, and donor management.

Our expertise and focus is in the following applications:

• Donor/Contact management
• Website development
• E-Commerce
• Electronic communications
• Database solutions
• Accounting systems