Nonprofit Planning, Marketing, Fundraising, and Search.
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Nonprofit Planning, Marketing, Fundraising, and Search. |
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| Intro | Services | Clients | Results |
Questions are our business. Here are some of the questions we are most frequently asked. Feel free to ask a new question of Results Group if you don't find the information you were looking for here.
| Question: | What can Results Group do for me that I can't do for myself? I think I know the steps our organization needs to take. |
| Answer: | If you're typical, you have had experience with perhaps five to ten nonprofits in your career, often most of them in the same segment of the nonprofit sector. Senior Results Group consultants bring to your project decades of collective in-depth on-the-front-lines experience with more than 150 nonprofit organizations. We haven't just talked about achieving income, we have met aggressive income goals year after year within the under-resourced and under-staffed situations typical to most nonprofits. We've been through your situation several times, within several different types of nonprofit management models. In many cases, our role as consultants is to deliver messages to top management that wouldn't be properly heard were you to deliver them. Bad news, for example, is best delivered by us as outsiders, so your role can remain positive and oriented toward making the solutions work. The voice of an objective outside expert is a powerful one, and we can often achieve concensus more quickly and more completely for you. Finally, consider how difficult change of any kind is for an organization. As consultants, we are indeed objective. When you say you need more staff, some Board members will say, "Oh, (s)he always wants more staff." When we say the same thing, backing it up with facts and figures, you typically get more staff. Key players in your leadership and your constituency will say things to us that they will not or cannot say to you. These same players will listen to an objective recommendation differently from yours. What we can do for you that you cannot do for yourself is to bring key facts to light and to achieve concensus among your top leadership sufficient to make change and progress possible. |
| Question: | I've been burned before by expensive consultants who are all smoke and mirrors. Are you really different, and if so, how? |
| Answer: | We have many clients who contend that their experience working with us is a dramatic improvement over their consultant experiences in the past. We take our name quite seriously. We deliver income results for our clients, and we do this in part by making sure the goals are clearly defined at the top of the project. We will be happy to provide references from our client list who can attest to our successful track record of meeting our client's needs since 1982. Our clients come almost exclusively from past satisfied clients, in the form of direct referrals and repeat business. We believe this is one measurable indicator that somebody out there is happy with our work. Finally, we are quite different in our staff structure. Our senior consultants are the individuals who will present your proposal, kick off your work and work alongside you throughout your project. We limit our workload to the number of projects which can receive this personalized attention from our senior partners, and we keep our junior staff members behind the scenes. With us, you won't meet with an impressive senior consultant and suddenly find yourself working with a twenty-something associate. We hear those stories, too. We'd be delighted to provide you with a top quality consultant. |
| Question: | Is there a better or a worse time organizationally to consider using a consultant? |
| Answer: | Perhaps the best time for outside counsel is when things are going very well and you wish to explore your best future opportunities. But we seldom get calls like that... Typically, we are called in at times of stress or times of change. When an organization is looking at a major investment that needs to be funded (like a capital campaign), or a major shift in direction (like switching a program focus, recovering from losing a major funder, or launching a new fundraising area). Often we can be extremely helpful when the established ways of doing things begin to fail you, when they just don't work as well as they used to. These elements tend to be symptoms of more widespread change needed within the organization. Typically at these points, the questions are very clear to you, but the answers are not. Because we can focus on your issues without the distractions of your day to day operations, we can deliver the time-consuming work of compiling data, identifying trends and mapping out solutions. This is labor intensive work that requires intense concentration, something that's hard to come by when you're up to your eyeballs in the daily operations needs of your department. The only "worst" time to enbage a consultant is when things have become so crisis-driven that no resources are left with which to turn around the crisis. Like a doctor, we can help most when we are called early in a crisis or to help with positive planning rather than reacting to needs. |
| Question: | What about executive search? I've done many searches. Why should I consider engaging you for a search? |
| Answer: | Many of our searches are performed for existing clients who reason that we know their needs, their resources and their 'corporate culture' so well that we can be of significant help in identifying not just candidates, but the right candidates. We also have a strong rolodex of contacts and colleagues who are "sources" during a search. While we do recommend advertising, we also actively use these sources to zero in on the right person for you. The sheer physical work of completing a search is for some clients the best reason for taking this task off their over-loaded desks and farming it out. In our experience with Director level positions, more than 85% of the resumes received are not competitive for the position. Of the remaining 15%, several hours of conversation and background checking are required before the best candidates are ready for interviews. Our role as search consultants is to act as your and your Search Committee's right hand in doing the long and arduous task of tracking down leads toward the very best candidates you can attract. |
| Question: | What are the biggest opportunities today for nonprofits to "grow" new income dollars? |
| Answer: | Over all, we would say development of mid-range gift, major gift and planned gift opportunities. These opportunities represent the upper levels of your relationships with your constituents, and for most nonprofits these are relatively undeveloped. Mid-range and major gifts offer perhaps the strongest opportunities. We often focus on annualized gifts to the general operating budget, as these are always the hardest dollars for any nonprofit to raise. An investment in these areas can have a significant effect on your bottom line. Initial investments typically begin to pay off within 18 months of launch, while we recommend a three year scenario for full return on investment in these areas. We would be happy to show you some of the specific results we have been able to achieve with our past clients, or to provide an assessment of your opportunities in these areas. |
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