Sometimes evolution, sometimes revolution, Fairmount’s strategic planning engages clients in a deliberate process that generates, synthesizes, and translates ideas into actionable plans that lead to financial resources.
We tackle what’s keeping you up at night:
- What ideas can reinvigorate and jumpstart your future?
- How do you respond to shifts in public policy and funder priorities?
- How can you stand out in a crowded market?
Through fact-finding, inquiry, and stakeholder engagement, Fairmount devises achievable plans based on evidence-based practices and models that are customized to your unique mission, values, and service needs.
Nonprofits require increasingly sophisticated resource development strategies. Fairmount’s outsourced counsel helps you navigate shifts in funder priorities, build fundraising culture, achieve transformational campaigns, and identify new supporters for the future.
Fairmount’s approach has raised more than $800,000,000 to propel our clients’ growth. We are expert in:
- Annual giving campaigns, membership, and developing impactful cases for support.
- Grantwriting strategy and management for institutional philanthropy and the public sector.
- Feasibility assessment and hands-on strategic counsel for capital, fund, and endowment campaigns that get you to the goal.
- Major donor prospecting, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship support.
- Training and tools to turn board and volunteers into passionate advocates for giving.
Our experience shows that organizations with a compelling vision and strong record of service can raise more money — even without a “power board”. Fairmount leverages your passion for the mission with our decades of fundraising expertise to realize success.
Selecting the next leader is an existential moment: who do we want to be as an organization? Beyond hard skills expertise, how do we find the person who embodies our aspirations, values and culture?
Fairmount is not your typical search firm. Having worked closely with hundreds of executives on an ongoing basis, we are deeply enmeshed in the nonprofit sector, and have a rich understanding of the context in which nonprofit leaders operate. We are able to identify and evaluate the readiness of candidates to not just interview well, but to deliver.
Fairmount leverages our networks and knowledge of the nonprofit sector to:
- Define the essential characteristics of the next leader
- Source, recruit and screen candidates across diverse sectors and demographics
- Develop and facilitate interactive interviews that model how the executive would lead
- Conduct reference checks from our trusted network
You might be doing things right, but are you doing the right things? Fairmount helps you gain a clear understanding of your programs’ effectiveness in light of evolving community needs and funding markets.
Fairmount’s strength lies in our ability to translate data and analysis into practical, actionable programs in the real world and in real time. Our program design and assessment services include:
- Systems assessment
- Collective impact planning and facilitation
- Environmental and best practices analysis
- Stakeholder survey design and analysis
- Focus group design and facilitation
Through data-driven strategy and assessment that are informed by our deep understanding of public policy, philanthropy, and national best practices, we help clients move from the problem statement to an effective response that gets at the root of community’s needs, engages optimal partners, and offers a framework for measuring impact and securing new resources.
Focusing on your mission can deliver revenue for your organization. Fairmount applies research, organizational dynamics, and funding know-how to craft data-driven business plans that advance mission and support sustainable programs and core operations.
Our market-based approach:
- Evaluates the market opportunity and competition.
- Identifies earned and contributed revenue sources.
- Generates and test financial models to ground plans in market reality.
- Determines what shifts in organizational structure, culture and personnel may be critical to success.
The outcome? A practical and achievable business plan that fuses current strengths, program innovation and best practices that chart a path to reach new markets, decrease reliance on traditional revenue sources, and position your nonprofit as a sector leader.
The ability to join forces with a like-minded or complementary organization can optimize impact, increase capacity, and enhance your organization’s reach. It can also be scary. Fairmount helps you navigate uncharted waters.
With skilled evaluation, communications, and logistics experience, Fairmount has long been a leader in helping nonprofits:
- Consider if, why, what, and how an affiliation is the optimal path
- Identify potential partners and conduct confidential outreach
- Quickly determine if the relationship makes sense
- Facilitate discussions concluding in a terms sheet
- Conduct due diligence and test ideas with stakeholders
- Formalize agreements in conjunction with legal counsel
- Develop implementation and communications plans
Fairmount’s long history in exploring and facilitating a wide range of collaborations, strategic alliances, partnerships, joint ventures, affiliations, and mergers helps guide our clients to the next level of impact.