Our Services
We offer a wide range of services to help your organization, church, or nonprofit grow in a smart way. Each project is tailored specifically to your strengths and existing capacity. Our goal is to uncover the heart and vision of your organization and help you make that vision into a reality through targeted strategic planning.
Capital Campaigns
Capital campaigns are unlike any other fundraising process. They are intense, specific, fast-paced, and require a great deal of strategy and buy-in. Maximizing Excellence can support a capital campaign at any involvement level desired— the strategic planning process; feasibility analysis, messaging; finite details of tracking donations; building a process and timeline; ensuring meetings and timelines stay on track; advising capital campaign leadership; and providing volunteers with training, tools, and motivation.
Maximizing Excellence can also manage the logistical burdens of a capital campaign such as coordinating action steps, emphasizing deadlines, and supporting volunteers on behalf of the organization.
Strategic Planning
Some refer to the strategic planning process as creating a roadmap for the future. Others call strategic plans an outline or a blueprint. No matter how you describe strategic planning, it is necessary for an organization’s sustainability.
Maximizing Excellence starts the strategic planning process by analyzing an organization’s internal and external environments and how they affect the organization. Board members participate in activities that focus on vision, customer values, and how to develop key messaging. Based on this initial analysis and these activities, Maximizing Excellence helps your group focus your ideas, think through manageable steps, and develop effective strategies. Organizations walk away with a specific strategic plan targeted around measurable goals.
Messaging Development
Using our highly effective NEED, VALUE, DIFFERENTIATION process, your organization will have consistent, yet customizable, messaging that can be easily adapted to print, web, presentations, and networking conversations.
Meeting & Group Facilitation
Maximizing Excellence, LLC provides professional, neutral facilitation services. Meetings will be well organized, and results driven, ensuring all parties are engaged and feel heard throughout the process.
Annual Campaign Management
Whether an organization is looking to freshen up a current fundraising process or create a fundraiser from scratch, Maximizing Excellence can help. We educate staff and volunteers on how to successfully prepare and implement a fundraising campaign.
This can include analyzing past giving trends; developing strategies, timelines, recruitment ideas, and volunteer trainings; facilitating campaign leadership meetings; managing progress; and assessing donor tracking tools. This comprehensive approach to fundraising campaign management ensures success while equipping staff and volunteers with transferable skills that will benefit future fundraising endeavors.
Campaign Readiness Assessment
Capital campaigns and endowment campaigns are often pinnacle fundraising endeavors for nonprofits. They cast a vision for the future of an organization that requires significant donor buy-in and investment to bring it to fruition. How a campaign starts is the leading determinant of how it will end. So why not get off to the best start possible with a feasibility study? The purpose of a feasibility study is to evaluate the probability of a project’s fundraising success before it begins. A Maximizing Excellence Campaign Readiness Assessment is a feasibility study on steroids.
Our Campaign Readiness Assessment positions a campaign for its greatest chance of success by discovering three key insights:
Initial perception of the project’s vision and case.
Probable donor’s appetite for investment.
Impact of the organization’s current position and capacity.
We work hard to provide the qualitative and quantitative data you need to lead your organization confidently and make informed decisions during campaign planning. Our data analysis is rigorous, leaving no variable or special discovery unturned. The organization’s proposed strategy and current position is benchmarked against best practices to keep analysis from becoming a moving target. The outcomes leave no question unanswered.
The assessment equips your organization with perspective to determine what can be realistically accomplished and reveals the most effective strategies to reach a feasible campaign goal. The insights will craft the most effective case and ask possible.
Arguably the most valuable feature of assessment findings and the decisions made in their name is that they are inspired by your donors. Our Campaign Readiness Assessment is designed as a strategic outreach opportunity, serving as an outlet to:
- Invite participants to express their opinions openly and honestly in a confidential setting.
- Understand participant motivations and hesitations.
- Influence perceptions.
- Surface potential volunteers and lead donors.
- Assess strategy and highlight organizational or project aspects to consider strengthening.
Needs Assessments & Customized Research Projects
Our assessment and research services are designed for organizations seeking to learn more about their key stakeholders to improve effectiveness and to identify the gap between what currently is and what should be. We use descriptive and analytical research methods to bring about actionable insights and strategic solutions.
Whether through surveys, focus groups, or interviews, we take a collaborative approach to research, closely involving clients and partners throughout the process. Past clients have included health systems, chambers, and statewide advocacy organizations.
Board & Staff Trainings
Board members and staff are an integral part of an organization’s success. Maximizing Excellence can empower your organization to maximize the potential of your current staff and board while also helping you dream for the future.
Our team assists with engaging buy-in, improving internal and external communication, and influencing staff culture. All of this can be done by conducting focus groups, educating staff, facilitating team projects, and concentrating on the strengths of the people and the organization.
Board Members can benefit from training on board best practices, tactics on how to engage more partnerships, how to solicit funds, and board recruitment strategies. These trainings are a great compliment to our strategic planning process and campaign management efforts.
