Echoing Green Orr Group partnered with Echoing Green to develop a multi-year transformative fundraising plan focused on racial equity. Echoing Green successfully raised over $75M in just 2.5 years, including two transformational 8-figure gifts, the largest gifts in Echoing Green’s history.
Challenge For more than 30 years, Echoing Green has been on the front lines of solving the world’s biggest problems. The organization identifies and selects emerging leaders with the best ideas for social innovation as early as possible and sets them on a path to lifelong impact. Echoing Green’s community of nearly 1,000 social innovators includes past Fellows like First Lady Michelle Obama, the founders of organizations like Teach for America and One Acre Fund, and public figures like Van Jones. Built and refined over three decades, Echoing Green discovers tomorrow’s leaders, today, and then funds, connects, and supports a new generation of social impact leaders. Despite its global impact and programmatic successes, Echoing Green was facing a critical challenge in operationalizing its five-year vision to grow into a $20M annual fundraising operation. This challenge was primarily driven by operational inefficiencies and the difficulty of converting prospects into donors. To overcome these hurdles and achieve its ambitious growth goals, Echoing Green engaged with Orr Group to assess its current fundraising state and develop a five-year development strategy that focused on optimizing its fundraising infrastructure, capacity, and assets with the aim of doubling its size in that timeframe.
Solution Orr Group began our work with Echoing Green in 2020 by undertaking a development assessment, where we evaluated Echoing Green’s fundraising infrastructure, capacity, and assets. As part of that work, we crafted a new case for support and provided recommendations on how to ramp up fundraising. Based on our findings, we recommended that Echoing Green launch a transformative multi-year fundraising campaign. Following the success of that effort, Orr Group has continued to partner with Echoing Green providing support around development systems and major gift/institutional fundraising.
Impact Through its Racial Equity Philanthropic Fund, Echoing Green successfully raised over $75M in just 2.5 years, including two transformational 8-figure gifts, the largest gifts in Echoing Green’s history. Echoing Green continues to attract some of the industry’s most sophisticated philanthropists. The organization’s budget has doubled since our partnership began in 2020 and together, we’ve raised over $100M.
“ As nonprofits, our constant struggle and worry is how to generate the resources we need to do the good work we're trying to do in the world? I think it is important that Orr Group bring groups of us together to think our way through it and take away learnings that allow us to do our work better. Thank you for that.” “As nonprofits, our constant struggle and worry is how to generate the resources we need to do the good work we're trying to do in the world? I think it is important that Orr Group bring groups of us together to think our way through it and take away learnings that allow us to do our work better. Thank you for that.” Cheryl Dorsey, President, Echoing Green