Prospect Park Alliance Most recently, Prospect Park Alliance engaged with Orr Group for a second time to provide campaign management services, helping to raise $55 million to date.
Situation Founded in 1987 to help restore Brooklyn’s flagship park after a long period of deterioration and decline, Prospect Park Alliance (PPA) is the nonprofit organization that sustains “Brooklyn’s Backyard.” Working in partnership with the City of New York, PPA employs staff and deploys its resources to maintain and develop the Park as an urban sanctuary for the diverse communities that call Brooklyn home. PPA built up a database of over 10,000 supporters and friends of the Park that serves as a crucial resource for its fundraising efforts. To increase development outreach, PPA retained Orr Group to develop and prioritize a prospect pipeline, including a wealth-screen analysis of PPA’s current database.
Solution Over the course of the engagement, Orr Group conducted various streams of prospect research to identify current and potential donors for PPA. This resulted in a pipeline of 100 top prospects for cultivation and stewardship. To better manage existing and new relationships with donors, Orr Group introduced and implemented a moves management system for PPA. Orr Group assigned ask strategies to each of the identified top prospects and separated the individuals into partners, endowment and campaign prospects. Orr Group then presented a final report with key strategies for ongoing cultivation and solicitation. This included leadership and board engagement strategies, briefing events, and sample appeals for PPA to utilize with potential prospects. Following our initial work with PPA, the organization PPA undertook a feasibility and planning study for their proposed $100M campaign. As a result of the planning study, one of the key recommendations was to increase PPA’s donor pipeline as very few prospects were identified at the seven-figure level. PPA recognized the need to identify and cultivate several new major gift prospects in order to achieve its goals. Additional findings also concluded that PPA needed to transform their campaign vision into a real and focused case for support that will better showcase the organization.
Impact As PPA prepared to address these challenges and move into the next phase of the campaign, PPA re-engaged with Orr Group for a second time to provide campaign management services with the goal of increasing annual funds, growing endowment support, and funding capital improvements to the Park’s buildings and landscapes. To date, we have helped raise $55 million towards the campaign goal. Our familiarity with PPA, extensive experience designing and managing transformational fundraising campaigns, and knowledge of the Manhattan and Brooklyn philanthropic communities made us well positioned to assist PPA in elevating its fundraising capacity.