Tim Angbrandt, a BVU Fellow, worked with Adoption Network Cleveland on a year-long project to expand their outreach efforts. The Executive Director, Bestie Norris, provides details on Tim’s impact below.
How did your fellow help your organization’s bottom line?
Our BVU fellow, Tim Angbrandt, worked almost weekly on coaching, facilitating, and developing our capacity to expand our nonprofit’s outreach. This work is transitioning now from discussion and planning to executing outreach efforts. It may be premature to answer from the goal post of a bottom line. We can say that our fellow helped provide strong professional development and direction to our team as he led us to consider the impact of outreach. He pushed us to consider and address what we need to be ready to respond to the impact of outreach in terms of collateral materials, web information, and general capacity. This also fostered discussions and considerations of how to foster relationships in addition to merely conducting outreach. We anticipate the outreach efforts our BVU fellow will launch, and we will continue with, will result in increasing participation in our programs, especially within targeted geographic regions. These targeted areas are important because there is a lack of other services provided to fill the gaps of support our organization can provide and because in providing to these local communities, we can make a case for additional financial support to keep growing.
Is there a particular story or anecdote you can share about how your fellow helped move your mission forward?
When working hard in the present and with core content day in and day out, any team can skip a step of how our message connects with those unfamiliar with our work. Our fellow was persistent in finding ways to communicate our organization’s need to find simple formats, simple language, and easily accessible content for new potential participants, partners, donors, or others to understand and connect with our work. One specific example was during a regular meeting with our fellow, he taped up our website’s full architecture to help demonstrate its complexity, and then he would later use this work to help amplify suggestions to create refreshed overview materials for our organization.
Would you recommend a BVU Encore fellow to other nonprofit organizations? Why?
Yes. For small nonprofits (under 20 staff members), the role/work to assess, plan, launch, and evaluate a program is often in the hands of the individual(s) executing the program. The capacity to focus on the future “even better if” within the day-to-day operations of the present can be taxing and disjointed. Welcoming fresh eyes and ears, and experienced hands, to a team can keep a project outside of daily operations a priority, clarified in scope, and informed with guidance of a professional solely focused on the outcomes defined by one or a few core objectives.
What skills and value did the BVU fellow bring to your organization?
Facilitation.
Focus.
Outside perspective.
To find a BVU Encore Fellow for your nonprofit, please contact us.