Partnering to strengthen foundation’s nonprofit grantees
The T. Rowe Price Foundation learned that their nonprofit grantee partners needed more tools to engage their communities, raise money, and use communications to advance their missions. Big Duck partnered with their team to build the capacity of local community organization grantees with in-person and virtual fundraising and communications-focused trainings.
Understanding participant needs
As part of the T. Rowe Price Foundation’s regular practice of surveying their local Baltimore, Maryland grantees about the skills and topics they most need, they found that many had under-developed fundraising and communications teams who were often stretched thin. Survey results showed a clear demand for more strategies to communicate effectively around fundraising, programs, and visibility.
Deepening communications and fundraising skills
Our trainings focus on helping participants develop stronger tools and frameworks to engage their communities in four core ways:
- Webinars: 60-minute interactive sessions focused on messaging, communications planning, and digital fundraising. Grantees learned memorable ways to speak and write consistently and persuasively. They also created the building blocks of a year-long communications plan and a year-end digital fundraising campaign.
- Small group cohorts: A select group of grantee organizations engaged in five hybrid branding workshops with interactive training, hands-on exercises, and collaborative peer learning. The series blended instructional content, take-home assignments, guided discussions, individualized coaching, and opportunities to share and workshop ideas with each other.
- In-person training: Full-day in-person workshops allowed grantees to connect and network through creative exercises guided by the Big Duck team. We led workshops on creating a digital fundraising campaign, donor communications plans, conducting audience research, and crafting a compelling message to tell their organization’s story.
- One-on-one coaching: Big Duck supported grantees as they prepared and implemented their year-end fundraising campaigns.
