Inspire works with over 70 non-profits per year, across a range of focus areas including education, sustainability, racial justice, and more. We offer a variety of services such as growth & expansion strategy, program design, and financial benchmarking.
—Executive Director, Disability Nonprofit
—Co Founder, Deputy CEO, Financial Literacy Nonprofit
We bring strategic thinking and results-oriented analysis to the leaders of organizations dedicated to making the world a better place. Our clients tackle a range of social issues, but all share the common goal of making profound social impact. Inspire targets organizations that are innovative and change-oriented in their approach to service.
We work closely with our clients to understand their missions and values, and proactively seek feedback throughout the duration of our cases. Our goal is to provide clear, actionable, and meaningful recommendations. We believe our value lies in lending an extra set of hands to tackle long-term strategic projects that our clients may not have bandwidth or resources to take up independently. Inspire clients are active partners and want to work with us to find solutions.
We provide a variety of services. Inspire’s core offerings include growth & expansion strategy, organizational effectiveness, marketing & publicity, new program development, economic modeling, and fundraising strategy. We connect each of our clients with one of our Client Development leads to scope projects and set goals that are both actionable and impactful.
While much of our traditional casework is still highly relevant and beneficial to clients, we reconize that many nonprofits may be undergoing new experiences and challenges during the pandemic, such as adapting to work from home, a variation in typical donation patterns, and an economic downturn. Given these dynamics, we have begun to offer cases that focus on adjustments to working remote, donor outreach management, and post COVID-19 strategy planning as well.
—CEO, Disaster Relief Nonprofit
KIPP, one of the largest public charter school networks in the U.S, came to Inspire asking for fundraising guidance. Most of their funds came from a few large gifts, and while they were well-funded in the near-term, they wanted to diversify their funding to avoid being reliant on a few large donors. KIPP partnered with Inspire to identify ways to target a broader set of donors to increase donor diversity.
Two Bain San Francisco consultants led a team of volunteers to support KIPP. The project lasted for four months, with 3 major presentations. Throughout the project the team shared and discussed the results with KIPP and incorporated their feedback.
The team approached KIPP’s challenge in four major steps:
1.Benchmarked best practices of similar non-profits through research and interviews
2.Brainstormed and developed KIPP fundraising communications; tested ideas through focus groups
3.Finalized the right communication and methods to reach potential donors
4.Added KIPP-specific data and general education data to communications
Thrilled with the results, KIPP integrated Inspire’s suggestions into their next fundraising appeal.
—Chief Growth Officer, Job Placement Nonprofit
Inspire has recently collaborated on several projects with Summer Search, a national youth development organization headquartered in Oakland, CA empowering thousands of young people to discover their purpose through 7-9 years of mentoring, summer experiential learning, and support. From sophomore year of high school through post-secondary education, to launching a fulfilling career, Summer Search has served more than 8,000 young people since its founding in 1990.
“The Inspire team engaged peers in our industry, gathered important insights and perspectives, and developed a robust set of best practices and proposals for our upcoming strategic plan. This work added so much capacity to our team that simply wouldn’t have been possible without them.
What really stood out to me, though, was how collaborative the teams were, how they kept our staff informed, and continually ensured the work was on the right track and relevant to our goals. We ended up with a high-quality, highly usable product in the end,”
Seth Ellis, National Director of Alumni Strategy and Development
Inspire and Summer Search collaborated on the following initiatives:
Expanding Summer Search’s offering: Developed a go-to-market strategy on the optimal set of mentoring services Summer Search should offer
Building Out a Data Organization: Summarized best practices from competitor benchmarking into a ‘best-in-class’ model for the organization’s data capabilities
Alteryx and Tableau Support: Helped build solutions to enable access, querying, and visualization of critical operational data for longitudinal use
Establishing a go-forward caseload management framework: Evaluating mentor-to-mentee ratios and building a go-forward decision-making framework to improve mentor experience
