Wendy Orleman has joined THD as vice president, client strategy, bringing over 20 years of experience leading strategy for nonprofit and commercial clients. We sat down with Wendy to hear how she will be helping clients grow and create meaningful social impact in her new role.
As we developed our content series on the RFP process, we've had some thoughtful exchanges on the topic both internally and with clients. We recently asked our team: What is one question you’d add or one change you would make to the RFPs we typically receive that you think would result in a better response? We are sharing four ideas here as thought-starters for your process:
We launched an unscientific poll series on LinkedIn several weeks ago to tap into the nonprofit zeitgeist about Requests for Proposals (RFPs). The season for issuing and responding to RFPs is beginning to rev up, as many organizations evaluate partner relationships in the early months of the year for mid-year contract renewals.
The RFP process is a notoriously laborious and lengthy undertaking for both requesters and responders; we were curious to learn how colleagues on the client and partner sides of the nonprofit world felt about it. As 2021 came to a close, our survey series sparked lively discussions with clients and among our Account Teams internally. Here are some of the musings that could improve the experience for all parties.
My iPhone’s “control center” serves up a daily sampling of photos from my photo library, taking me back in time to pictures of vacations, graduations and reunions, birthdays, and weddings captured “On This Day,” sometimes many years ago. These strolls down memory lane are an invitation to revisit the past, but it’s not the oldest photos that give me pause lately — it’s revisiting photos from just one year ago.
Recently, I’ve found myself tapping to the drumbeat of a rap poem that each of my kids performed in 5th grade about shifting of the tectonic plates (hard to forget … I have four kids so I heard it a lot) because, on so many fronts, 2020 has felt like the Earth’s plates are moving under my feet.
With so much seemingly in flux, envisioning the impacts on charitable giving (specifically) and the nonprofit sector (in general) is daunting. But as Chief Strategy Officer at a social impact agency, that’s in the job description.
To better understand the impact of the “events of 2020” on charitable giving, THD fielded research just after the presidential election. The outcome presented both immediate-term observations, as well as interesting insights with longer-term implications. While some of the data reinforces broader trends that are known to us, other data suggests new opportunities for those nonprofits whose focus is on building sustainable revenue streams from long-term donors.
