Month: April 2021

Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden’s 20th anniversary left it energized and future-focused, while the pandemic emphasized the importance of cultivated green space across our region. The Garden’s leadership hired Vandever Batten in partnership with Betsy Fleming to help refine its identity, clarify its organizational priorities, and embrace a new strategic direction that meets the ever-changing needs of the dynamic Charlotte area. National experts and regional stakeholders have helped inform and test the Garden’s plan to become an even more valuable, sustainable, and regional asset looking ahead.

Related services: Transformational Strategy Design Services

Goodwill’s leadership had a vision to elevate its impact across our region, but expanding its culture of philanthropy was required to achieve it. Vandever Batten hosted an Advancement Plan, seeking strategic input from key shareholders and shaping a fundraising and staffing plan to grow philanthropic support. Since the plan and staffing components were implemented, Goodwill has raised tens of millions of dollars in support and built its extraordinarily successful Opportunity Campus to help individuals overcome many interrelated obstacles to employment.

Related services: Advancement Planning Services, Strategic Advisory Services

After the Humane Society of Charlotte recently raised a historic $11 million, its leadership knew it needed a different strategy to achieve its incredibly ambitious $15 million capital campaign goal to build a state-of-the-art animal welfare facility. Vandever Batten conducted a Mid-Campaign Assessment and continued to provide Strategic Advisory Services to help the organization adjust its facility plans and grow fundraising results to meet its funding target. Simultaneously, Vandever Batten helped strengthen the Board’s governance and volunteer and donor engagement models, along with other long-term organizational strategies. These plans will continue to fuel greater fundraising results far beyond the capital campaign’s conclusion.

Vandever Batten most recently helped prepare the Museum to deliver its mission across a more diverse, fast-changing community through a distributed model that will better equip our community to achieve the ideals of a New South City. Vandever Batten in partnership with Betsy Fleming hosted a Transformational Strategy Design process that helped Museum leadership shape and test a new strategic direction that offers an innovative and more action-oriented road map for history museums nationally.

Vandever Batten was privileged to support the Catawba Lands Conservancy as it launched the Carolina Thread Trail, a 15-county initiative conserving land and funding trail development. The CTT’s campaign goal was $25 million in cash and $15 million in land for a total of $40 million. Vandever Batten helped craft an overarching capital campaign strategy and implement it through the work of the Governing Board, and then empower individual counties to execute their own private fundraising campaigns. Following the campaign’s conclusion, Vandever Batten continued assisting the Catawba Lands Conservancy by assessing and strengthening its development function while helping it partner with other land trusts across the region to attract planned gifts and bequests.

Related Services: Capital Campaign Management, Advancement Planning, Strategic
Advisory Services

Originally known as Seigle Avenue Partners, Freedom School Partners served students in the Piedmont Courts neighborhood and dared to expand its vision to meet the pressing educational needs of all underserved students across Charlotte. Vandever Batten was hired to help shape and implement a new strategic direction and capital campaign to fuel it — all in order to build the organization’s capacity to drive greater impact. As part of that transformational movement, the organization changed its name to reflect a partnership with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) while hosting Freedom Schools summer programs at a growing number of sites across the city.

Related Services: Transformational Strategy Design, Capital Campaign Management, Advancement Planning

Vandever Batten has had the pleasure of supporting the Library through four milestones. The firm:

• Shaped and implemented two separate fundraising campaigns in partnership with the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte; a $14 million endowment campaign three years before the creation of ImaginOn and a $4 million capital campaign to help cap public funding for the facility.
• Shaped and implemented the Design Phase of The Future of the Library Taskforce, which was formed when Mecklenburg County reduced the library’s budget by almost 40% during the Great Recession of 2010. Vandever Batten helped create a design map and process to address the following areas of concern:
  • Scope, cost, and relative importance of various library services
  • Organizational structure and system for delivering library services
  • Governance of the library system
  • Sustainable funding model for supporting library services
• Hosted an Advancement Assessment and Plan to grow a culture of philanthropy that would help drive greater innovation and partnerships. Vandever Batten recommended creating what is now known as the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation, which recruits its own separate board and is solely focused on attracting higher levels of contributed income to augment the Library’s quasi-governmental funding model.

Related Services: Transformational Design Services, Capital Campaign Management, Strategic Advisory Services

Charlotte Country Day School was Vandever Batten’s first client in 1999, when the school raised a record-breaking $33 million to expand and enhance its 80-acre Cannon Campus while also growing its endowment. Most recently, Lauren Batten helped propel the institution through an even more transformational season of the school’s 77-year history. After refreshing its brand, conducting a strategic planning process, hosting a master facility planning process, and shaping a more innovative and comprehensive Advancement function over the last decade, Country Day received more than $100 million in support, including a successful $59 million comprehensive capital campaign. During the same timeframe, the school grew its endowment by $25 million and added or renovated more than 111,000 square feet of academic and community space to its Cannon Campus. Its Annual Fund, supported by more than 5,000 donors, doubled to $2.4 million each year. Country Day’s endowment was valued at approximately $60 million in the spring of 2021.

Related Services: Transformational Strategy Design, Capital Campaign Management, Strategic Advisory Services