Before launching YoungAssociates as a full-time practice in 1998 (the firm was founded in 1976), Henry Young worked for nonprofits in chief development positions for more than twenty years. He first distinguished himself when he conceived of a 1974 marketing/development campaign between Frisch’s Big Boy restaurants and the Cincinnati Ballet, which resulted in a $1 million sponsorship. Other early successes include the BAM Emergency Flood Campaign (1976), the economic turnaround of the Joffrey Ballet (1979), and the benchmark setting for the Guthrie Theater Campaign for Artistic Excellence (1986-1991).
Our differences start with the recognition that many development programs keep trusting their intuition. We, too, believe in what our gut may be saying, but we gather information in nonprofit feasibility studies and our proprietary wealth analysis tool PDW to confirm it. The YoungAssociates approach starts with an understanding of what the donor believes or does not know, quantifying the demographics and capacity of your constituencies and testing and adjusting every component of donor communication to insure advancement of institutional narrative in persuasive and financial terms equal to the vision/mission of our clients.
Particularly relevant to today’s economic climate, every employee of YoungAssociates is trained by an individual informed by the experience of the 1981-1991 recession and with the comfort to lead in the face of uncertainty or the patience to address donor ambiguity.
The challenges facing nonprofits today are daunting. Unlike many fundraising consulting firms with no practical hands-on experience with annual fund drives or meeting cash flow, YoungAssociates informs every aspect of planning and executing capital and/or endowment campaigns with one basic assumption: No cultivated major gift prospect should be converted at the last minute to address budget equilibrium issues before they happen or to correct an imbalance after it happens. If a situation is very turbulent, we believe there is no basis for intuition. We always take our clients through simulations of how campaign decisions could play out. Campaigns are a dynamic, ambiguous environment requiring leadership, experience and judgment.
I think of the number of gifts required for a campaign to be like the game that asks, “How many coins are in the glass jar?”
We always want to determine the degree to which the first estimate influences the second, which influences the third.
What does this mean for you, as a development director? We know and respect the work you do, but we see the benefit in slowing down and checking or correlating errors. We want to provide you with the best counsel, staff augmentation and tools to do that work in light of a market that may force you to reexamine your reasons to exist. We are about systems that make your efforts and those of your volunteers more efficient and provide an elevated return on investment.
What does this mean for trustees or other volunteer leadership? We deliver success while also being deeply conscious of cost. We keep our focus on your goal and never give in to the convenience of the moment.
Leaders are often not in the market to have their decisions and choices questioned. Our firm has a true entrepreneurial spirit, matched with the strength to execute strategies that not only deliver your goal but transform your relationships. We bring a laser focus to the tasks before us and have the professional experience to identify unique gift opportunities and the nonprofit context to tell the story of extraordinary creativity, resilience to challenge, and drive to mission—the unique imperatives that we call the nonprofit institution.
