Small Team, Big Growth
Grace Sica
Vice President of Corporate Partnerships
Operation Warm
Industry Innovator
Working with Accelerist is so much more than having access to a database. The Accelerist team helps us understand and interpret the data. Honestly, they’ve helped build our program from the ground up.
For nearly two decades Operation Warm has had a simple mission: to provide children in need with the gift of brand new winter coats. Since 1998, Operation Warm has provided coats to nearly 3 million children across the United States. Traditional grants from companies have played a major role in helping Operation Warm achieve its mission. However, after an uptick in company requests for sponsorship and cause marketing in 2016, Operation Warm created a dedicated team, led by Grace Sica, to focus on corporate partnerships. With a growing national brand, and solid organizational footprints in Philadelphia and Chicago, Operation Warm was ready to turn their attention toward expanding regional and national corporate relationships.
Challenge:
Grace knew that “doing it right” meant finding the right partner to support their expansion efforts. They needed partnership expertise and business insights they could count on. And they could not justify spending an arm and a leg for a large cause marketing agency, given their recent hires and focus on operational efficiency.
Grace recognized a first step in the opportunity for growth was putting the right valuation on their events. Because almost all of their corporate partnerships involved some kind of event component, they needed to understand the value of these events in order to price them accordingly to drive corporate interest.
Solution:
Grace was pleased to learn about Accelerist’s sliding payment scale for nonprofits that’s based on total revenues. In short, larger nonprofits pay more while smaller nonprofits pay less. But every client gets access to the same great tools and insights. And she was immediately intrigued.
After further exploration, Operation Warm brought Accelerist on board and invested in Accelerist’s Asset Valuation and Constituent Analysis tools, providing much-needed data on Operation Warm’s marketplace strengths and core audience acumen. Accelerist’s tools delivered eye-opening insights, and the team stood by Grace and her colleagues along the way to interpret the results and findings to support strategic decisions around outreach efforts. Accelerist’s findings helped Operation Warm build a game-changing employee volunteer program where employees can personally interact with children in need and give new coats to every child in a school.
Accelerist gave Operation Warm the confidence they needed to talk with companies and share the organization’s value proposition to drive fundraising. With Accelerist’s support, they’ve quickly taken their corporate engagement work to the next level.