This year is Solid Management’s 20th Anniversary. In order to mark this milestone we have undertaken a pro-bono research project for the Institute of Fundraising. The focus the research is to assess how charities can maximise the involvement of senior volunteers in fundraising; whether Trustees, development board members or other influential people. Our goal is to explore what factors support these people to successfully engage their friends and business contacts in a charity’s fundraising activity. We hope to capture some new learning for professionals working in the voluntary sector and, through publishing our findings, share best practice.
Our research involves an online questionnaire for both professional fundraisers and senior volunteers involved in relationship fundraising.
Your expert guide to major donor fundraising
Solid Management & Consultancy Services Ltd
Established in 1997, we are consciously a small firm, employing five highly experienced consultants. Each of us has years of experience leading fundraising teams and major appeals, and we have all personally solicited seven figure gifts. We feel this gives us a unique perspective; we have personally tackled the challenges that you are facing and we have walked in your shoes.
Our speciality is major gift fundraising, both supporting on-going programmes and helping establish specific major appeals and new programmes.We work with a wide range of clients primarily in the social care, health and education sectors, and have recently supported the major gift teams of national charities including Cancer Research UK, the MS Society, Diabetes UK, Marie Curie Cancer Care, RNIB, Save the Children, Refuge, the Brooke, Kings College London and Together for Short Lives. In addition to this charity consultancy, we also advise a number of major donors who engage us to assist them deliver their philanthropic activities, again giving us a helpful insight into the donor perspective.
We work incredibly flexibly, delivering consultancy tailored to each clients’ specific needs. This support includes working alongside in-house teams to develop cases for support, establish development boards and create and implement major gift fundraising strategies. We take a very practical and realistic approach to our work and we are known for our ability to establish rigorous infrastructure and help make big ideas a reality.
Our approach is always to coach and mentor executive teams, to ensure they are the best they can be. Carrying our fundraising reviews to see if organisations are ‘major donor ready’ as well as exploring potential for creating at ‘step change’ in this area of work. We also deliver a significant amount of training to staff and board members. Further information about the training courses we run, can be found on the training page.
Although we commonly work alongside our clients for long periods of time, certainly through the life of major appeals, we offer the flexibility to increase or decrease the level of our input and work on a one month notice period. We genuinely want to ensure that we offer value at all times and as such we feel it is important to offer our clients this flexibility. All of our consultants are London-based and it is important to us that we are regularly present in our clients’ offices.