We recently received a service grant from FD. FD is a global communications consultancy where one of our board members is a senior managing director. FD focuses on business and financial communications and has worked with us in a pro bono capacity on a number of projects for several years.
When FD describes their company values, they say that they strive to be intelligent, expert, dynamic, holistic, collegial, and accountable. Partnering with us to promote and model effective pro bono work speaks to these values and is one vehicle for their community impact.
Our partnership with FD is a great alternative model that demonstrates one way nonprofits can tap into the resources their board members provide. It also demonstrates that Board service doesn’t have to be all cash give-and-get. Sometimes the best Board service can come in the form of leveraging personal and professional relations to bring additional pro bono skills and profits to nonprofits.
Our latest project, a two-month grant of service which was established with the help of our board member, was valued at $13,450. We are at inflection point as an organization and this grant was critical. After eight years focused on internal growth and development, we are turning to external audiences and realized we needed to build our own capacity for public relations efforts.
FD does pro bono right
PR is hard to do pro bono. A lot of pro bono work is done for one-off projects, but this doesn’t work well in PR, because it is about relationship building. FD understood this and really focused on helping us build our capacity to manage such relationships rather than just executing one-off tasks.
FD has been amazing and has done pro bono right. They really treated us as though we were a paying client. They provided us with a contract that included a scope of work. They tracked hours. At the end of the program, they even asked for evaluation.
Over the past year, FD has helped us better identify and define our audiences, create messaging and documents that can be used as templates, and build a media list. In this past quarter, they even created a series of training sessions to help us build our PR infrastructure and train members of our new marketing team to build relationships with media sources while creating strategic communications plans.
FD really demonstrates the gold standard of pro bono work. It is something other PR firms should aspire to achieve.
Thank you Betsy Neville, Stephanie Brown, and Carly Jarosz for your support, and, more importantly, for setting the standard for pro bono work. You rock.
Request PR pro bono support at your nonprofit today!
