Overview:

Since Broward College first opened its doors in 1960, it has firmly stood by its mission to provide a high quality education that is affordable and accessible to all. During these last 50 years, they have been a great community partner and have always believed that they can make Fort Lauderdale/Broward County a better place through education and community service.

Strategic Philanthropy applied for an RFP in 2013 to complete the following:

• Evaluate the organization’s past giving efforts
• Devise a community relations/corporate philanthropy plan that would allocate the college’s dollars to nonprofits that best met their goals and objectives
• Establish a system where Strategic Philanthropy would work with the Broward College leadership team and help manage their future community relations efforts based on the plan created

As Broward College looks towards the next 50 years, they wanted to better serve the needs of their community. They wanted to streamline their partnership process to not only serve their nonprofit and community partners better, but also measure the impact they are having in the community. The result was the creation of new tracking systems to assess funding for sponsorship/professional associations as well as the launch of an external and internal website to communicate the company’s charitable priorities to employees and community partners.

Approach:

In order to generate support for this project, Strategic Philanthropy employed a multiphase strategy. Phase I consisted of working closely with Broward’s College’s leadership team to get an understanding of how the organization was currently handling their sponsorship decisions. Also in Phase I, a comprehensive evaluation of the organization’s past giving efforts was conducted and reviewed Broward College’s cash donations to nonprofit organizations as well as the financial contributions to professional associations.

This analysis shed light on the overall impact the organization had in the community but also how all of the good work the organization was doing was not being communicated with key stakeholders and faculty/staff.

Phase II of the strategy included creating a task force that was comprised of nine senior executives who helped drive the strategic philanthropic process. The task force met four times to devise a corporate philanthropy structure and plan that would assist the college in aligning its dollars with the organizations that best met their goals and objectives.

Phase III of strategy included managing the day to day plan agreed upon by the College Leadership.

Phase I & II Results:

As a result, the following was accomplished:

• Established three (3) key funding priorities to help focus Broward College’s future giving efforts
• Created giving guidelines as a way to assist organizations and employees in understanding the company’s charitable priorities. These guidelines serve as an objective way the college can review all requests and find the sponsorship opportunities that best align with their organization’s goals and objectives.
• Devised a budget based on the importance of the funding priorities as well as to assist with sponsorship decisions
• Created measurements of success based on the organization’s funding priorities
• Aligned the college with key organizations within the funding priorities and secured maximum visibility
• Created an internal and external structure for solicitation requests. Strategic Philanthropy manages the following requests that come through Broward College’s community partnership website:
• Sponsorship requests
• In-kind donation requests
• Speakers requests

Phase III Results:

Upon rolling out the community initiative in August 2014, Strategic Philanthropy has managed and implemented the day-to-day initiatives created in the strategic philanthropic plan.  This includes:

• Prep & Manage Sponsorship Efforts
• Manage in-kind requests
• Coordinate speaking requests
• Track and report on all key measurement of community outreach
• Oversee budgets for community outreach programs
• Organize, manage and track state, county and city Leadership Programs
• Host Emerging Leadership Nonprofit Match Program
• Coordinate placement for leadership members to serve on board of director for key nonprofits
• Assist with all community awards for the College