As America's premier mentoring organization, Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) mission is to provide children facing adversity with strong and enduring, professionally supported 1-to-1 relationships that change a child's life for the better, forever. After an annual evaluation of and by its board of directors, BBBS of Metro Chicago took steps to create a new process to hold its board members accountable to a series of responsibilities, including a required give/get threshold of $10,000.

A board member agreed with this shift and voted for the change yet was concerned about achieving the give-get without corporate support. Not achieving the give-get would result in stepping off the board at the end of her term the following year. A strong believer in the organization and its mission she wished to remain on the board, but was uncomfortable leveraging her personal network.

BTS worked directly with the board member, mentored her on stewardship and cultivation techniques and demystified "the art of fundraising". Together they collaborated on developing a reception event hosted in the home of the board member as well as the supporting strategic activities preceding and following the event.

The board member and spouse hosted an outdoor reception in their home including light refreshments. Attended by family, friends and colleagues, whom the board member felt had giving potential, the evening's highlights included the board member's personal testimonial for her involvement, the CEO's overview of the mission and need and a video showcasing the agency's impact. As a result of the event the organization received more than $10,000 in donations and the board member has planned an increased goal for her next event.

BTS was hired by the Diabetes Care Coalition (DCC), a first-of-its-kind alliance of diverse nonprofit organizations and corporations committed to helping control diabetes and prevent its deadly complications, at a time of transition. BTS would manage the final stages of a public service campaign launch focused on adult diabetes management. With leadership in transition and an important public service campaign scheduled to launch shortly, members needed to act quickly, make decisions and authorize the vendors to move forward if they were to achieve the timeline in place at that time.

With a diverse board and differing opinions on the strategic and creative direction of the campaign, consensus was required among the members in order to move the campaign forward and to open communication with the vendors during this transition in leadership.

Provide executive leadership, assess all options, gain confidence of members, nurture vendor relationships, build consensus where possible, drive process for decisions to be made and take action.

The Coalition reorganized as a smaller alliance with all the funding intact to move forward with the campaign launch. The alliance consisted of American Diabetes Association (ADA), American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) and National Coalition of LaRaza (NCLR). Agreement was achieved among these remaining parties as to the strategic and creative direction of the campaign and the vendors executed to the campaign plan. Bi-lingual TV and radio public service announcements along with a supporting website and call center launched September 28, 2009 and continued through August 30, 2010.

Over the course of its history, CURE has played a catalyst role in the epilepsy research community by shifting the research focus from improving outcomes to finding a cure. In 2009 the board leadership of CURE approved a new three year (2010 - 2012) strategic plan to address the challenges in epilepsy research and accelerate the impact of CURE's mission. The guiding principles of the plan included four key strategic initiatives, a timeline for specific activities required within each initiative and assignment of leadership to manage each function. The timeline was aggressive in order to keep the plan moving forward and begin executing the new strategic priorities.

CURE was operating with a lean personnel structure and Board membership who were all actively engaged in managing a number of key activities. Leadership wanted to move forward and begin to work on the strategic plan initiatives, but was concerned programs and fundraising activities would be negatively impacted if staff and/or volunteers were pulled from their current efforts. At the same time they did not want to lose ground on implementation of the new three-year strategic plan.

In January, 2010 BTS began leading the management and implementation of the overall CURE strategic plan and in accordance with the plan was also tightly focused on a series of documented deliverables within two of the four key initiatives.

Over a period of eight months BTS collaborated with CURE stakeholders to achieve its aspirations over the strategic plan period. Activities required for implementation of two of the four initiatives were completed and progress was made on a number of other activities within the remaining two initiatives. Many of the deliverables are currently in use by CURE stakeholders and staff with positive results while others await appropriate timing and leadership to launch.

Having evolved out of AIDSCare, an organization renowned for its work in housing and supportive services to people living with HIV/AIDS, EdgeAlliance wanted to expand its reach to other organizations wanting to affect real change. Offering a revolutionary concept in nonprofit management, EdgeAlliance provides its members with a wide range of benefits including collaboration; the pooling of resources; greater agility for smaller agencies; a reduction of barriers to accessing services; a stronger voice to funders, public officials, and the community; and greater purchasing power for supplies, insurance, technology and other expenses.

The EdgeAlliance board and staff leadership team was part of AIDSCare and needed to address issues related to their own performance in transforming from a direct service nonprofit to one that provided services to other nonprofits in order to maximize their impact.

BTS developed a board and staff retreat designed to engage all parties in the assessment of EdgeAlliance's resources, reveal information about their capacity to conduct activities required of the new mission and share ideas on practical applications to improve performance and become a more effective mission driven organization.

Facilitated by BTS, board and staff participants actively engaged in a focused review of roles and responsibilities, performance against expectations and benchmarking against other local nonprofits. Based on the results of their own assessment and applications exercises, BTS summarized the outcomes of the retreat and delivered a final report to leadership addressing critical success factors and recommendations for a series of key initiatives EdgeAlliance should undertake. Within three months leadership took action on a number of initiatives with positive results and continues to move forward; becoming a more effective mission driven organization and delivering more services to its constituents.