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Client Case Studies

Client Comments

Comments from our Clients

We decided to work with Brakeley Briscoe because we wanted a tailored, “hands-on” approach.  We needed to go beyond just being advised what to do, to being trained and having an infrastructure in place for our new Chief Development Officer.  We had encountered difficulty in hiring the most effective person without this basic structure in place. 

After an internal assessment, BBI provided a senior consultant to work with us one-on-one.  Jackie Venable, Vice President with Brakeley Briscoe, worked on site with us for a six month period – training staff and volunteers in prospect identification, working with our IT staff to adjust our intake software to accommodate the data needs of the development operation, and developed a step-by-step program designed to move our prospects from identification to cultivation to solicitation and stewardship.  She also drafted our HIPAA policy to ensure complete compliance and provided counsel on solicitation strategies for our most highly rated prospects. 

With the basic infrastructure in place, along with recommendations for staffing, budget, database systems and processes, we were able to attract and hire a first rate Chief Development Officer.

Sigurd H. Ackerman, MD
President and Medical Director
Silver Hill Hospital - New Canaan, CT

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Stacey Heckel, VPD at BBI client Anne Arundel County Community College responded thusly:

I would heartily suggest Brakeley Briscoe and, in particular, Shauna Chabot, for consulting in the Northeast region (or elsewhere for that matter).  Brakeley Briscoe has offices on the west coast, east coast and midwest).  Brakeley just completed a development assessment for us and now are helping us hire a new Director of Development.  In future, we will likely use them for our campaign.  I can't say enough good things about them.  What I like is that they have Community College experts within the company, and they also can advise on best practices from non profits and four year institutions. 

I am very choosey about consultants and I normally don't do this (this is like sharing a great babysitter's name -- you know she might get booked). 

Stacey Heckel
Vice President of Development
Anne Arundel County Community College - Arnold, MD

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Brakeley Briscoe's experience helped guide our capital campaign to 100% overachievement!  Our donors care deeply about the welfare of our animal patients, and they are also concerned about the health of their ocean home.  Brakeley Briscoe grasped the concepts of both motivations and helped design the best appeal.  Our dream hospital is under construction.  We were very pleased with their service and would recommend them highly.

B. J. Griffin
Executive Director
The Marine Mammal Center - Sausalito, CA

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I am writing to recommend the work of Brakeley Briscoe, Inc. (BBI) which has served as fundraising consultants to our institution since March 2006, assisting us with a challenging capital campaign.

During the past seven months, BBI has moved our organization forward by leaps and bounds helping us to establish a working feasibility study, volunteer leadership, and a structure for campaign management that we never thought possible. In addition, they have helped to build our infrastructure, working with us to concurrently enhance our Annual Fund strategies.

Our organization, while 150 years old, was simply a child when it came to development and fundraising structure. Faced with an urgent capital campaign, we searched for a firm with a strong reputation for training and management of volunteer leadership, experience with difficult non-profit issues, a long list of successful campaigns and a wide breadth of professional staff. Brakeley Briscoe was the right choice for us. Not only have we had the constant backing of their principals, but we have been able to have full time attention from one of their staff as we build our campaigns. Their honest and direct approach has enabled us to move ahead quickly and address the nuances of a volunteer led campaign.

I strongly recommend Brakeley Briscoe to any organization searching for campaign management and would be happy to answer any questions.

Nancy Drapin
Executive Director
Congregation Sherith Israel- San Francisco, CA

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We needed an outside, professional opinion and you did a splendid job of applauding our steady commitment, encouraging the inclusion of new voices and divergent ideas, and guiding us to setting an end date to give us a new sense of urgency ….. These were all very important messages for our team.

Campaign Co-chair
The Tatnall School -- Wilmington, DE

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Thanks for all that you have done.  Lucie, you have been a wonderful leader, mentor, and cheerleader for the volunteers and our department.

Angie Smorey
Director, Volunteer Services
Cincinnati Museum Center -- Cincinnati, OH

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Stephan Hienzsch, Executive Director at U. S. Dressage Federation wrote, “Our $5 million campaign to build a new headquarters building in the Kentucky Horse Park began under difficult circumstances. We were in a recession; we had just relocated to Lexington from Lincoln, Nebraska; and we had no real history of fundraising, let alone campaigns. We needed guidance, structure, mentoring and expertise, and we got them all from Brakeley Briscoe. Our president and I, both novices, have learned much about major gifts work from the BBI team, and it has paid off - our new building is up and running, and we are now building an endowment.”

Stephen Hienzsch
Executive Director
U.S. Dressage Federation -- Lexington, KY

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Hello Abbie - I thoroughly enjoyed your training session at the Sheraton. I love your classes. Even though I already knew part of what you covered this time, you always give me such a boost - a real sense that I CAN DO THIS !!! Your classes are a mixture of a lot of facts, experience, and enthusiasm. You are encouraging and empowering and always make me feel capable and motivated again. I'll take any class you teach; I'm definitely an Abbie-groupie.

Anne Myers
Development Director
Partners in Care, Inc. -- Severna Park, MD

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I interviewed a parade of consultants and then Julie Ver Steeg walked in. Through her presentation of the report and discussion with the board she displayed such tremendous professional knowledge and competence. The report is impressive and gives us a thorough analysis and solid plan to follow. It is good to know that she will be with us as we implement the plan. We dealt primarily with Julie, but she is backed by a team of professionals, at Brakeley Briscoe Inc, with a wide variety of skills.

Nancy Strohl
Executive Director
Child Care Law Center -- San Francisco , CA

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"You'll be happy to know," writes Dan Layman of the Shenandoah Shakespeare to Managing Director Abbie von Schlegell, "that we continue to live with your firm's report, extracting recommendations from it as our various committees continue to plan for the future. At first I thought we would receive the report, act upon the recommendations, and move on. I've been pleasantly surprised to see the organization use the report as a reference tool, allowing it to be a living document that can be a regular tool for our continued work."

Dan Layman
Chair of the Development Committee
Shenandoah Shakespeare -- Staunton, VA

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We selected Brakeley (now Brakeley Briscoe) because of their extensive experience with colleges like ours and because we thought we'd get an approach tailored to our needs. That expectation certainly came true. They gave us a very thoughtful and realistic pre-campaign study report, helped us enlist our volunteer leadership, and coached us into asking for what turned out to be the largest gift from a living individual in our history, which set the bar for our campaign.

Thomas Ryan
Vice President for Institutional Advancement
Assumption College -- Worcester , MA

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I have known and worked with Brakeley Briscoe for the better part of a decade. My longtime association with BBI speaks to the company's flexibility and savvy across and among many types of leading organizations in the non-profit world.

As the leader of the development team at a small liberal arts women's college in Atlanta, I turned to George Brakeley and Steve Wertheimer for a pre-campaign operational audit to help us identify our gaps and begin plans to "staff up" for the college's first campaign in over ten years. Brakeley's solid experience in higher education positioned them to make actionable recommendations for an experienced staff - and allowed them to deliver difficult messages to institutional leadership in the audit and during subsequent campaign consulting.

Then, as the Vice President for Development at the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC), I continued to turn to the same Brakeley Briscoe team for guidance. This development program was far from "usual" as it has very corporate/foundation-heavy, and is - understandably - linked to the priorities of CDC leaders and our country's ever-changing public health needs and emergencies. In spite of our unique nature, the Brakeley team showed its flexibility and worked with us to explore creative solutions to everything from personnel challenges to "one time only" capital opportunities at CDC."

Adelia P. Thompson -- (Now) Vice President for Development
Birmingham-Southern College -- Birmingham, AL

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Brakeley Briscoe's nominal assignment was to address our fundraising challenges, but through the process of assessing our internal readiness, George Brakeley discerned early on that our issues had more to do with strategic, managerial and operational concerns. The fact was, we were at a critical juncture in the life of the Museum. His analysis and recommendations encouraged us to embark on the right course.

Marshall Lawson
Chair, Board of Trustees
Herreshoff Marine Museum -- Bristol, RI

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Recognizing that we are a unique organization, we sought to partner with someone who could understand our particular circumstances and help us to develop a process specifically tailored to our needs. We definitely wanted the relationship to be a partnership. Brakeley Inc, now Brakeley Briscoe Inc understood our position and approached the relationship with a healthy respect for our staff and for our experience-based knowledge of our opportunities and challenges. Together, we crafted a comprehensive plan for the advancement of our campaign goals.

Michael L. Rose
President
Carolinas HealthCare Foundation -- Charlotte, NC

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Brakeley Briscoe and its affiliates have been proactive--and sometimes downright inspiring!--in helping Cincinnati Museum Center get its long-awaited and very ambitious comprehensive campaign up and running.

Mary Todd Hardeman
Vice President for Development and External Affairs
Cincinnati Museum Center

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As Executive Director, Development, PR and Marketing at the Washington County (MD) Health System, I was responsible for contracting with Brakeley Briscoe (then Brakeley Inc) in 2002. George Brakeley was our point of contact, and there simply are not enough superlatives to describe him and his work. He was honest, had no hidden agendas, and his interviews were professional and confidential and proved invaluable in helping to determine how much we could raise, from whom and over what period of time. His recommendations proved to be on target. He knows his business inside out and seems to have fun at it as well. Bottom line: We followed his plan and raised over $4 million in record time..just as predicted.

Barry Nickelsberg,
Vice President for Institutional Advancement
Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic -- Spartanburg, SC

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© 2006 Brakeley Briscoe Inc.

Brakeley Briscoe Inc. Clients