Elevate is a stable partner during a volatile year for nonprofits
Last year was an incredibly hard year for the nonprofit sector. In that context, the work of building—and protecting—reliable revenue mattered more than ever. At Elevate, we spent 2025 doing what we have done for more than a decade: showing up as a steady, strategic partner for nonprofit leaders navigating uncertainty.
We are proud that the numbers below tell part of that story.
Grant Revenue as a Stabilizing Force
In 2025, Elevate-supported organizations secured $137.2 million in grant funding, with a win rate of 47%. These results were not driven by a handful of extraordinary awards alone.
Instead, the median grant award was $30,000, reflecting the importance of consistent, renewable funding. The mean award was $159,797. These results reflect a funding landscape where consistency and diversification remain essential to organizational stability. Over the course of the year, our team supported the submission of 383 letters of inquiry, 1,534 grant proposals, and 760 grant reports, for a total of 2,677 deliverables.
This year, we also encouraged clients to make the most flexible ask possible in order to adapt to volatility in public funding. Whenever funders allowed it, general operating support or broadly defined program support became essential tools.
Last year, Elevate raised $29 million dollars in general operating grants for our clients, which is 21% of all dollars awarded.
Also this year, funder stewardship also became non-negotiable. Grantmakers increasingly prioritized existing grantees and organizations with whom they had strong, ongoing relationships. For some nonprofits, maintaining and deepening current funder relationships was the only viable path forward. Our team is proud to have raised $67.8 million in renewal funding, which is half of all funding awarded.
Finally, this year conservative forecasting was essential for nonprofit leaders to plan for uncertainty without overextending already stretched resources. We worked with our clients to deliver over 60 strategy projects including 45 revenue projections, which included a careful review of each current funder, their giving history, and their likelihood to renew. It also included 17 peer landscape analyses, which analyzed the giving trends and of peers to promote strategic decision-making for nonprofit leaders.
Supporting Nonprofits Across the Country
Overall, in 2025, Elevate worked with 102 organizations, including 99 retainer clients, across 20 states and 55 cities. These were nonprofits serving diverse communities, responding to urgent needs, and making difficult decisions under pressure.
This year, we also launched new services to support organizations as they navigate this phase, including our most streamlined service to date. Our Specialized Grant Services also worked with 9 specialized projects for clients, including peer landscapes, cases for support, and prospect research.
Building Long-Term Relationships
We are so proud that our average client tenure reached 4.5 years, a reflection of long-term trust and shared responsibility. And our longest client has now been with Elevate over a decade! In a volatile funding environment, many nonprofit leaders chose to stay with a partner who already understood their programs, their risks, and their institutional history.
A Team Built for This Moment
Supporting nonprofits through a year like 2025 required a team: 60 staff members, living and working across 26 states, bringing regional knowledge and national perspective to every engagement.
Our team logged more than 11,600 Zoom meetings, totaling over 1.5 million minutes, while managing 294 Monday.com projects in our project management system.
For our staff, we invested more than $15,700 in professional development and introduced weekly convenings to crowdsource info and tips across the company about changes they (and their clients) are witnessing across the sector. Our Social Connections Committee also hosted 8 events to facilitate community building and social activities allowing staff to connect through activities outside our day-to-day work, including our very popular Valentine’s Day Battle of Rom Coms, our annual Grant Professionals Day celebration, our Halloween Costume Contest, and our virtual Winter Party.
Other milestones we are celebrating this year include: three staff also welcomed new babies! Additionally, four staff who have been with Elevate over 6 years earned a paid sabbatical. Their adventures included trips to visit family, extensive home renovations, and walking 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago.
Sharing Knowledge in a Time of Change
Elevate also leaned into its role as a thought partner. In 2025, we hosted 13 webinars, including five free sessions, published 15 new blog posts, and convened three live Conversation Series events.
Many of these offerings focused on helping nonprofit leaders interpret and respond to rapidly changing conditions, including new administrative realities and funding constraints.
We were proud to partner with Grant Station on these efforts. We attended the Grant Professional Association annual conference in Baltimore, where you might have seen us!
In particular, we were proud to have three Elevate staff members present topics at this conference, including: Prospect Research Strategy; How to Build Meaningful Relationships with Private Grantmakers; and Infusing Empowerment Language in Grant Writing.
Looking Forward
Elevate has partnered with hundreds of nonprofits over the past decade, helping secure more than $1 billion in grant funding. In 2025, that experience mattered.
Today, our focus is sharper than ever: reducing risk for nonprofit leaders as they make critical decisions for their organizations.
We want Elevate to be the lowest-risk option for your grants program in this moment of uncertainty—not because the work is easy, but because we have built systems, expertise, and relationships designed to hold steady when conditions are anything but.
The challenges nonprofits face are real, and they are ongoing. But so is our commitment to standing with the sector through them. If you want to know how we can help you, please reach out!
We know that communities around the country are capable and resilient – and that nonprofits will continue to be a positive force during this season of suffering and scarcity. But it is incredibly hard right now for our sector.
The need is deep, wide, and growing. Private funding is as constrained as it has been in decades. Federal funding has evaporated. Expenses are at an all-time high after years of inflation.
Elevate is digging deep to meet the moment comprehensively for our established nonprofit clients and prospective clients. We have been a trusted expert and partner to hundreds of nonprofits for over a decade, resulting in over $1 billion dollars raised from grants. Today, we are focused on reducing risk for nonprofit leaders as they make critical decisions for their organizations. I intend for Elevate to be the lowest-risk option for your grants program at this moment of revenue uncertainty.
With this in mind, we are introducing the most responsive and flexible service packages we have ever offered because we know clients need options right now. We have more affordable options that focus on just the support you really need and we have increased our options for adding more support for even our already comprehensive scopes of work.
We are also helping nonprofit leaders tap into the information they need to project future revenue and decide which programs and revenue sources to prioritize. Together, we will meet this moment.
We have been talking to our nonprofit clients all year. Below is a summary of what we are hearing and how we are adapting. My hope is that you see your organization and your distinct situation in one of the below themes – and that you can chart tangible next steps that are available for you right now.
If you are a prospective Elevate client who sees your organization in one of the scenarios below: we want to talk! Please reach out to Jessica Culverhouse, the head of our Business Development team.
If you’re an established Elevate client: we are so proud to partner with you at this critical moment. If you need to discuss your options, particularly during difficult budgeting periods: we should talk! Please reach out to Jaime Roscoe, the head of our Client Relations Team.
And of course, everyone reading this right now is invited reach out to me personally to discuss what you need and how Elevate can respond!
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
The overall funding landscape is contracting for our work. There is less money now. What should we do?
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Elevate is helping clients define and fund their core programs. During contraction, nonprofits need to protect their mission-critical programs, something we highlighted in a conversation series earlier this year. Wherever possible, they should re-direct time, attention, and investments to support this essential work.
Through our Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, we are supporting this work by:
- Preparing data-driven revenue projections and assessing the feasibility of programmatic and organizational grant revenue targets;
- Conducting peer landscape analyses to explore whether re-framing current work or focusing on a previously lower-priority program’s funding needs could replace other funds that are disappearing from the marketplace;
- Offering an external perspective on an organization’s essential programs and how we can best communicate what is at stake if those programs disappear to a funder audience;
- Monitoring key indicators of grant program effectiveness so we can help clients pivot more quickly if one strategy is not working as intended.
Through our Ongoing Writing Retainer Services, we are supporting this work by:
- Taking the work of maintaining an existing grant program off of a senior leader’s plate, so they can focus on securing resources from new sources or on stabilizing an organization undergoing dramatic change.
Through our custom solutions, we are supporting this work by:
- Reducing the cost of our comprehensive grant writing services model by removing revenue growth services – prospecting and cultivation – for organizations that want or need to focus on just maintaining what they have;
- Offering time-bound projects or series of projects to address specific needs, rather than ongoing support services. For example, we can assess your existing budgets to identify what may be turning off funders in a competitive market. Or, we can research a handful of priority funders you would like to pursue independently.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
We need to downsize or restructure our development department or fundraising function. We are looking for ways to delegate essential tasks so that our limited internal capacity can focus on the most important work.
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Elevate has long been a good solution for organizations that need to restructure their overall development department or grant function. In the current context, we can provide both short- and long-term staffing solutions that give organizations a lot of flexibility to choose an option that meets their needs and budget now and add or subtract from that option in the future as their needs change.
Through our Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, we offer a low-risk staffing solution by taking on the work of hiring, training, and establishing the workflows for an entire grant department. You pay for a fraction of a senior strategist, a writer, and a data manager rather than three distinct positions. And, if any of those staff members are no longer available, we find another team member for you while maintaining continuity for your overall grant program. If your budget is limited right now, you can choose one of our smaller scopes of work and scale up later if your circumstances change.
Through our Ongoing Writing Retainer Services, we also take on the work of finding stellar grant writing talent and establishing a streamlined process for outsourcing part or all of your grant writing and submission needs. Like our Comprehensive services, we can scale our support up or down as your needs change. We are now offering our most cost-conscious package – 2 grants or reports per month for $3,500 per month. Finally, if you ever need more strategy or prospecting support, we will help you transition to a more comprehensive engagement or recommend a one-time project to meet your needs.
Through our custom solutions, we can further ensure your development function is positioned to meet the moment. For example, we can add additional data tracking to your Comprehensive services to track every deadline you need to keep tabs on for your grants program, even the work you do internally. Or, we can engage in a one-time project to assess your development needs and map those functions onto your available staff roles and capacity.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
We are cutting programs, activities, or interventions and need to understand what funding can be retained or re-deployed.
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Funder positioning is one of Elevate’s strengths: we are the best at figuring out how to tell an authentic story to a funder in a way that helps them really understand how they can have an impact.
Through our Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, we take a critical look at every upcoming deliverable to assess whether the previous year’s strategy is still the right one in this context. Through intentional revenue target development and funding projections, we can recommend whether we need to focus upcoming asks on a new program or initiative that is underfunded.
Through both our Comprehensive and our Ongoing Writing Retainer Services, our draft process helps us understand funders’ current giving priorities. We can make data-driven recommendations about which funders will be most receptive to a request that looks a bit different than in years’ past.
Through our custom solutions, we can work with you to build a defined project or ongoing retainer focused on communicating organizational pivots to current and potential funders. This work can include template outreach emails, a project plan with deadlines for reaching out to key funders in advance of planned solicitations, and research into evolving giving priorities.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
Our nonprofit was reliant on public funding. We’ve realized we need to diversify our funding sources.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
Elevate has worked with many clients over the years who are stepping into private funding for the first time, after years of building organizations through corporate, individual, or public funding. That expertise positions us well to support organizations’ pivot away from public funding sources that have disappeared.
Through our Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, we are working with organizations that have a strong private funder base to increase gift sizes from dedicated supporters and pursue focused strategies to secure funding from new supporters. Through peer landscape analyses, prospect research, draft emails to new and renewal funders, and cultivation project management, we can help nonprofits further strengthen their private grant revenue stream in the short-term.
Through our custom solutions, we are working with organizations that did not previously have a strong private funder base to:
- Assess the long-term funding potential in their space through Peer Landscape Analysis Projects;
- Prioritize relationship-building and solicitation of well-aligned funders through Prospect Qualification Projects;
- Provide one-time or ongoing support to strengthen their funder relationship-building by developing funder outreach materials, providing coaching, offering ongoing task management, and working with you to prep for funder calls.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
Our programs are resonating with funders right now, thankfully! We are looking for support with revenue growth while staying within our budget.
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Elevate is gleaning real-time insights from our expert staff who work with a large base of clients. Based on weekly staff huddles facilitated by our President & Managing Director, we are seeing nonprofits in the following spaces find success pursuing new revenue streams:
- Mental/Behavioral Health, particularly in connection with housing programming;
- Substance Abuse recovery and prevention; and
- Grassroots organizing, convening, and education around timely issues, particularly resisting corporate greed, supporting workers, economic mobility, and creating a more just democracy.
At the same time, we know that even this revenue growth may not be grounded in a high volume of new grant submissions. Instead, it may require strategically re-framing existing work to align with the most timely issues facing their communities and targeted outreach to a small pool of well-aligned funders.
Through our Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, we can re-frame your work for more promising funder spaces, analyze what is and isn’t working about past strategies, and recommend appropriate revenue targets grounded in data-driven revenue projections. For the first time, we can also scale all aspects of this model up or down – do you need less drafting but more funder research and cultivation support? We can make that happen.
Through Ongoing Writing Retainer Services, we can take routine renewals and reports off of your to-do list so you can focus on the cultivation and solicitation of new funders for new work or priorities.
Through our custom solutions, we are working with organizations to assess the long-term potential of grant funding in their space prior to deciding whether to invest in building a private grant program. Let us take some of the guesswork out of what your next move should be as you acclimate to a different revenue profile.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
Our funding seems stable, but we need to understand our funding potential for specific geographic regions, or programs, or the next 3-5 years to aid our current planning.
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Elevate offers a variety of analyses that can help nonprofit leaders understand what funding is available in which geographic regions or for what programs, in order to make more strategic decisions about both investing in and decreasing investments in specific programs. In particular, we are helping nonprofit decision makers understand the long-term funding potential in their space through Peer Landscape Analysis Projects and prioritize relationship-building and solicitation of well-aligned funders through Prospect Qualification Projects.
WHAT WE ARE HEARING:
I just need more information about what is happening in the sector in real time.
WHAT WE ARE DOING:
Elevate remains a resource for original data and research through our blog and email list. For example, a recent post from our President & Managing Director reports what we are seeing regarding the impact of the federal funding freeze. One potentially surprising finding was that Elevate clients secured comparable public funding in 2025 as they had in previous years. Additionally, we hosted a Conversation Series earlier in the year and have a series of posts about the big questions nonprofit leaders are asking and guidance from seasoned professionals about leading through periods of uncertainty. We also host workshops and trainings, including a free introduction webinar available on demand and other educational webinars available through our partnership with GrantStation.
Earlier this month, I stepped into the new role of President & Managing Director here at Elevate. In this new position, I am responsible for overseeing the work of our Executive Team and supporting cross-departmental collaboration in service of our top goal – consistently high-quality services for clients that leads to long-term partnerships.
While this role is new to me, I feel very lucky that I am already deeply familiar with Elevate, our phenomenal company leaders, and many of you, our clients. This September, I celebrated my 11th anniversary with Elevate and, while a lot has changed, so much has also remained the same.
As I step into this new role, I would like to highlight a few of the reasons why I remain deeply dedicated to our work:
- We have a remarkable founder and CEO. Alayna founded Elevate to help nonprofits win more grant funding and help nonprofit leaders clarify and refine how they will achieve their missions. Her approach was uniquely pragmatic – provide the expertise, capacity, and structure that all grant programs need and the revenue will come. She challenges anyone who works with her – staff, clients, and partners – to look at problems objectively, make decisions grounded in data, and always take the right next step to achieve progress over the long-term. I feel very lucky that she remains the strategic leader for the company as we grapple with a period of deep uncertainty in the sector.
- Our team is committed, super talented and, frankly, fun! Elevate staff care deeply about how their work supports the success of their clients and colleagues. Our clients get to see their excellent attention to detail, persuasive writing, and strategic thinking every day; I also get to see how they learn from each other, come up with creative new ways to solve old problems, and teach all of us in leadership a thing or two at least weekly. Finally: I rarely go a day without laughing – genuinely laughing – in a routine meeting.
- We get to support smart, hard-working nonprofit leaders. Every role I’ve had – from Grant Writer to Director to Supervisor to Vice President – has involved digging into the tough, complicated, and often messy part of nonprofit fundraising and leadership. It turns out that I prefer operating in the spaces where the revenue potential is unclear, the systems are constantly in need of updates, and the community needs always seem to grow instead of shrink. I think the reason is that these complicated spaces are where really amazing nonprofit leaders also find themselves.
So, while there are a few changes that come with a new role and new structure to our Executive Team, there are also a lot of things that remain constant. I look forward to building on the parts of Elevate that make us who we are – and continuing to work with leaders, staff, and clients who have set the standard for me over the years.
Friends and partners of Elevate, it’s time for an annual tradition – our look back at the previous year by-the-numbers!
Last year brought change and uncertainty throughout the nonprofit sector – from the continued proliferation of AI tools and billionaire philanthropists making transformative grants through open calls, to a turbulent presidential election, an overall decline in nonprofit revenues, and specific risks to programs that support marginalized groups.
Here at Elevate, 2024 was indeed a milestone year. Here are a few of the key data points that shaped our year.
We raised our one billionth dollar and hit the 100+ million mark for the 4th year running
The headline this year is of course the grant dollars we secured to support our nonprofit partners. This summer, we hit a major milestone: raising $1 billion in grant funding since Elevate’s founding in 2013. In a press release, Elevate’s Founder and CEO, Alayna Buckner said, “This achievement is a testament to the hard work, skill, and dedication of our staff. But at the end of the day, this milestone belongs to the nonprofits we serve and the work they are doing in their communities.”
Of course, we didn’t stop there! In 2024, Elevate’s clients secured $133,638,544 in grant funding with our support. This is not only the highest annual total in Elevate’s history, but it also marks the 4th consecutive year we’ve raised over $100 million in total. That’s a lot of funding going to support housing, health services, education, grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, climate change mitigation, reproductive justice, and much more. To hit that high mark, we submitted 3,148 total deliverables (LOIs, proposals, and grant reports) last year.
The average and median grant award is (slightly) up; the overall win rate is (slightly) down
Digging into the total dollars raised a bit further, the average grant awarded to Elevate clients in 2024 was an impressive $147,703, and the median award was $30,550. This is up somewhat from last year’s average grant award of $131,172 and median of $30,000.
At the same time, our average win rate – that is, the percentage of grants that were ultimately awarded – is slightly down in 2024, following a recent trend. Elevate’s win rate in 2024 was 49%, as compared with 56% in 2023 and 65% in 2022. Prior to 2022, Elevate’s win rate remained steadily in the 50% range for several years. What remains true is that this is well above the national average win rate of 18%.
As we continue to track data and make sense of the past four years in our sector, our CEO Alayna Buckner hypothesizes that perhaps Elevate’s outlier win rates in 2022 specifically reflects the impact of excess dollars flooding into the sector due to COVID along with relaxed philanthropic expectations at that time. If this is true, it would mirror other changes that Elevate and our clients are seeing, where philanthropy adapted in 2021 and 2022 to the global pandemic, but began to return to previous trends starting in late 2023 and all of 2024.
Hundreds of organizations across the sector trust Elevate to support their grants programs
In total, Elevate partnered with 143 nonprofit organizations in 2024, including 110 nonprofits that engaged us for our signature Comprehensive Grant Writing Services with an average client tenure of over 4 years.
Our partners include nonprofits large and small, working across the country in a wide range of issue areas. Among those organizations we worked with last year, 4 serve an international audience and 25 have a national reach. Our clients are headquartered in 54 cities across 18 states, and the top 3 cities where Elevate clients are headquartered include Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York.
Elevate partner organizations have annual budgets ranging from $400,000 to $1.8 billion, with a median annual budget of $5 million. And the top 3 issue areas in which Elevate clients work are:
- Health, Human Services, and Housing
- Education and Training
- Advocacy, Policy, and Organizing
None of this is possible without our talented staff!
Of course, none of the major successes outlined here would be possible without Elevate’s talented team of grant professionals. Elevate employs 67 individuals who work remotely from 26 states across the U.S. This includes 15 staff in the Director or Senior Director role, 20 Grant Writers and Grant Specialists, and 8 Project Coordinators, as well as a team of managers and support staff who work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly.
Elevate invests in staff development and wellbeing. Last year, staff took advantage of their annual professional development fund to the tune of $15,295 invested in learning and professional growth. And 5 staff took advantage of a 4-week paid sabbatical, a benefit offered to tenured staff to support opportunities for travel, personal growth, reflection, and more.
As we enter 2025, we’re both cautious and optimistic about what is to come. While change and uncertainty will undoubtedly continue, we remain true to our founding values. Specifically, at Elevate we believe that progress is possible, and nonprofits make the world better.
Click here to access our 2024 Elevate By the Numbers infographic, and review our 2023 By the Numbers and 2022 By the Numbers blog posts.
If you’re interested in exploring whether Elevate is the right partner to support your organization’s grant program in 2025, we’d love to hear from you!
Here at Elevate, we have a lot to be proud of, and we aim to celebrate wins large and small. Our hardworking team – 80+ talented grant strategists, writers, and data specialists – work side by side with approximately 100 nonprofits nationwide to secure the resources needed to make a difference across a wide spectrum of issues. We’re proud of each win – from the $10,000 grant from a new partner to the seven-figure award that catapults an organization to the next level of impact. But sometimes, the numbers are so staggering we have to take a minute to pause, reflect, and celebrate!
To that end, we are incredibly proud to share the news with you that:
Let’s pause for a minute and let this all sink in. If you, like me, lose count past a few zeros, here are a few ways to conceptualize just what a large sum one BILLION is…
- One billion stars equals 1/100 of the Milky Way
- One billion people is one eighth of the world’s population
- One billion seconds is almost 32 years
- One billion steps would result in 15 trips around the equator
Obviously a lot has gone into achieving this milestone over the last 10+ years. Our 2023 Elevate by the Numbers post will give you some idea of the impressive metrics it takes just to win over $100 million annually (which we have succeeded in doing for the last three years). We’re also proud that this cumulative figure includes $11 million in funding our clients won as part of Mackenzie Scott’s highly competitive 2023 Yield Giving Open Call.
Executive Director Sonja Allen offers powerful testimony of how working with Elevate has benefited one such client, Yield Giving winner Friends of Guest House, a Northern Virginia nonprofit that provides housing and reentry services for women who have experienced incarceration: “Elevate’s service model ensures we can raise the funds we need to make a difference in the lives of the women we serve. We are fortunate to have such a strong partner in our mission.”
I’m certain that I speak for all of our staff when I say that it is immensely rewarding to know that this money is going to support the delivery of vital direct services as well as systems change and advocacy efforts in communities across the nation.
Interested in learning more about the clients we serve? Check out this 2023 Meaningful Wins blog. You can also learn more about working with Elevate and our services here.
In spring 2023, MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving launched an open call for community-led, community-focused organizations. It received over 6,000 applicants, including 31 Elevate clients who participated. At long last, in March 2024, 361 awards were announced. The process was rigorous, and each organization that participated deserves major kudos!
Elevate is thrilled to share that six of our nonprofit partners were selected as awardees in Yield Giving’s 2023 Open Call. All together, these organizations secured $11 million in funding from Yield Giving for their crucial work in housing, substance use treatment and prevention, education, advocacy, and more. Five of Elevate’s clients were among the top tier of applicants and received $2 million each, and one organization was selected for the next tier and received a $1 million award.
Ultimately 1 out of 5 Elevate clients who applied won (compared to 1 out of 17 for the overall pool.)
Of course, Yield Giving was just one of many competitive opportunities Elevate teams and clients pursued (and secured!) in the past year. We are proud of all of the wins – large and small – that each of our clients secure to advance their important work.
For more on how we measure success at Elevate, check out our 2023 By the Numbers and 2023 Meaningful Wins blog posts! We look forward to continuing to partner with and support ALL of our nonprofit clients in 2024 and beyond!
As we reported in our most recent blog, Elevate closed out 2023 by helping our clients win in excess of $100 million in grant funding! (Balloons effect) Because we meticulously collect data on our work with clients, we know that the average and median grants were $131,000 and $30,000, respectively. However, the size of a grant only tells part of the story. A grant of ANY size can have a significant impact on an organization. A grant may be particularly significant because it is the result of a new funder relationship or an award from a current funder for a new priority. An award may be significant because it supports expansion of current work or new initiatives, or builds capacity to help an organization grow and develop as it moves into a new phase of its life cycle.
Accordingly, we are excited to spotlight just a few of last year’s meaningful wins that helped our partner organizations achieve their fundraising objectives.
Jewish Family Service of the Desert Awarded $200,000 from the Houston Family Foundation
Founded on the Jewish principle of healing the world, Jewish Family Service of the Desert has addressed the social services needs of the Jewish and general community throughout California’s greater Coachella Valley for over 40 years. JFS of the Desert serves thousands of people a year with mental health, school counseling, emergency assistance, and special programming. The organization started working with Elevate in 2023 as one of its Comprehensive Grant Writing Services (Comprehensive Grant Writing Services) clients.
2023 Meaningful Win: Last year, The Houston Family Foundation awarded JFS of the Desert a total of $200,000, with $150,000 allocated to its Case Management Program, providing individuals who are low-income with no-cost assistance in accessing available benefits; and $50,000 to increase current and future access to mental health services in the Coachella Valley.
IN Series Awarded $15,000 from Humanities DC
IN Series is the standard-bearer for innovative opera theater in Washington, DC. Working with local artists and diverse communities worldwide to create novel works grounded in opera and song, IN Series challenges and reimagines these forms, folding in an expanding range of aesthetic and cultural traditions. The organization has been working with Elevate through Comprehensive Grant Writing Services for five years.
2023 Meaningful Win: IN Series was awarded a $15,000 grant from Humanities DC to support its Shakespeare Everywhere Festival Scholar in Residence Lecture Series. The lecture series featured Shakespeare scholar, Professor Marjorie Garber, as she discussed The Promised End, an operatic reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear featuring the music of composer Guiseppe Verdi. The production and lecture series were produced as part of the Shakespeare Everywhere Festival, with the following partnering institutions: IN Series, Folger Theater, Studio Theatre, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington Ballet, and the Washington National Opera. You can read more about the Shakespeare Everywhere festival here.
Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition Awarded $50,000 from the Tides Foundation
Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition (MEJC) works to achieve a clean, healthy, and safe environment for Michigan residents. The organization takes a multi-faceted approach to systems change by aligning on intersectional goals with statewide power-building organizations and small grassroots groups for policy change and disruption. MEJC became an Elevate Comprehensive Grant Writing Services client in 2022.
2023 Meaningful Win: The Healthy Democracy Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation—a grantmaking initiative that is committed to building a more inclusive democracy by shifting power to leaders and communities who have been historically excluded from participating in our nation’s future—awarded MEJC $50,000 to support its general operating costs for planned civic engagement work. This win is particularly meaningful as it represents a shared goal between MEJC and its funding partners around shifting power to—and building power within—impacted communities to change the status quo.
Jewish Family Service of Seattle Awarded $40,000 from the Boeing Employees Community Fund
Inspired by Jewish values, JFS of Seattle helps individuals and families in Puget Sound, Washington achieve well-being, health and stability through a range of supports that include financial assistance, outreach and education, and services for refugees and immigrants, older adults, and people with disabilities. JFS of Seattle is one of Elevate’s oldest Comprehensive Grant Writing Services clients: our partnership is 8 years strong (and counting!)
2023 Meaningful win: One of JFS Seattle’s priorities is supporting and welcoming immigrant and refugee communities to the Puget Sound region. A $40,000 award from the Boeing Employees Community Fund in September 2023 allowed JFS of Seattle to purchase a minivan for the purposes of transporting folks who are resettling in the area. For example, the van will be used to pick up newly arrived refugees from the airport, accompany clients to registration appointments for benefits or to medical appointments, transport clients to appointments for enrolling their children in school or in English language classes, and transport clients to job interviews.
GALA Hispanic Theatre Awarded nearly $80,000 from Learn24 Out of School Time
GALA (Grupo de Artistas LatinoAmericanos) Hispanic Theatre is a National Center for Latino Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Since 1976, GALA has been promoting and sharing the Latino arts and cultures with a diverse audience, creating work that speaks to communities today, and preserving the rich Hispanic heritage for generations that follow. By developing and producing works that explore the breadth of Latino performing arts, GALA provides opportunities for the Latino artist, educates youth, and engages the entire community in an exchange of ideas and perspectives. GALA is a Comprehensive Grant Writing Services client that has partnered with Elevate for eight years.
2023 Meaningful Win: GALA received $79,984.00 in grant funding from Learn24 Out of School Time in support of Paso Nuevo, the organization’s free, year-round bilingual, inclusive theatre education program offered to high school students between the ages of 14 and 19. In addition to providing acting training, playwriting, and mentorship, students can earn community service hours, receive performance stipends, go on field trips, and train for future employment and leadership opportunities.
We are so pleased to share with you this small sample of the hundreds of meaningful wins our clients secured with the support of their Elevate teams in 2023! If you work with a nonprofit and are interested in learning about how Elevate can help you meet your fundraising goals, learn more about our services here and please get in touch!
For those of you who are regular readers of Elevate’s blog, you know what time it is. (And for those who are new readers, you are about to get a snapshot of what we are all about.). ‘Tis the season to celebrate the past year’s accomplishments while also reviewing the data related to our work and examining underlying trends. Because we at Elevate always look for the stories that data tells us. So without further ado, I introduce to you . . . 2023 Elevate by the Numbers.
Elevate’s Win Rate is Over 50% and Our Median Grant Is Up!
At the risk of sounding boastful, we are thrilled to share that in 2023, we secured over $100 million in grant funding for our clients. We’ve now hit this milestone for the third year in a row! While this NINE FIGURE total is certainly impressive, more importantly, we recognize that it represents the sum of both the larger and smaller awards that are equally vital in meeting our clients’ revenue goals. The average grant we won with our clients last year was over $131,000, and our median grant award was $30,000 (up from $25,000 in 2022). We also won the majority (56%) of all grants that we submitted and that were closed for the year. This is considerably higher than estimated national win rates (an estimated 18% of all grants submitted nationally are awarded).
Elevate Clients are Making a Difference in 47 Cities
Last year, we worked in partnership with 168 nonprofit organizations, hailing from 15 states and 47 cities across the nation, with Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia-based organizations leading the pack with the largest shares of our client portfolio. The nonprofits that collaborate with Elevate work in a variety of sectors: Health, Human Services, & Housing; Education & Training; and Advocacy, Policy, & Organizing represent the three largest categories of Elevate clients. Our clients’ budgets range from from $400,000 to over $1 billion, with a median annual budget of $2.5 million.
Because we understand that organizations have different needs based on the stage of their grants program, their capacity, and their strategic fundraising goals, Elevate does not work in a one-size fits all manner. While the majority (96) of our clients opt for our signature Comprehensive Grant Writing Service or our Ongoing Writing Retainer, we also provide start-up support through Grants Accelerator Projects and project-based writing capacity through our Writing Capacity Projects. In 2023, 16 organizations partnered with Elevate on GAPs and 25 engaged us for WCPs.
Elevate Teams Drafted & Submitted Nearly 3,000 Deliverables for Clients
You may be asking what it takes to win $100 million in grant funding. It obviously takes a lot of hard work by our talented Elevate staff (check out our swell team); more concretely, we submitted a total of 2,912 grant proposals, concept notes, reports, and letters of inquiry last year. To get the job done, we racked up in excess of 2 million zoom meeting minutes by attending over 15,000 virtual meetings in 2023. As a fully remote workforce, our 86-member staff reside in 26 states. And last year, Elevate invested $41,000 in staff professional development to support our team in developing their knowledge of IDEA+J, nonprofit financials, fundraising trends, and other topics that are relevant to our clients’ success.
Elevate Can Also Get Down
Lest you think that all of this business leaves no time for pleasure, you’d be wrong. Elevate knows how to party. Last year, we celebrated our 10th anniversary in style at the LINE hotel in Washington, DC, closing the night out with 100 sweet cupcakes. We also jammed to 1,012 songs as part of the wildly competitive Elevate Music League. When we weren’t eating, dancing, and partying, we managed to welcome four precious new Elevate tykes – congrats to the new parents!
Interested in being a part of this winning team or perhaps learning more about our different client services to see how we might support your organization? You can find more information about our services here, or click here to learn more about open positions at Elevate.
Just the grants, please!
In 2022, Elevate launched a new, streamlined retainer service: the Ongoing Writing Retainer. This service provides dedicated, professional grant writing capacity to nonprofits with established grant programs that need expert writing support.
Is an Ongoing Writing Retainer right for your organization? Read on to find out, and contact us today to schedule a meeting to assess your organization’s grant writing needs.
Picture It: Grant Writing Nightmares!
Nightmare 1: Imagine, you are the Director of a nonprofit’s small but mighty Development Team. Everything is going swimmingly…until the day your indispensable grant writer sheepishly asks to schedule some catch-up time on your calendar. It turns out they have secured an exciting new career opportunity! You smile winsomely and wish them well, but inside, you just died a little bit. You keep thinking about that overflowing grants calendar and the extra work that is going to fall to you or your other colleagues while things get sorted.
Hiring and training a replacement grant writer is a process. It took you 4 months to find the last one, who stayed with the organization for just over one year. During the last grant writer search, you missed deadlines for important grant reports and renewals. And one long-time funder became irritated with the lack of coordination and pulled their support… Your mind is spinning with all of the worst-case scenarios that simply cannot happen again.
Nightmare 2: Now imagine you are the Development Director for a nonprofit entering into an exciting transitional period. Program staff is in tune with emergent needs of the community and developing exciting and impactful new programs that are resulting in tons of new interest in the organization. The proverbial phone is ringing off the hook with new funders and partners who want to support the organization’s work. The Executive Director and the Board are looking to the Development team to increase revenues in line with program growth. Up until now, you’ve been keeping all those fundraising balls in the air — managing major donors, overseeing the grants calendar, prospecting new funding leads, and planning successful events. But now, you’re starting to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!
You know that soon, something’s gotta give, whether it is long-term planning, maintaining corporate relationships, or wooing major donors.
QUIZ TIME!
What would you do if you were the Development Director in one of these nightmare scenarios?
A – Text a friend and plan a coffee date to vent about your to-do list.
B – Roll up your sleeves and get to work.
C – Call Elevate!
D – Both A and C
Reclaim Your Time: Elevate’s Ongoing Writing Retainer Service To the Rescue
The correct answer is D, which also stands for “Don’t despair!” That’s because Elevate has got you covered with our Ongoing Writing Retainer Service (OWR)!
Our signature service at Elevate is Comprehensive Grant Writing Services, which offers you a suite of grant program strategy advice and planning, grant calendar and data tracking, project management, prospect research, cultivation support, and full-service grant writing.
While for many organizations this is the solution they need, we’ve learned in our ten years of work with nonprofit clients that, from time to time, organizations simply need a boost in grant writing capacity. In response, we launched a streamlined retainer package in 2022 to help nonprofits through capacity challenges such as the ones described above. We call this service an Ongoing Writing Retainer (OWR).
The OWR matches an organization with a professional grant writer that works to focus exclusively on drafting, editing, and submitting written deliverables – grants, LOIs, and reports – thereby freeing up your internal team’s capacity for other important tasks.
The OWR might be the right Elevate service for you if you already:
- Develop and plan your own annual fundraising goals and strategy;
- Have a planned grants calendar and successfully track all funder deadlines and cultivation history internally;
- Research new funding opportunities, draft funder outreach materials, and track progress toward cultivation targets internally.
The right support at the right time: Elevate and Cavalry Women’s Services
Cavalry Women’s Services, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that ensures women have access to the proper trauma-informed healthcare and educational support they need to take positive steps toward independence, engaged Elevate for an Ongoing Writing Retainer in early 2023.
Calvary came to Elevate with a solid grants program, at a time when they were planning ahead for their Director of Institutional Advancement to step away from work for a period of leave and a temporary need for capacity to their internal grant writer planned to be away for personal leave. With a strong grants program and a clear calendar of opportunities in place, they sought Elevate’s support to write and submit their grants.
We paired Calvary with one of our expert grant writers who quickly acquainted themselves with the organization and its programming. Calvary assigned up to four deliverables per month to their Elevate grant writer, including proposals and grant reports.
The Elevate writer met with our point of contact at Calvary briefly on a biweekly or as-needed basis to confirm details and deadlines, receive assignments, and discuss what information was needed to prepare the grants. Elevate handled each step of the drafting process—from planning, drafting, editing, attachment gathering, through to submission. Meanwhile, the team at Calvary was free to focus on other development responsibilities while knowing that their grants submissions could rest in Elevate’s capable hands.
When asked about her experience working with Elevate on an Ongoing Writing Retainer, Heather Laing, Chief Development Officer and our main Point of Contact at Calvary, shared:
Elevate’s OWR is not only for organizations that have a short-term staffing need; we have many other happy clients who have selected this service as their long-term grant writing solution! For example, you can check out the Case Study on our work with the Latino Community Foundation to learn more about our years-long OWR partnership.
Ready to get started?
Interested in what an Ongoing Writing Retainer or one of Elevate’s other services can do for you?
Get in touch so that we can answer your questions, and you can spend more time where your energy is needed most.
I had the opportunity to sit down with one of those partners, April Walker, founder of Philanthropy for the People for an Elevate Q&A, the first in a series of blogs where we “pass the mic” to another member of our extended community to gain their personal perspective on issues relevant to the philanthropic sector and nonprofits. These conversations are exciting to Elevate as they lift up the opinions and expertise of our partners — which sometimes differs from the perspectives of Elevate’s leadership or readers. We believe that rich dialogue and difference of viewpoints makes this work more meaningful.
In my conversation with April, the first of our Elevate Q&A sessions, she shared her perspective and advice for organizations seeking to center equity and inclusion in their work. She also offered her thoughts on the limitations and challenges inherent in institutional philanthropy and fundraising – plus some advice for grant professionals and nonprofits. Here, I share some of the highlights of our discussion.
Institutional Philanthropy as an Imperfect Solution
Every day, nonprofits navigate the uncomfortable realities of power dynamics and disparities inherent in grantmaking. I asked some questions that explore these tension points and how it is possible to embrace an alternative value system while attempting to meet an organization’s budgetary needs.
Johnisha Levi: Institutional philanthropy is an imperfect solution to societal need, in part because it is the product of inequitable wealth transfers. Given this reality, what do we do to challenge and disrupt this system while society has yet to undertake the necessary systemic and structural reform to replace this entrenched system?
April Walker: When I started in the field, folks were not quite as bold as they are now. Now they are starting to say, “Hey, you over there with all that wealth that you amassed in a problematic way, or that you inherited, we see a problem with that. And not only do we see a problem with that, we’re challenging that because we don’t trust exactly where the money came from, or we see that you’re limiting how you actually show up inside of the values you purport to have. We see that you’re asking us questions that you yourself don’t live by.”
So with the big players in the philanthropic space, it is getting harder and harder to celebrate the ways in which those dollars are exchanged. They’re not actually losing much, and the demands on celebrating and recognizing them are creating an additional strain for those of us who see the truth of what’s happening. It’s not necessarily an indictment of individual wealthy people or of all foundations of all sizes. but it is a request and growing demand for transparency. I think one of the biggest things that we can do is speak truth to power and not just placate, laud, and celebrate people for having huge amounts of resources at their behest—and with that act of calling out comes incredible amounts of power.
JL: When do you think the tide started to change in terms of calling out problems inherent in Philanthropy?
AW: I think within the past five years things have shifted. We’ve seen this as funders invite more conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion by asking related questions of grantees. As a grant writer or grant professional, if you’re continually having to answer questions about how diverse or not a nonprofit’s board is, or how inclusive or not a program is from a funding entity that is none of those things, it is going to continue to expose these inequities.
JL: What is giving as its most ideal? What other models of giving do you recommend we look to for inspiration in our work and in our own lives as givers?
AW: In proportion to what we have as a community and in proportion to what we have been able to amass on a large scale in terms of wealth, Black people are deeply generous. Sometimes it shows up financially, but there is also a generosity of time, of connection, of resources. Members of my family would likely never call themselves philanthropists, but have they put money into a pot to ensure a certain relative can achieve XY and Z dream? Absolutely. Is that a giving circle by the sector’s terms? Absolutely.
I trust in the power of our ability to show up because you can pretend to care, but you can’t pretend to show up, whether that means showing up with a plate of food or showing up with $20 or just to lend a hand, and not even needing a thank you. All of that to me counts as generosity where I come from, and there’s a different type of connection in that than when money is at the center and you have to perform a certain way in order to even be in relationship.
Advice for Grant Professionals and Nonprofit Clients
JL: In a recent Cocktails, Conversations & Lessons in Philanthropy episode, you discussed funders’ need for public recognition and celebration and how that is frequently integrated into proposals. How do you recommend that grantees (and the fundraising consultants who work with them) respond to the common (and frankly uncomfortable) question of “How will you publicize our donation?”
AW: There are two applicable buckets. The first bucket is name recognition, or the literal benefits the funder receives for donating—what I call the five star treatment. The other bucket is a funder taking credit for stuff that they didn’t really do—meaning that funding an initiative through-and-through looks very different from making a non-profit apply every year. The former takes a long-term, sustained investment where people do not have to question if this money is going to run out. I wish quite frankly someone would do a case study of how much funders, especially corporate foundations or businesses in general, spend on ensuring that their investments look a certain way versus actually ensuring that their dollars are impactful.
Some grantees may decide that this recognition costs too much emotionally or mentally; other times, this may extend to telling the foundation this truth. It really comes down to being clear on how much risk your organization can assume. I’m also a huge advocate of telling other funders about their peers. I think at the end of the day, when you have a relationship with a funder who is deeply understanding—who does show up inside of their application in a way that’s not making you and your vision feel small—that it’s an opportunity to say, “Hey, I really appreciate your process for all of these reasons, and here’s how we also are engaging with other folks differently.”
JL: Funders are fixated on the idea of metrics and measurements, often to the detriment of smaller, less resourced organizations that are doing great work that is not necessarily measurable in the way that they demand. How do we evolve from this need to quantify? What have you seen other funders doing as an alternative? And how do we move away from the status quo?
AW: There are funders that will ask for anecdotes in lieu of metrics or measurements, including asking for successes and challenges encountered. I quite prefer those questions. My personal and ever-growing feeling is that funders who want metrics should collect them themselves. Nonprofits need not be experts in all things. You want someone that’s really skilled in data analysis and measurement, if you as a funder have a specific focus on funding poverty in this local community, is it not incumbent upon you to collect the data that you need to prove that you are funding it in the right way? I don’t know many nonprofits that can pay a data expert what they’re worth.
Nonprofits are interested in the data too—we want to know that we are doing the “thing”—but we are also interested in the reality of the thing and data doesn’t give us all of that narrative. The question is really one for funders to start asking themselves. Given you as the funder have set your own focus areas and funding priorities, how do you plan to go about getting that information from nonprofits that you can see are under-resourced? And even what funders do get from nonprofits is not always the most accurate, most comprehensive, complete story.
I’m also not sure what all these reports are telling people. As someone that used to be a program officer and received grant reports, even I had the question of, “What do we do now?” And if an organization didn’t meet the metrics, are we using that reality that they fell short of the metrics to determine whether or not we fund them again, rather than to determine how we can help improve the situation?
JL: Sometimes as individuals and organizations, we feel powerless to effect change when the problems are so massive. What are some steps or some work that you recommend we can still do to make a difference in our day-to-day work?
AW: Giving into hopelessness and giving up is not a path that we can choose. You have days that are challenging and demoralizing, but you can look up any number of leaders in the sector that remind us to be hopeful. Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson is a great example. And we do have wins along the way!
I’m also finding the people that I can link arms with. I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on the people that are committed to moving slowly or delaying. I think your day-to-day has to find a balance between, “I have this capacity to fight, but when I feel like I’m at my wits end, I can turn back to the community that I know is bolstering me and take some strength from them.”
I also use my own philanthropy for this purpose. I support the organizations that I believe in and I know are doing good work and that I can trust, and that’s where I designate as much support as I can. I can also show up as a volunteer, I can show up as a board member, or I can just lend time to make an introduction. All of those things still matter inside of a system that is working to save itself, inside of whiteness as a construct that only knows how to defend itself. I have no qualms and no Illusions about how powerful the systems are, but I also won’t doubt my capacity for change and my capacity for impact.
Interested in learning more about alternative models of fundraising that are more community-centered? Check out the 10 principles of Community-Centric Funding developed by fundraisers of color that are grounded in racial and economic justice.
Keep your eye on this space for more ideas and strategies from April in the coming months as well as other Elevate Q&As.
