The Need

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Opportunity, Community, & Justice for Kids (OCJ Kids) is a small, grassroots nonprofit that was born out of one couple’s desire to provide children in the foster care system with the tools, resources and positive role models that allow to them to succeed and excel in every aspect of life. As a small but growing organization, OCJ recognized the sustaining power of institutional partnerships and built a relationship with their local Charles Schwab office – first as a grantee and, soon, as a participant in Schwab’s signature skills-based volunteering initiative: a single day of high-impact consulting called the Charles Schwab Pro Bono Challenge.

In 2017, OCJ Kids had the idea to leverage the Pro Bono Challenge event to collaborate with skilled volunteers to develop an informed strategy that could help them forge additional strong, holistic corporate partnerships – like the one they had with Schwab – that would ultimately lead to increased recognition, volunteers, and dollars.

The Solution

OCJ Kids worked with Common Impact, a nonprofit intermediary that partners with Schwab to lead the Pro Bono Challenge, to talk through the challenges they face in their partnership development efforts and to define a project that would effectively address those challenges.

Common Impact connected OCJ Kids with a team of Schwab employees with expertise in client cultivation and retention. Over the course of the five-hour consulting session, the team conducted an assessment of OCJ Kids’ existing partnership infrastructure and defined a new corporate engagement strategy and roadmap for the organization.

The Impact

Six months after implementing the new engagement strategy, OCJ reported that they had been able to increase volunteer and donor engagement by 50 percent and earn $150,000 in additional revenue. OCJ Kids also reported that the team’s roadmap had saved their staff an estimated 45 hours per month, enabling them to serve an additional 200 clients.