The Manchester Boys & Girls Club (of Manchester, NH) is more than just a place to go after school. For one young girl, it became an escape from a life of homelessness and being put into state custody. The staff, board, and volunteers have so much passion for their work with the children that their energy has generated $1.15 million in gifts and pledges by implementing the Benevon Model. Read the interview for more about this group and their success.

This week Gary Frost, the executive director at the Manchester Boys & Girls Club, and Tracey Adams, the associate development director, are interviewed by Terry Axelrod, the founder and CEO of Benevon. As with many of the staff, Frost and Adams have spent a large part of their lives with the Manchester Boys & Girls Club.

Adams, a member of the drum corps in 1976, is one of five full-time staff members who are alumni of the Boys & Girls Club program. And both Frost and the director of development, Brian Tremblay, have been with the organization since 1976—twenty-nine years each! Frost said many of the children start coming to the club when they are six years old and can't bear to leave when they hit eighteen, so they stay involved and help other children.

Terry: What's one of the stories that really touches your heart or reminds you of why you do the work that you do?

Tracey: Gary won't be able to get through it. It's our "Jen story," a young lady who… (pauses with emotion) I don't know if I can get through it either (laughter).

It was a November evening, and Gary and Brian were closing up the building when a mother, daughter, and young son peered into our front door at the Union Street Clubhouse. They had just arrived in town and didn't have anywhere to go. The mother did not have the mental or financial capacity to care for her children. They had been homeless for a long time. We enrolled the kids as members and put the family in touch with services for housing assistance, clothing, and food.

The girl, Jen, thrived at the Boys & Girls Club. She was very quiet and spent hours at the club. Eventually, the children were put into state custody when their mother could no longer care for them. Jen's brother was sent north and was too far away to come to the club, but Jen stayed local and participated in just about every program we had to offer. She became a camp counselor and a lifeguard. She went to the University of New Hampshire and swam competitively for the swim team, which was something she learned at our Camp Foster day camp. She graduated with a degree in marine biology and is now teaching inner-city kids about marine sciences!

Jen is an outgoing, energetic young lady who is becoming so successful in life. She's giving back to kids now, and it's because of what the Boys & Girls Club provided her. She's our superstar and a wonderful young lady. She loves Brian and Gary, and she comes back to visit because we're all still here.

Terry: You really give them a sense of family and it's very touching, so thank you for telling that. That sense of family is what you'll provide for your donors, too. It's that kind of commitment of your staff to the kids that will make you so successful when it comes to building sustainable funding. Before you came to [Benevon] 101, you had all the pieces in place; you just needed the system.

How many staff members do you have?

Gary: We have seventeen full-time staff members. Depending on the time of the year and the programs, we have upwards of seventy staff members total. We've grown so much in recent years. We're approaching our hundredth anniversary in 2007, and that's going to be a big celebration for us because we're also on the verge of a capital campaign, so we're very excited about that.

Terry: Let's talk about what you were doing for fundraising before you got involved with [Benevon]. What was life like?

Gary: Well, we actually have a pretty diversified funding stream because we try not to put all our eggs in one basket. Of course, we've done special events. You name it, we've probably done it over the years. Some special events are good because they get you out in the community, but many of them took too much of our human resources, so we made a concerted, conscious effort to move away from what I call the entertainment business. We used to have a formal ball gala for about forty-five years that didn't generate much financial support or connect people with what the Boys & Girls Club was about. We also ran a Bingo game for eons that did generate significant funds, but the numbers diminished and running the game became restrictive.

Right now we're down to just one special event, a golf tournament accompanied by a silent and live auction, which we've run for twenty years. It does very well. We generate $50,000 plus with that. We are able to use an exclusive golf and country club, so it's something we're probably going to continue. We have two very powerful videos about our programs that we now show at the tournament because we want people to understand why they're really there. The amounts given recently have been a lot higher than in previous years, so hopefully adding this presentation about our work had an impact.

Tracey: I definitely think it did. We also involved our kids at the tournament. They brought golf clubs to the players' carts in the morning, and I think just having the kids there helped, too.

Terry: So before [Benevon] then, life was pretty much special events?

Gary: Yes. We did have an annual campaign, which we started in 1990, and that really added to the success of our first year using the [Benevon] Model. Anybody who looks at the model will see it's not rocket science; it's just discipline more than anything. We had done all of the components in the past, but we hadn't put it together in a concerted effort and followed up on it. We've stuck very closely to the model with very few changes, and it's been successful. The whole cultivation piece is the key to its success.

Terry: Tell me a little bit about your results. How have you done using the model?

Tracey: At our first Ask Event^™, we didn't know what to expect. We booked half of the ballroom at the biggest hotel downtown with a seating capacity of 250 people. We had twenty-seven Table Captains lined up, and we invited previous donors from our annual campaign. We had 220 people actually in attendance that morning. Our guests were greeted by children at each entrance. We also had children playing African drums, which really got people going. The energy in the room was incredible.

We followed the model exactly with a one-hour program filled with facts and emotion, video, and testimonial speakers, and we ended with a "pitch" for people to join our new giving society.

After the breakfast, we went back to the office and started opening envelopes, and it was amazing every time we'd get a member of our Champions for Kids Society, which is our Multiple-Year Giving Society^™. Gary was sitting next to me. He'd open the envelope, and I'd take it out and squeal every time we had another Multiple-Year Donor, and there was a lot of that going on. At the end of that morning, we had about $386,000 in gifts and pledges.

We had a celebration that night with our board and our Table Captains to make our announcement. Gary had members of our team up there each holding a number. He put us in the wrong order to start, and everyone was happy with a much lower number. He kept shuffling us around, and when we finally revealed the $386,000 number, everyone was just amazed. We did a follow-up mailing to those who couldn't be in attendance, and just a couple months later we hit $500,000 in gifts and pledges over the next five years, so we were just thrilled. I think the highest amount our previous annual campaign had ever raised was about $68,000, and we were already over $100,000 for one year's funding, with pledges that would continue out for four more years.

Gary: And our second year, again, we didn't really know what to expect because we thought we might have run out of donors! We booked the entire ballroom, doubled the number of attendees, and we brought a lot of new people on. We expanded our Table Captains. Some of the folks that were our Champion for Kids Society members stepped up to the plate and became Table Captains. At 5:45 a.m. on the morning of the second event, we started picking up children to help with the event. We call these children "first mates" because they team up with the Table Captains and are seated at each table. So it was also extremely successful, and it's just escalated.

Tracey: And at our third event last month, we raised an additional $345,000 in gifts and pledges for a three-year total of $1,150,000 in gifts and pledges!

Terry: That's wonderful! You are definitely on track toward sustainable funding. How do you define sustainability for your organization? How will you know when you've ensured the legacy you want to leave?

Gary: Right now we have an endowment fund that's approaching $2 million. An endowment fund is really important to our ability to focus on our mission and have less pressure to go out there and generate those dollars year in and year out. Our annual budget is about $1.6 million right now, so we'd like to increase our endowment.

I don't know exactly what the benchmark for establishing my legacy would be, but it would make me feel good and accomplished to leave the legacy of a system in place for this mission-based fundraising to continue. We've learned a lot from our mistakes over the years, and we've found that the most cost-effective way to raise money is by asking folks to give a bit of their own personal wealth. But you need to show them what the outcome will be. Ultimately, I'd like to see more kids in our community served because there are just so many more kids out there that we aren't able to reach. Our membership is at 2,000 right now, and we serve 450–500 kids a day, but we have a community of 18,000 young people in the school system. We have just scratched the surface.

Terry: What do others at the Manchester Boys & Girls Club think about the [Benevon] system?

Gary: We've sent teams to [Benevon] 101, 201, and now 301, and the team members have grabbed on to this and think it's the best thing since sliced bread. We have one individual who's been on our board for eighteen years now, and I've never seen him so energized. His enthusiasm blossomed when we became involved in this model. It's really great to see that. It's so important to have board involvement because they support the staff in the nuts and bolts of the organization, and they are one of the keys to the success of this model.

Terry: Thank you both so much for sharing your experience with us.