At the end of last year, we were bullish about the future of the nonprofit sector and the opportunity for innovation in fundraising, leadership, and strategy to unlock greater impact and outcomes. While 2020 has disrupted every facet of the nonprofit sector, our business, and the world, we remain equally optimistic, and perhaps more so, about the sector and the power of philanthropy.

This year, we saw the dramatic growth of mega-gifts, in addition to the diversification of gift recipients and the increase in the numbers of unrestricted gifts. Simultaneously there has been growth in more modest giving with the number of donors and gifts increasing. Crisis consumed the world and people across the economic, social, and geographic spectrum all responded generously. At a time when we might have expected people to turn inward and philanthropy to decrease, donors did the opposite.

In a year when we all were forced to make difficult business decisions, we are particularly grateful for those nonprofits that continued to invest in our partnership. Our partners in 2020 spanned the sector and engaged our team of 50+ fundraisers and strategists in a variety of ways. We spent the year planning and managing some of the most aggressive campaigns in the nonprofit sector, providing outsourced fundraising leadership and support, recruiting and managing talent, creating and building consensus around new strategies, helping to unlock the full potential of planned giving via more proactive approaches, and collaborating with CEOs and boards alike to navigate a year unlike any other.

Through it all, we wrestled, like society, with how to live up to our stated value of diversity, equity, and inclusion as being core to the success of the sector and our work. The murder of George Floyd forced all of us to reckon with the racial injustice that has held our society back from achieving its ideals. While we continued to advance our own DEI journey as a firm, we sought to move the dialogue forward and leveraged our power as a convener in the sector to organize conversations on building diverse executive teams, boards and donor pipelines as well as building cultures, teams, and talent that value and advance diversity.

It’s been a year. And collectively, we’re moving forward. Our commitment to the nonprofit sector is that here at Orr Group, we will be moving forward aggressively, with optimism, and with the confidence that by working together, we will improve the business of philanthropy and the world in which we live and work.