Land O’Lakes Venture 37 Case Study
The Opportunity
Affiliated with Land O’Lakes, Inc., Land O’Lakes Venture37 (Venture37) is a nonprofit organization striving to help global communities thrive through agriculture. At the time of their engagement with SDSG, Venture37 was known as Land O’Lakes International Development and was challenged with assessing the feasibility of transitioning from primarily funding their international development work through government grants and cooperative agreements, to raising revenue through more traditional fundraising efforts.
Our Work
SDSG worked closely with the Venture37 team to answer fundamental questions about how the organization could best position itself for a potential transition, how to build internal capacity to support this effort, and how they could differentiate their mission and thrive in a crowded philanthropic space. Venture37 and SDSG partnered to surface potential funders, learn how to best attract those funders to Venture37’s cause, and how to build their internal team and development infrastructure to support growth. Through an immersive interview and onboarding process, SDSG developed an understanding of Venture37’s history and focus, then used an “art and science” approach to build a prospective funder model and inform a comprehensive funder landscape review.
Client Services
Strategic Fundraising + Development
Funder Intelligence + Pipeline Development
Capacity Building + Support
Client Results
SDSG presented our findings along with detailed recommendations for how they might navigate advancing and operationalizing this work. Armed with these recommendations–as well as a prospect pipeline of 35 qualified prospects surfaced by SDSG and funder criteria to inform future development work–Venture37 leadership was able to make a data-informed decision about the future of their brand, organizational positioning, and fundraising efforts. This supported Venture37 in transitioning away from what was then Land O’ Lakes International Development.