Case Study: Advancing corporate donor engagement

Meet the Client

LOFT Community Services provides support and hope to people facing complex mental and physical health challenges, addictions, dementia, and/or homelessness. As the fastest growing healthcare agency in the GTA, LOFT tackles the most complex, the most varied, and the most comprehensive mental health and supportive housing challenges in the province. 

LOFT runs programs and support services for more than 9,500 people from youth to seniors per year, and has more than 1,700 housing units in Toronto, York Region, and South Simcoe. Its growth and evolution are deeply rooted in its strong community relationships and collaborative approach, including partnerships to help meet client needs.

The Client’s Challenge

In early 2022, LOFT’s Corporate and Community Engagement Portfolio wanted to create a more effective approach to encourage corporate partnerships. This tactic needed to more easily facilitate requests and help garner new support. Until this point, proposals and engagement opportunity presentation decks were being created on-demand, with each one tailored to a specific corporate or community request rather than encompassing the overarching organizational need. This reactive process required a great deal of time, effort, and resources. 

LOFT needed a proactive tool focused on strategic funding opportunities in order to be able to reach out to larger scale organizations and grow revenue opportunities. This targeted template needed to be responsive to inquiries about corporate engagement and fundraising as well as have the ability to educate prospective partners, inspiring them to join with LOFT. 

Our Solution

This new corporate engagement tool needed to be conceived, written and designed in a short period of time in order to be completed by the end of LOFT’s fiscal year. Right away, we enlisted Rachel Ott at Varga Girl Design to support the entire process. Rachel breaks through cookie cutter design to create memorable, visceral graphic design and she’s also amongst the best when it comes to brand development. In order to create a corporate engagement deck that resonated, we needed to get to the heart of the organization’s story, values and key messages, while understanding the driving forces of its audiences, and tell a story with a great hook and a stunning look. 

Together, we stuck on the idea of taking on challenges because a challenge requires physical or mental strength to accomplish — no one chooses to run a marathon because it will be easy, they choose to do so because it will be a challenge. Solving the mental health and supportive housing crisis is not easy and we wanted to inspire corporate partners to take up this challenge and agree to stand alongside LOFT.

With a theme in place, the Luminate team wrote a powerful sales deck, explaining the challenge, laying out the facts, and showcasing the immense impact the audience could have should they take up the challenge. With the copy approved, Rachel got to work on designing the deck; using bright, lively colours and imagery that evoked feelings of ‘working together to solve a challenge.’

The Results

The first test run of the deck was to a church group who was interested in partnering with, and fundraising for, LOFT. It was very well received and the deck is currently being used to engage supporters and partners, including larger scale organizations, to grow revenue opportunities that are aligned with LOFT’s transformative fundraising strategy.