Rev. Todd Bruce

We requested proposals from several capital campaign consulting firms, and JD Klote was the only one that believed we could raise what we needed to complete our master site plan and fully renovate and expand our buildings so that we could continue to grow. I am so glad that we chose to go with JD Klote; if we had gone with someone else, we would not have been able to achieve what we have achieved, for the simple reason that no one else thought we could do it or should even try.

 

We had our own doubts, too.  When we first saw the scale of gifts proposed by our consultant, we knew that we didn’t have a donor who could make that largest foundational gift. But that didn’t stop our consultant or our campaign.  He quickly figured out another pathway to success for us, and it worked.

 

The active phase of our campaign is winding down, and we’re beginning to talk to contractors and apply for permits. Though we thought that even those in the congregation who attend only very rarely understood what we are doing and why, the visits we made as part of the Capital Campaign made it clear to us that despite our best efforts at communicating about this project, there were still some people who didn’t know or understand, or had misconceptions about what was happening, and the visits gave us a chance to educate those folks and turn them into enthusiastic supporters of the project. We loved making the visits to everyone in the parish; and because well over half of our parishioners have joined the parish in the past seven years, the visits also helped us to create new connections between parishioners and a sense of belonging and common purpose.