The Rev. Marek Zabriskie

St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania is delighted and honored to have worked closely with James D. Klote & Associates, Inc. as our consultants on a $6,250,000 capital campaign, that was well over two times the amount that we had ever raised before and represented a 20-fold increase of what we had raised in our largest capital campaign 20 years before. Our goal was aggressive and represented six-times our annual giving. Many in the parish thought that it was well beyond our ability to raise this goal.

We spent well over a year preparing for our campaign, determining our goals and selecting our consultants carefully and then met with more than 20 focus groups in our church to determine what they believed our priorities for the campaign should be. At every focus group we also highlighted the need to increase our endowment. We had an annual giving of $1,000,000 and have an endowment of $5,000,000. Almost $2,000,000 is restricted to operate our 15-acre cemetery, leaving less than $3,000,000 of unrestricted endowment. St. Thomas operates nine separate buildings, which are 150 years old on average and require much maintenance along with our 43-acre historic campus that dates back to 1698.

Thanks to the hard work of James D. Klote & Associates, Inc., an excellent leadership team from our church, and incredible generosity from more than 200 households in our church, we not only reached our goal but we surpassed it by $250,000 and raised an additional $750,000 of endowment that we had not set out to raise in our campaign at this time. In addition, we increased our annual giving by over 10%. We determined at the outset to do a combined annual and capital campaign, as our needs to increase annual giving were as great as our need to raise capital funds. We couldn’t be happier with our result or with the work of James D. Klote & Associates, Inc. Our campaign was called ‘Building for the Generations,’ and it has clearly allowed us to create the strongest foundation that our church has seen in centuries.

I would be glad to give my highest recommendation for anyone who is interested in knowing about your consultant’s gifts, performance and abilities. Indeed, he has served St. Thomas Church extremely well. He is very capable, extraordinarily hard working and is a joy to work with; this s a rare and wonderful combination. We hate to see him go, and we would have been thrilled to keep him on longer.