Reinvigorating Donor Retreats
How does a ministry with a small staff organize a donor retreat that’s done with excellence?
They hire a dedicated event producer to guide the process and allow their team to interact with the donors.
The background
With any event work we do, our goal is to be the calm, steady presence that our client needs. We aim to do the heavy lifting on logistics, programming and production in order to free our client contacts to focus on interacting with guests, building relationships and preparing for their roles in the programming.
After reimagining their donor retreat experience through work at a previous firm, the Guardian team stepped in to become the event producer for Desiring God, a leading evangelical teaching ministry–guiding a seamless transition of responsibility from their team to ours over the course of several semi-annual retreats.
The project
What started with changes to the program flow and room setup moved to a complete overhaul of the guest communication process and on-site experience. We oversaw the content creation for programming elements, printed materials, and graphics; drafted scripts and integrated existing videos to help tell Desiring God’s story in a compelling way; created a schedule that offered guests times of rest, encouragement and interaction with like-minded people; selected choice production vendors, provided detailed run sheets, oversaw rehearsals and cued the operators to execute smooth programming; researched and recommended tools to streamline the registration and communication processes; and worked closely with venue contacts to select spaces and menus that fostered a deeply enjoyable experience.
the outcome
As the on-site “single source of truth” event contact, we coordinated with venue, volunteer and staff contacts to ensure that all plans were executed seamlessly. Our efforts created an ideal environment for Desiring God to engage their audience and inspire them to continue partnering with the ministry.