Our Mission
LAPA is all about your fundraising advancement.
LAPA seeks to positively change the way nonprofit executives and their boards think about, plan, and grow their fundraising programs.
LAPA serves as campaign, grant, and planning experts with clients across the country, around the world, and in every field of charitable activity.
LAPA provides a full suite of fundraising services including grants research and management, feasibility and planning studies, advanced donor research, annual funds, planned giving programs, major gifts, and campaigns.
Our Approach
We focus on your results
We exist for the sake of producing fundraising results for you.
We are proactive in communication and infuse performance measures into all of our work including ROI reporting, financial forecasting, weekly progress updates, and regular personal contact with you.
We track your ROI - Return on Investment
LAPA is the only fundraising firm that tracks and publicly reports actual return on investment for each client. For every dollar you invest in fundraising, you will know exactly how well our strategies performed, and what processes need to be improved to gain a greater return.
As established by the Better Business Bureau, a good ROI benchmark is three to one, or $3 raised for every $1 spent on fundraising. LAPA is proud to report that we have met or exceeded this goal for every client we’ve worked with.
As documented by an outside independent evaluator, for every dollar that clients have expended with LAPA, they have received an average ROI of $4.25 from private grants, $27 from government grants, and $8 from campaigns.
View Our Annual ROI Reports Here:
2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020
We strategize and implement
LAPA doesn’t just make the plan, do the research, or conduct the study; we can also implement the recommendations and manage the work.
Many consulting firms advise nonprofits on strategy, and assume the organization has the capacity to implement those strategies. Yet at LAPA we know that nonprofits come in all shapes and sizes, so we’re equipped to function as a full-service development back-office: from researching and writing grants, to creating and managing major donor programs, to designing and managing your next campaign. We work to build your development capacity.
Have an in-house staff? We can train and support them to raise more money than ever before.
Are you ready to hire? We can help you find the best candidates and make sure they’re ready to hit the ground running with a fundraising strategy that will succeed.
We're campaign, grant, and planning experts
It took us decades to develop the comprehensive integrated fundraising services that we offer.
LAPA provides a full suite of development services, including feasibility and planning studies; campaign planning and management; data mining and prospect research and development office management.
Drawing on our work with innovators in the nonprofit sector, and decades of on-the-ground experience, we implement development programs that transform, impact, and advance missions. We even have an extensive private and public grants division with seasoned grant writers and evaluation experts that can be seamlessly integrated into your development team.
LAPA provides high quality fundraising services, working collaboratively as a team, encouraging current and prospective clients to identify, design and implement successful fundraising efforts.
Our Values
You will know our values by what we do. These six touch points define our team values.
Practice Emotional Intelligence in Relationships
Honesty, openness, and frequent communication are central to the success of LAPA’s work. We honor what we say we are going to do and ensure that you are informed and supportive of our decisions and proposed actions.
Social Justice Activists
Nonprofits are key to the creation of civil society and are unified in seeking social justice. Fundraisers, by extension, must be committed to that underlying desire to create a more just and equitable world.
Interventionists
LAPA seeks a new dimension on performance. Their practical approach is the intervening variable for change and the systems that support it.
Value Deep, Sustained Partnerships
LAPA seeks to be seen by our clients as an indispensable extension of their staff and board. LAPA volunteers for and sponsors galas and events, modeling the philanthropy role that we ask of others.
Nimble
LAPA customizes our approach to fit your needs. Instead of running you through the same fundraising industry routines, we listen deeply to your past experience and future aspirations and customize a scope of service to fit the culture of your organization. If warranted, LAPA modifies the scope of service along the way.
Code of Ethics
As longtime members of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the Grants Professional Association, and the American Prospect Research Association, LAPA strictly follows and adopts their code of ethics as our own, including the Donor Bill of Rights.