Featuring: Danielle Grandholm, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Rising Kites
The Challenge
What started in 2021 as a single bag program for families receiving a Down syndrome diagnosis expanded in a few short years into a coffee shop and a flower-growing enterprise, both built to employ individuals with disabilities. “I would say I’m definitely a dreamer when it comes to our nonprofit work,” said Danielle Grandholm, who co-founded Rising Kites with her husband, Matt, after their daughter Sammie was born with Down syndrome.
“We were doing a lot, and it was getting a little out of hand, because we wanted to do so much, but we don’t actually have the capacity for all of those things.”
The board recognized the need to balance the organization’s impactful growth with taking care of its team. It was time to slow the pace, agree on priorities, and build a plan everyone could access and point back to along with fundraising coaching support for Danielle.
Why LSA?
Rising Kites didn’t come to Loring, Sternberg & Associates cold. The relationship started years earlier, through a personal connection. Danielle’s sister, who had donor relations experience, began volunteering for Rising Kites early on and introduced Danielle to Annette, a college friend. “Annette kind of fell in love with what we were doing,” Danielle shared, and started volunteering her time to help lead Rising Kites’ fundraising campaign. By the time the board decided it needed a strategic plan and fundraising coaching, LSA was a proven connection.
The Approach
Strategic Planning
LSA structured the engagement in four steps. It began with an in-person board and staff planning retreat, where Annette facilitated a guided SWOT analysis and helped Rising Kites’ leadership sketch out high-level goals and future direction. From there, LSA developed, coordinated, and tabulated an online constituent survey, gathering feedback from community leaders, medical providers, families, and partners about needs, gaps, and priorities. Danielle singled out this step as one of the most valuable parts of the whole process: the survey was, in her words, “eye-opening.” Not because it surprised the board with new information, but because it confirmed they’d been focused on the right things all along. “It seemed like even the things that mattered to our board were the things that mattered to our overall community,” she said.
With the retreat and survey complete, LSA drafted an initial strategic plan and worked with Danielle and a small leadership team through structured refinement sessions to turn broad direction into a usable plan. The full board then had the opportunity to provide additional input and revisions before formal approval.
Fundraising Coaching
Alongside the strategic plan, Annette and Danielle built an ongoing fundraising coaching relationship: biweekly, 60-minute check-in and strategy calls focused on Rising Kites’ development work. That starts with analyzing Rising Kites’ development plan and talking through strategies to put it into action, then digs into the annual fund, reviewing solicitation pieces and shaping input on mailed communications, multi-channel campaigns, and donor asks.
The calls also cover the operational side of fundraising: evaluating Rising Kites’ CRM processes and procedures and addressing shortcomings, reviewing stewardship plans and activities for ways to enhance them, and building or adjusting tools and processes wherever a gap turns up. Annette has provided templates and resources in areas identified as opportunities for improvement, giving Danielle a place to start instead of creating it from scratch.
Annette and Danielle use the time to strategize on top donors and newly identified prospects, including specific gift asks and approaches, and to review marketing materials and Rising Kites’ library of donor impact stories.
The calls have also helped Danielle build a meaningful framework for engaging individual board members in fundraising and development, and give her strategic guidance on events, activities, and communications as they come up, plus a standing place to bring whatever development questions arise between sessions.
A “Wow” Moment
For Danielle, the standout moment was what the retreat and the constituent survey revealed together. Going into the process, she worried that bringing the whole board through a formal planning exercise might surface real disagreement about priorities. Instead, the opposite happened.
“We all kind of knew the things we were going for, but then seeing all of us come together, and seeing that we all said the same things over and over about what the main goals were, what the priorities were, it just really highlighted that for us.”
The outside survey data uncovered that the issues the board cared about were the same ones community leaders, medical providers, and families shared. Danielle said of the realization, “It was like, a ‘Yes, okay, we’re all on the same page, we’re going in the right direction.'”
The Results
Rising Kites adopted its first-ever strategic plan, and the organization is already working to bring it to life. The committee working on the organization’s goals has mapped out the roles and structure of how Rising Kites’ programs and positions should work. The bag-program team has cleaned up its processes ahead of Rising Kites’ first appearance at a medical conference where the organization will spend a week introducing genetic counselors to its work. And the employment-program goal has already produced an early draft of a booklet laying out development goals for Rising Kites’ employees.
What the plan changed about the board and how it operates is just as important to Danielle. Before, board members came to meetings and offered ideas; now, each has taken ownership of a specific goal and largely drives it without much oversight from Danielle herself. “They’ve really taken ownership over a lot of tasks,” she said. That shift, paired with LSA’s separate work of biweekly fundraising coaching with Danielle and hands-on support for the annual fundraising campaign, means the organization now has both a long-term roadmap and an active partner.
Fundraising coaching has followed its own arc, from reactive to intentional. Danielle came in hoping for specific, practical guidance: a game plan for newsletters, mailings, and donor communications. She got that, but the bigger shift turned out to be accountability.
“I think I knew it would be helpful, but having someone hold me accountable to creating and implementing a game plan and schedule has made the whole year feel less burdensome,” she said. “I have a better idea of what to expect each month and can plan accordingly, rather than feeling like things are constantly popping up out of nowhere.”
Final Thoughts + Impact
Asked what LSA brought to the table that Rising Kites couldn’t have done alone, Danielle pointed to intentional planning and guided implementation:
“For LSA to come in and show us these are the goals we’re working toward, these are the objectives, this is how we’re going to get there. Just mapping it out for us allowed us to have a much clearer direction.”
She believes Rising Kites might have arrived at similar goals eventually on its own. What LSA provided was the plan itself, and a process disciplined enough to turn board enthusiasm into assigned, owned, and tracked work—the same discipline that now gives her a fundraising rhythm to plan around all year, instead of reacting to it month to month.
About the Organization
Rising Kites is a nonprofit founded to support families with a new Down syndrome diagnosis. Started in 2021 by Danielle and Matt Grandholm after their daughter, Sammie, was born with Down syndrome and they found themselves with little more than a generic printout, Rising Kites’ mission is to give other families what they didn’t get: encouragement, resources, and community from the moment of diagnosis onward.
Learn more at risingkites.org.
