CASE STUDY - NON-PROFIT
A Better Us / Heart to Heart Marriage & Family Ministries
From Vision to Fundable Growth: Building a Strategic Giving Framework
Helping secure a strategic foundation designed to support sustainable growth, deeper impact, and long-term stewardship.
The Situation
Heart to Heart Marriage & Family Ministries, through its flagship program A Better Us, has a clear and compelling mission: strengthening marriages and families across Canada through Christ-centred teaching, media, and coaching.
As the organization looked ahead, leadership and the board recognized a pivotal opportunity:
Expand national reach
Build long-term financial sustainability
Align vision, programming, and fundraising into a single, coherent plan
What was needed was not more ideas, but a shared strategic framework that could guide decisions, execution, and donor investment over the next five years
The Challenge
Like many mission-driven organizations, Heart to Heart faced a familiar tension:
A bold long-term vision, but fragmented paths to execution
Strong donor relationships, but limited structure to support strategic giving
A desire to grow impact nationally without overextending operational capacity
The core challenge was clarity:
How do you turn a faith-centred vision into a strategy that donors, leaders, and teams can all confidently move forward with?
We worked with the board and leadership team to translate vision into a clear, fundable, and executable growth plan.
The work focused on four integrated outcomes.
1. Aligning Vision Around a 5-Year North Star
Working directly with leadership and the board, we helped articulate a unified 5-year vision:
Positioning A Better Us as one of the most trusted and accessible Christian marriage resources in Canada
Expanding reach across media, churches, events, and digital platforms
Ensuring the vision was ambitious, but grounded in operational reality
This created a shared reference point for every strategic and fundraising conversation.
2. Structuring Strategy into Clear Pillars
The vision was translated into three strategic growth pillars, supported by a strong governance foundation:
Expanding media outreach and digital presence
Building a national coaching and counselling network
Improving long-term financial sustainability
Strengthening governance and operational integrity as the foundation for growth
This structure helped leadership clearly define where to focus, and just as importantly, where not to.
3. Designing a Fundable Growth & Giving Framework
Rather than a generic fundraising appeal, the strategy was intentionally designed to support donor-aligned giving.
The plan:
Converted strategic pillars into defined growth projects
Clarified which initiatives required seed funding vs. ongoing donor support
Created a clear distinction between growth investments, sustainability funding, and operational backbone needs
This allowed donors to see exactly how their support connected to impact.
4. Bridging Strategy to Near-Term Execution
To avoid the plan becoming aspirational only, we helped leadership prioritize 12–18 month execution horizons:
Identifying early initiatives that could demonstrate momentum
Creating a practical roadmap leadership could act on immediately
Ensuring the strategy functioned as a living tool, not a static document
The Strategic Approach
The Outcomes
While specific financial details remain confidential, the impact of the work was clear:
Leadership and board alignment around a shared, long-term strategy
A clear strategic narrative that strengthened donor conversations
Funding secured from key donors in support of defined strategic pillars
A practical execution roadmap to accelerate growth over the next 12–18 months
A strategic plan designed not just to guide ministry, but to fund it
The Takeaway
For mission-driven organizations, growth requires more than faith and vision alone.
It requires:
Strategic clarity
Aligned leadership
A framework that helps donors confidently invest in the future
This engagement reinforced a core Leadership In Focus belief:
Strategy only matters if it helps people decide, act, and commit.
A Better Us now has a strategic foundation designed to support sustainable growth, deeper impact, and long-term stewardship.
Customer Testimonial
“We are deeply grateful for the outstanding work Kurtis Graham did in helping us create a 16-page strategic growth and giving plan for a key fundraising event. Kurtis took our rough planning notes, ideas, and vision and transformed them into a clear, compelling, and beautifully designed presentation booklet.
He demonstrated an exceptional ability to organize complex information, clarify our message, and communicate both who we are as a non-profit charity and what we hope to achieve over the next five years. The final document not only articulated our vision with excellence, but also laid out specific goals, projects, and funding opportunities in a way that was easy to understand and inspiring for our supporters.
Kurtis’ attention to detail, strong strategic thinking, and skillful use of graphics elevated the entire presentation. His work played a key role in helping us confidently and effectively share our vision for growth and impact.
— Rev. Ron Mainse, President, Heart to Heart Marriage & Family Ministries
Support the Ministry
If you’d like to learn more about the mission of A Better Us / Heart to Heart Marriage & Family Ministries, or explore ways to support their work, you can do so here.