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Launching a capital campaign is daunting, especially when you’re a nonprofit looking to build a campus overseas. With tumultuous economic conditions and fluctuating exchange rates, it’s hard to manage your investments and maximize dollars for your mission.
Christi Gordy knows this firsthand as the Founder and Executive Director of Canopy Life. The organization was built from the ground up to serve children in Kenya, with plans to scale and help even more students in the next decade.
In this case study, learn how Infinite Giving helped Canopy Life to:
- Grow their cash reserves through new investment strategies
- Raise $1.48 million in a capital campaign and steward those funds
- Manage its cash holdings with a fluctuating exchange rate
“Partnering with Infinite Giving has taught me so much about how financing works.”
How Infinite Giving helps nonprofits with their missions
Kenya “left a thumbprint” on Christi’s heart since her first visit after graduating from college. “I knew I wanted to make a difference in the international community,” Christi said. From there, she’d go on to run a program for Kenyan students to come to America on church choir tours.
Christi saw firsthand how these children “transformed” while they were visiting the U.S. “They were traveling in a safe, nurturing environment, and were given hope of what a better life could look like,” she shared. ”But this transformation wouldn’t be sustained when they returned home. We knew we needed to do more to sustain that change with emotional health, and to help develop their potential into the future leaders for what Kenya needs.”
Fast forward to today: Christi successfully founded Canopy Life and built a boarding school in Kenya that houses about 30 students. She aspires to scale the school so it can serve 200 students within the next decade.
Enter Infinite Giving.
“Infinite Giving gave us many more options, especially on potential gains for the cash holdings we had.”
How Infinite Giving streamlines donations and cash management
Christi said that partnering with Infinite Giving made it easier than having to start from scratch with a better cash management and investment strategy. “We have financially savvy board members who the Infinite Giving team was willing to meet with in the early days so they understood all of the offerings,” she explained. “This made conversations with our board a lot easier. The accessibility was really valuable, plus having templates around Investor Policies provided by Infinite Giving.”
As “a typical nonprofit,” Christi shared they needed a better way to grow their high capacity donations. “For stock donations, we had previously used another service but it was super clunky,” she explained. “We didn’t get a lot of stock donations but for the ones we did receive, we’d literally have to write on paper and fax things in.”
With Infinite Giving, Canopy Life is able to accept major gifts in stocks, cryptocurrency, DAFs, and endowments in one easy-to-use place, then steward those funds to help them grow. “We love the stock donation portal,” Christi said. “As a whole, we’ve never had any complaints from our donors gifting stock.”
Infinite Giving helped Christi open her nonprofit brokerage account in just a couple days, plus provided the technology for a giving option on her website and streamlined the donor process. When a stock gift is donated, we automatically liquidate the stock, send the donation receipts, and then transfer the funds into Canopy Life’s capital campaign’s holdings. “I knew there were high-savings cash options but needed guidance on what to do with the funds before we were ready to spend them,” Christi said.
She also shared how Infinite Giving was proactive in reaching out about options for new investments, including one strategy for investing in Treasury Bills. “We had a board member who was a financial advisor and said absolutely, let’s invest in T-bills to take advantage of that opportunity,” Christi said. “It made returns in the six months it was there. It was worth the energy and investment.”
What Infinite Giving did to help make a difference
In 2023, Canopy Life launched a capital campaign to raise $1.48 million to build three new buildings – two houses and one new academic building on its campus. Christi explained that throughout the 20 years she’s worked in Kenya, the value of the shilling (Kenya’s currency) has fluctuated steadily. Then for the first time in 20 years, the exchange rate dropped by 20 points.
“This means the value of what we raised won’t go as far,” Christi shared. “Our U.S. dollars from the capital campaign are not going to produce everything we need to fund construction, so I’ve been value engineering our project.”
With Canopy Life’s cash holdings in Infinite Giving, Christi said she’ll use the growth of those dollars in cash reserves to help supplement the costs. “I still have to fulfill our promise with what we’ve raised from the $1.5 million to build those three new buildings, so when investments make money for us, it helps close that gap on things we can’t control, like the exchange rate on the shilling.”
“I’m making the most of our funding in Infinite Giving.”
To summarize how Infinite Giving has helped Canopy Life’s mission and goals, Christi said it’s the knowledge that their cash holdings are helping to protect them from risk and continue to grow over time.
“I love the product, and I love the accessibility. It’s the most user-friendly platform for anybody to use,” Christi said.
Want to grow your high capacity giving?
Contact our team at Infinite Giving today to learn more about how your nonprofit can grow with thoughtful stewardship and better cash management. Get started here.
