One of SST’s past clients, St. Luke’s Historic Church & Museum, is a National landmark located in Smithfield, Virginia. Since the creation of Historic St. Luke’s Restoration, stewards of the site have avidly collected and stored important documents pertaining to its corporate history. Until the relatively recent acquisition of a computerized constituent management system, St. Luke’s institutional records were all kept in hard-copy form. Unfortunately, many of these documents were stored in a house on the property that burned to the ground.
Twelve boxes of files survived the fire, and approximately 50,000 pages, mostly onion-skin copies, are slowly deteriorating. Information contained in these surviving boxes documents the formation of Historic St. Luke’s Restoration, illuminates the 1950s preservation and restoration efforts, traces the acquisition of items in the collection, details financial records, and reveals philanthropic relationships and financial transactions. Critical corporate history lies in these twelve boxes of damaged institutional archives.
SST was hired to provide an audit of the existing Annual Fund Campaign, strategy for growth, planning documents to identify a timeline and reporting mechanisms. The end result was that SST’s work produced 104% of the campaign goal for an underperforming Annual Fund which had not met its goal in many years.
Due to the COVID-19 stay at home order, the museum and grounds closed which resulted in a significant loss of income from admissions, gift shop sales, private event rentals, cemetery sales, and educational program ticket sales. SST has been a consultant and advocate for St. Luke’s Church & Museum for over two years. Throughout our partnership, we assisted them with recovering from these series of unfortunate events by securing corporate investments as well as local/state and federal grant funding. SST also successfully secured funding for St. Luke’s from the CARES Act and through the PPP loan process.
Let us help you build a successful future for your organization. Please call our office at 757-536-9937 or reach out to Strategic Solutions by Tricia, LLC via Facebook, or at www.ssbytricia.com.