Build Up Advisory Group

Build Up Advisory Group supports brave nonprofits and philanthropies to scale their impact by strengthening their grant making, governance, and organizational structuring.

Who We Are

Build Up Advisory Group® was launched in February, 2019, by A. Nicole Campbell to transform the social sector. We are the only advisory firm focused exclusively on social sector infrastructure design.

We are also the only firm founded by a Black woman who has been an advisor to two of the world’s most prominent philanthropists, outside counsel to foundations, NGOs, and charities, and has held positions of general counsel, in-house counsel, senior program lead, and senior operations director in philanthropies - as well as the position of in-house counsel in a public charity. Our culturally competent approach is informed by her lived experience.

We do not believe in business as usual and strive to be brave enough to truly be risk takers, be creative in ways others are afraid to be, and approach philanthropy with a unique and fresh perspective.

We are uniquely situated to support brave vision in technically sound and innovative ways. All of our engagement leaders are practicing attorneys who can be creative in problem solving and also understand the legal implications that come along with that creativity.

This brave, strategic, solution-oriented approach, known as Brave Infrastructure Design®, is the foundation of our advisory services.

We are a New York limited liability company with employees across the globe including the United States and in sub-Saharan Africa.

Build Up Advisory Group® is a member of the Build Up Companies, a federated group of companies formed by A. Nicole Campbell to bravely facilitate and support social and economic change and equity around the world.

We Help You Do Your Work Better

We offer our clients a unique combination of unparalleled technical, operational, and governance expertise, international grant making and giving expertise, and cross- and intra-border based leadership. We structure funding awards and complex grant-making solutions, and help our clients successfully operate in some of the world’s most challenging regulatory environments.

We offer infrastructure design advice in the following areas:

All Access Advisement

We work with leanly-staffed nonprofits and private foundations by serving as in-house Advisor, responsible for designing and assessing organizational infrastructure, grant-making processes, and governance.

Speaking Engagements, Trainings, and Workshops

Members of the Build Up Companies team can be booked for speaking engagements discussing Governance, Grant Making and Management, Organizational Structuring, and Charitable Giving / Investing.

The audiences for these engagements range from intimate, private conversations among Board members, investors, or philanthropists to groups of program and executive teams to hundreds of grant-making and grants management professionals.

We also conduct workshops and design learning modules in each of these advice areas for staff, Board members, executive leadership, and individuals interested in learning about any aspect of that advice area.

Finally, we conduct trainings for operations, grants management, and legal teams within philanthropies to help them design training plans and modules for staff, priority plans for the team, and policy and process assessments.

How We Work

At Build Up Advisory Group®, we build deliberately and carefully to allow you the time and space to put your core values into your organizational infrastructure. Our founder and C.E.O., A. Nicole Campbell, provides further insight in the video below.

Build Up Advisory Group® helps clients lead brave, strategic
socio-economic change by building their infrastructure capacity. Take a quick peek at how we work.

All of our engagements begin with an assessment. We begin most of our structuring engagements with an Infrastructure Assessment, which allows us to assess the organization, its infrastructure, and its work. We explain the Infrastructure Assessment in more detail below to provide an example of the elements involved in our core assessments.

Following our initial assessment and advice, most of the organizations we work with then engage us to serve as their Chief Infrastructure Officer and team to help build out the organizational infrastructure or grant-making roadmap and recommendations within the assessment or advice, serving as a thought partner to the organization's Board and Executive leadership.

The Chief Infrastructure Officer and team engagement is described in more detail below.

Infrastructure Assessment

Our Infrastructure Assessment identifies the strengths, challenges, and gaps within your organization’s infrastructure to ultimately inform how you can then build infrastructure to support your organization’s brave vision. We designed the Infrastructure Assessment from our years of providing strategic, legal, and operational advice to nonprofit organizations, networks, associations, trusts, corporations, and movements.

The Infrastructure Assessment will inform how to build and strengthen your organizational infrastructure to support the bravest version of your organization. The Infrastructure Assessment is particularly beneficial if:

You are struggling with organizing your internal team capacity to ensure it is providing sufficient leverage for your organization’s priorities.
Your board is not fully engaged, does not adequately hold the Executive leadership team accountable, and has not consistently provided thought partnership or oversight.

You are challenged with managing your organization’s regulatory and compliance needs while maintaining a rapid funding or programmatic response.
You have difficulty raising funds because you are unable to tell a compelling story about your operational and infrastructure needs and their impact on your programmatic work.

You are unsure of how to address these issues to ensure your organization can effectively build and scale its impact.

If you want to be designed and built internally stronger to better deliver on your charitable misson to change the world, then our Infrastructure Assessment is the first step.

The Process

Our proprietary Brave Infrastructure Design® methodology informs the Infrastructure Assessment process. We usually conduct our Infrastructure Assessments in about three months.

Step 1
Discovery Call Step 2
Dillegance Collection Step 3
Kick-Off Session Step 4
Info Gathering Step 5
Validation Conversation Step 6
Assessment Step 7
Assessment Conversation

Step 1
Discovery Call

Step 1: Discovery Call

The Infrastructure Assessment begins with a Discovery Call to determine whether your organization is a good candidate for the Infrastructure Assessment.

Step 2
Dillegance Collection

Step 3
Kick-Off Session

Step 4
Info Gathering

Step 5
Validation Conversation

Step 6
Assessment

Step 7
Assessment Conversation

The Focus

Your Infrastructure Assessment will evaluate your organizational strength and effectiveness, inform how your organization’s operations and governance should be designed, and describe any guidance or support needed for your organization’s operations and work.

The Infrastructure Assessment reviews and assesses key components of your organizations infrastructure, such as:

Vision & Mission

Assessing whether organization members understand and are aligned on its vision and mission to effect change for the marginalized and vulnerable communities it serves.

Fundraising & Development

Reviewing fundraising and development efforts to determine whether it is helping to develop an infrastructure that can financially and sustainably support the organization.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Assessing the ability to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI’’) principles into its infrastructure.

Program Strategy

Determining the areas that impact how organizational infrastructure itself shouId be designed, built, or rebuilt.

Organizational Capacity

Assessing an organization’s internal capacity to successfully carry out its essential activities and operations, including human resources practices impacting all stages of an employee lifecycle

Asset Protection

Determining how the organization creates and protects its assets.

Governance

Assessing the strengths and gaps within governance-related materials - including policies, by-laws, and other formation documents; practices; processes; board composition; fiduciary responsibilities; board engagement and performance; and the overarching governance structure.

Strategic Communications

Assessing strategic communications to determine whether the organization has the ability within its processes and structures to consistently signal to partners, donors, and other stakeholders the importance of its work and overall impact.

Structure

Assessing an organization's overall structuring (i.e., the vehicle(s) used to transact business and operate) to determine how it impacts the organization's ability to implement Its mission and operations.

Grant Making

Reviewing the strengths, gaps, and
challenges within policies, practices, and decision-making components of the grant-making infrastructure.

Financial Management

Assessing the financial management to understand, at a high level, the organization's processes, policies, and practices to secure its financial infrastructure.

The Benefits

After the Infrastructure Assessment, you will have a practical guide for your organization’s

Comprehensive infrastructure design
Governance compliance, structure and roles
Ecosystem of vehicles and entities needed to advance your social impact vision
Ability to increase efficiency in work and operations and improve its capacity

Accountability, oversight, and management needed for programs and operations
Staffing roles and responsibilities
Ability to scale brave social impact among the vulnerable communities it serves

Chief Infrastructure Officer and Team Retainer

Following your Infrastructure Assessment, Build Up can serve as your outsourced Chief Infrastructure Officer and team (or as a thought partner, at minimum, depending on your retainer selection) throughout the engagement. We intend to bring peace of mind, provide additional capacity and leverage, and strengthen your organization’s foundation for its innovative work.

We will manage the key operations and matters of your organization, reporting directly to you and your Board of Directors, as appropriate. Build Up will ensure that this management and any implementation of the Assessment's recommendations align with your brave mission and goals.

Build Up will also ensure that your operations are conducted effectively and efficiently over the course of the engagement and respond to any issues that may arise during implementation. We will sensibly assess risk and risk leadership in order to help determine how you should engage in certain activities or develop certain policies.

As your Chief Infrastructure Officer and team, we will engage with you, key staff, and the board regularly so that we can review and design Assessment recommendations to support activities, strategize and discuss upcoming initiatives and programs, and ongoing activities and review any proposed changes to activities and operations.

In order to implement the Assessment recommendations, we will collaborate and coordinate with other advisors that you may need to engage to support your activities and operations. We will serve as the main point of contact for these advisors and Build Up will manage these relationships to ensure that the services and advice provided to you are coordinated, relevant, timely, and effective.

Build Up will begin this engagement by designing an appropriate prioritization and implementation plan of support. Our Chief Infrastructure Officer and team retainers are usually twelve months.

I love using my legal training and expertise to help brave philanthropists, philanthropies, and nonprofits build capacity so they have the ability to transform outcomes for vulnerable communities and interrupt cycles of injustice and inequity. If you think bravely, we can help you change the world.

A. Nicole Campbell - Founder, Build Up Companies

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