Rhonda Staley Brooks, president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sacramento, said that if they threw open their doors in Sacramento to any child who needed one-on-one mentoring, they could easily serve 100,000 children.

"You know any child can benefit from the service of having an additional adult role model in their life," she said. "But we have to narrow our reach down to what is feasible for an agency our size."

Currently, the Sacramento group serves 205 children from single-family homes. But, like most of the Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies, they have lofty plans for expansion. Staley Brooks said they'd like to be serving 700 children by 2010.

With such an ambitious goal, Staley Brooks said her organization knew it had to step up its fundraising efforts. She said it was the Big Brothers Big Sisters national headquarters that first introduced her to the Benevon Model.

"I went to one of the preliminary meetings [Benevon] had here in Sacramento and fell in love with the concept, because what they were telling us was just things we weren't doing. We didn't have a system in place to incorporate the individual donor," she said.

She got help from her foundation board and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America to pay the $8,500 tuition for a team of six to attend the Benevon 101 Workshop. She gathered four board members, herself and another staff person, and they went to Las Vegas for training at a workshop entirely customized for Big Brothers Big Sisters.

"I call it a lot of 'a-ha' moments," Staley Brooks said of the two-day workshop—simple things like handwritten thank-you notes to a donor of a certain amount or calling the donor and thanking them for their $1,000 instead of just sending them a letter.

"So the experience for me was very overwhelming but good overwhelming," she said. "I was ready to go back to work the next day and start implementing what I learned."

Staley Brooks said that now when she talks about her agency, she tells stories about matches between "Bigs" and "Littles," including her personal story. She's worked at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sacramento for eleven years, and when she was a case worker assistant she made a match for a little brother who has since lost his life from an asthma attack. She tells of the big brother who made such an impact on this boy's life and the impact the match had on her life.

At her group's first introductory Point of Entry^® Event, she told this story and said the man who founded the Sacramento chapter cried.

She knew she had hit a nerve. "If I can move him, and he's the one who brought it to Sacramento in 1963, then I can move anybody."

Staley Brooks said the [Benevon] Model is about much more than the money.

"It's not about raising $100,000, but bringing people out to wine and food tastings to talk with them and deliver a mini Point of Entry and get them hooked to what we do," she said. "I can honestly say going to the [Benevon] Workshop is the best thing we could have done. It has opened doors that we couldn't have otherwise opened or didn't have the means to open because our board members' connections are limited."

Staley Brooks said these new connections have brought all kinds of new benefits, like the donor who gave $1,000 and was later invited to a donor appreciation event, or "Free Feel-Good Cultivation Event^™," with "Littles" at a baseball game. The donor came to the game, met the kids and has since donated some of her season tickets to the Sacramento Kings basketball games. She's also interested in being a table captain for the next Ask Event^™.

Another donor, she said, came to an Ask Event and donated $1,000 for five years. That donor then brought four friends to the next Ask Event, who also signed up for five-year pledges at different amounts.

By using the Benevon Model, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sacramento has gone from having seven special events a year to four, and one of the four is the donor appreciation event.

Staley Brooks said one of the big keys to her group's success is the commitment from the board. "I'm a development staff of two—me and another person, so it takes a committed board to help. This would not have gotten off the ground if I didn't have four board members that went with me."