Senior Consultant in Agriculture and Rural Development
Don Ricketts’ success in growing volunteer-led organizations is a direct result of strong strategic planning and management skills coupled with solid experience in leadership development. He built what became a model for the coordinated consumer marketing efforts between states and their national organization and is known as an expert in organizational structure and governance.
His strategic, customer driven or as he refers to it as an ‘outside-inside’ approach has resulted in a proven track record in creating innovative programs and services, transforming key organization functions, and successfully tackling difficult assignments covering broad and diverse areas. To illustrate, Ricketts’ accomplishments include:
Designing strategic planning procedures that led 45 state beef promotion organizations to adopt development of annual marketing plans.
Creating comprehensive governance resources for volunteer leaders and staff of a major national organization and its many affiliates that enhanced performance and compliance.
Leading implementation of an intensive and integrated public relations and advertising project for national and organizations to counter an extensive misinformation campaign about beef promotion that increased support for the promotion programs by 10%.
Launching strategically targeted programs that strengthened a national organization’s relationship with the state affiliated marketing organizations who account for over $10 million in annual revenue.
Creating innovative revenue sharing programs that channeled over a million dollars of state and national resources to assist the consumer promotion efforts of small state beef promotion organizations located in major population areas.
Serving as the subject matter expert for attorney groups and helping prepare attorneys who argued before the US Supreme Court, successfully defended the $80 million funding for state and national beef promotion activities against a constitutional challenge. The victory preserved funding for 16 similar national promotional programs for farmers and ranchers totaling more than $750 million.
Reinventing a national association’s information technology department and its culture turning it into a proactive and customer driven group focused on helping the organization achieve its business goals while significantly reducing costs.
