Inside the Partnership: Zip With Us®
How a fast-growing pediatric cancer nonprofit found the team—and the thought partnership—to keep pace with their mission
When you’re evaluating a consulting or agency partner, you can read a lot of websites. You can watch a lot of demos. You can sit through a lot of capability decks. What’s harder to find is the unfiltered take from someone who’s actually been on the other side of the engagement. The leader, or client, who hired the team, watched the work get done, and can tell you what was different about it.
That’s the premise behind our new series, “What Makes a Powerhouse Team Different? Insights from Our Clients.” Over the coming months, we’ll be sitting down with the organizations we work alongside, from nonprofits to mission-driven businesses and the leaders behind them. We’ll ask what brought them to Powerhouse, what working together looks like day to day, and what makes the experience different from the consultants and agencies they’ve hired or worked with before. In their own words. At Powerhouse, we believe the best way to showcase what our total remote team solution brings to the table is to hear it from those who have experienced it.
We’re starting with Zip With Us®. Here’s what they had to say.
Meet Zip With Us®
The Zip With Us® origin story lies with founders Angela and Brian Degnan’s son, Thatcher. When Thatcher was just two years old, he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) while on a family vacation. The Degnan family had just moved back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Miami, Florida and were taking advantage of living closer to Brian’s New England-based family. Thatcher hadn’t been feeling well, and when he didn’t seem to get better after a few days his parents took him to the hospital to be checked out. That started an almost 1,500-day journey with ALL.
During those first days post-diagnosis, Thatcher received a gift from one of his nurses: a yellow graphic T-shirt with a handsewn zipper on the upper chest, which made infusion days and countless emergency room trips a little more bearable. Angela says that at first she thought every child diagnosed with cancer received a similar gift, but she came to realize that Thatcher’s shirt was somewhat unique.
As her family’s journey with cancer continued, and Angela received more and more comments from medical staff and other parents about how amazing Thatcher’s shirt was, Angela and Brian began to realize that the T-shirt that made infusion days a lot easier was something that every child battling cancer could use. Thus, Zip With Us® was founded in 2018 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization creating custom adaptive medical apparel to improve the treatment experience for patients, raise critical funds for research, and increase awareness of the daily challenges these children and their families face.
Today, Zip With Us® partners with over 200 U.S. hospitals and a few international hospitals to ensure that each infant, child, and young adult diagnosed with cancer and other serious medical complexities receives the gift of adaptive apparel customized to meet their treatment needs. Additionally, they offer their adaptive apparel through their online store. Zip With Us® is committed to providing barrier-free access to their products, ensuring all children have access to their apparel regardless of circumstances.
Angela, who serves as the Zip With Us® executive director, marvels at how their small, home-based nonprofit has expanded so rapidly, even through COVID. “We’ve had such success, onboarding nonstop basically since we opened,” she says. As we all know, rapid growth, even for such a worthy cause as that of Zip With Us®, can come with a lot of professional headaches as a small group of nonprofit staff work feverishly to keep up with the pace of growth. For Angela and Zip With Us®, help came in an unexpected way.
Enter Powerhouse
In one of those twists of fate, Angela signed up to run in a local Dick’s Sporting Goods’ “Run for a Reason” event where Zip With Us® was registered as an official charity. There, she met Krista, a local teacher who learned about Zip With Us® through the pediatric cancer community. “Krista’s nephew had been diagnosed with a childhood cancer,” Angela says of the fateful meeting. “We met during the program preparations, and it turned out that her sister worked for Powerhouse. Krista told her sister about us, her sister in turn told Powerhouse President Jessica Bertsch about us, and she reached out, offering an in-kind grant through her company’s Share the Goodness charitable giving arm.”
That first partnership resulted in a new horizontal logo design for Zip With Us®, a T-shirt and onesie drive kit, coloring sheets for pediatric patients, and email blast templates the nonprofit could use for a variety of needs. “She came in and asked what she could do,” Angela says, “and then she proceeded to offer suggestions and ideas I probably wouldn’t ever have had the time to think about. For instance, she provided a complimentary annual report that she created and designed when she realized we didn’t have one. It’s not something I had the bandwidth for at the time, but I bet I’ve handed that report out at least 50 times by now.”
The Partnership in Practice
As the partnership grew, Zip With Us® leaned more and more on their Powerhouse total remote team solution, not just for marketing collateral but also for organizational support and eventually a whole host of nonprofit services, including grant writing and grant nurturing. “I feel very supported by Powerhouse,” Angela says. “I feel heard, and I’m surrounded by glorious minds on the Powerhouse team. Everyone has different backgrounds and many are military spouses. I can’t stress how much the qualities of those military spouses shine through. The Powerhouse team is professionalism meets warmth meets a can-do attitude.”
For Angela and the Zip With Us® team, partnering with Powerhouse has been seamless and wonderful. “When I partner with someone, I am looking for someone who takes the work as seriously as I do. Powerhouse does that. From day one, they have embraced our mission as their own. They’ve really become a true team, and I see the relationship as long-term at this point,” she says. Besides the tangible solutions Powerhouse brings to the table, Angela says that she’s had lots of conversations centered around growth with the Powerhouse team. “The thought partnership has been amazing,” she says. “So very helpful. Not only when it comes to dreaming about next steps but in stepping up to help us make them happen.”
What Makes Powerhouse Different
“There are so many layers of logistics in running a successful nonprofit,” Angela explains. “You can feel like you’re on the train to crazy town a lot of the time. Jessica and the Powerhouse team understand this. They have this incredible ability to adapt to my personality and work within my parameters without question and in a very real way.” She adds that for her personally, the organization that Powerhouse has brought to her has been the most helpful. “Everything with Powerhouse feels very purposeful,” she says. “There’s no wasted time when you’re in meetings with them, but at the same time there’s this feeling of being with family. It’s professionalism and personal connections all rolled into one.”
Throughout the partnership, Angela says the organizational aspect has become increasingly important to her. Whether it’s engaging in honest and open communications around deadlines, having strategic conversations about sustainable growth, or seamlessly meeting the specific needs of Zip With Us®, the Powerhouse total remote team solution has exceeded her expectations.
“I’m incredibly proud not only of what we’ve been able to accomplish with Powerhouse but also that we can afford access to this amazing team of women who provide services we likely couldn’t sustain if we had to hire entirely in-house,” Angela says. “I know there are certain positions we will continue bringing in-house as we grow—for example, we recently hired a CFO—but the services Powerhouse provides work so well for us that I don’t feel any need to change that.”
Under the current contract with Powerhouse, Zip With Us® utilizes grant-writing and nonprofit support services. “So far, I’ve worked with three or four women with extensive grant experience,” Angela says. “That expertise alone would make the partnership worthwhile, but Powerhouse has also helped us build an entire grant library and infrastructure that will support us long-term. If we ever need to fully write grants independently in the future, we’ll already have the tools, resources, and foundation in place to be successful.”
Angela also emphasizes the value of the collaborative team approach. “The creative minds involved through our Powerhouse contract are truly mind-blowing and bring so much value to the organization,” she says. “One person alone could never achieve the same results as the collective Powerhouse team. The impact is simply greater all around.”
For Angela, Powerhouse’s transparency has been a breath of fresh air. “The beauty of Powerhouse is that whenever we discuss a project or idea, there’s immediate ownership, a clear plan of action, and a defined timeline. They are able to execute at a much faster pace and consistently deliver when we need something done. When the Powerhouse team shows up, everything is focused, organized, and completed the way we need it to be,” she says.
Angela says that one of the most valuable aspects of the partnership is the consistent communication and visibility throughout the process. “I never have to worry about where a project stands because I always know exactly where it is on the path to completion,” she says. “The communication is stellar.”
When asked if there’s a particular project Zip With Us® has completed with Powerhouse that she is most proud of, Angela initially said that it’s too difficult to choose just one. After reflecting, she points to how many of the original the Share the Goodness deliverables continue to provide value today.
“The T-shirt and onesie drive kits are still actively used on our website and have freed up an incredible amount of time for our employees and volunteers, who previously had to build each drive individually,” Angela says. “And the grant organization system has been an absolute dream. It eliminates the constant searching for documents and provides instant access for board members and our accounting and leadership teams.” She adds that having a dedicated team managing and maintaining organizational documentation has been transformative for Zip With Us® as the nonprofit continues to grow. “Just knowing someone is overseeing and organizing all of that is huge for us,” she says.
The Last Word: Advice from a Founder
“Powerhouse is the best value when it comes to mission-aligned support,” says Angela. “They genuinely care about nonprofit success and operate with a level of integrity and strong values that is reflected in everything they do.” Angela says she wishes more people understood the depth and impact of the partnership between Powerhouse and Zip With Us®. “The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in every way,” she says.
With Powerhouse, you get an entire team and access to multiple skills sets and creative minds. “Getting so many different people with varied experience and fresh approaches means end results that are nuanced and professional and result in high-quality products achieved at accessible pricing for a nonprofit budget. They even identify bottlenecks and propose solutions before being asked. It’s a no brainer to partner with Powerhouse,” Angela says.
“If you’re even thinking about partnering with Powerhouse, my best advice is to take the initial consultation call,” Angela recommends. “It costs you nothing and demonstrates an honest approach. Powerhouse will honestly assess if they can help or recommend alternative paths if they can’t. Their genuine goal is to see you succeed, regardless of whether they’re the right fit for you.” If you’re still on the fence after that initial consultation, Angela recommends starting with one helpful project to see the immediate positive impact Powerhouse can have. “Let the relationship grow from organic results,” she says. “I promise it’ll be worth your time.”
