The blog
My latest thoughts...
How to grow funding, engage donors, and maximize your development efforts.
Leaving a Six-Figure Corporate Job to Do Work That Matters
Twenty years in corporate sales and marketing, working with some of the largest brands in the country, builds a certain kind of career security — and, eventually for me, a certain kind of…
Read →The Sales Skill Nonprofits Desperately Need and Rarely Hire For
If you ask most nonprofit job descriptions what they're looking for in a development hire, you'll see a familiar list: grant writing experience, event management, donor database proficiency,…
Read →What I Wish I'd Known Before Leaving Corporate for Nonprofit Work
After two decades in corporate sales and marketing, making the decision to bring that experience into nonprofit work felt clarifying in a lot of ways — and there were still things I only fully…
Read →Why Corporate Closers Make Underrated Development Directors
Nonprofit development hiring tends to favor candidates who've come up through the nonprofit sector itself — a natural instinct, since sector knowledge and mission alignment genuinely matter. But…
Read →What 20 Years of Enterprise Sales Taught Me About Major Gift Fundraising
I spent two decades in corporate sales and marketing, closing large deals with some of the biggest brands in the country, before I brought that same skill set to nonprofit development. People…
Read →Reporting That Actually Helps Your Board (Not Just Fills a Slide)
Most nonprofit board meetings include a development report, and most of those reports follow the same format: total dollars raised so far this year, compared to the same point last year, maybe a…
Read →Signs Your Donor Database Is Costing You Money
A messy donor database rarely feels urgent. Nothing breaks. No one gets an error message. It just quietly costs an organization real fundraising revenue, in ways that are easy to miss because the…
Read →Benchmarks: How Much Should a Small Nonprofit Be Raising From Major Gifts?
One of the most common questions I get from a new client is some version of: "Is what we're raising from major donors actually good?" It's a fair question, and it's genuinely hard to answer…
Read →The CRM Audit Checklist I Use With Every New Client
Every engagement I take on starts in the same place, regardless of the organization's size or focus: a full audit of the CRM. It's not the most exciting part of the work, but it's the foundation…
Read →What a Healthy Development Pipeline Actually Looks Like for a $1M Nonprofit
Small nonprofits rarely have a clear picture of what a healthy development pipeline should even look like at their size — most benchmarks and best practices are written with much larger…
Read →How to Find the Right Person to Pitch Inside a Company
A strong corporate sponsorship pitch sent to the wrong person inside a company almost never goes anywhere. It gets forwarded once, maybe, and then quietly disappears. Finding the actual right…
Read →Beyond the Logo: Structuring Sponsorships Companies Actually Renew
Getting a firstyear corporate sponsorship is hard. Getting it renewed year after year is a different challenge entirely, and it's one most nonprofits don't think about until the renewal…
Read →Cold Outreach to Corporate Partners: What Actually Works
Most nonprofit cold outreach to potential corporate partners looks the same: a general email to an info@ address or a generic "partnerships" inbox, describing the mission and asking for support.…
Read →How AI Helped Me Find a $10K Donor Hiding in Plain Sight
One of the most common things I hear from a new client, partway through an audit, is some version of: "I had no idea that person was even still connected to us." It happens more often than you'd…
Read →Where I Draw the Line: Why AI Never Touches Donor Communication
I talk a lot about how AI speeds up my research, my CRM audits, and my internal planning. I want to be just as clear about the boundary on the other side of that: no AI writes anything a donor…
Read →The Discovery Call: What I Actually Ask a Donor Before Making an Ask
In enterprise sales, nobody pitches a deal in the first conversation. You run discovery first — you ask questions, you listen, and you figure out what the other side actually needs before you…
Read →What Makes a Donor \"Major\"? It's Not Just the Dollar Amount
Ask ten small nonprofits what qualifies as a "major donor" and you'll get ten different dollar thresholds — $1,000 for one, $10,000 for another, $25,000 for a larger organization. The number…
Read →Translating a Sponsorship Deck Into Something a CMO Actually Wants
Nonprofit sponsorship decks and corporate marketing decks are, structurally, trying to do the same job — make the case that a specific investment is worth a specific budget. But they're usually…
Read →What Nonprofits Get Wrong About Pitching Corporate Sponsors
I spent two decades on the other side of this conversation — as the person deciding whether to fund a partnership, sponsor an initiative, or sign off on a corporate giving budget. Now that I'm on…
Read →The AI Tools Actually Worth Using for Small Nonprofit Development Teams
Every week there's a new AI tool claiming it will transform nonprofit fundraising. Most small development teams don't have the time to sort the genuinely useful ones from the noise, so they either…
Read →Why Most Nonprofits Undersell Their Own Case for Support
I've sat through more nonprofit pitch conversations than I can count at this point, and the same problem shows up almost every time: the organization is doing genuinely important work, and somehow…
Read →AI Prospect Research: What It Can (and Can't) Tell You About a Donor
Prospect research has always been part art, part legwork — piecing together public information to get a sense of whether someone has the capacity and inclination to make a meaningful gift. AI has…
Read →The 5 Signs a Lapsed Donor Is Worth Re-Engaging
Every organization I've audited has a graveyard of lapsed donors sitting in the CRM — people who gave once, or gave for years, and then simply vanished from the giving history. Most development…
Read →5 Ways I Use AI to Audit a CRM in Under a Day
A full CRM audit used to be a multiweek project: a development person manually scrolling through hundreds or thousands of donor records, trying to spot patterns, gaps, and opportunities by memory…
Read →How I Rank a Donor List: A Framework Borrowed From Enterprise Sales
Every nonprofit I've worked with has the same problem hiding in plain sight: a donor list with hundreds or thousands of names, and no real sense of who on it actually matters.
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