Nonprofit Lowdown

We’re in what I like to call the Super Bowl of fundraising , that mad sprint to December 31st. Before you pour all your time and energy into your year-end campaign, I want to make sure you’re not losing money through hidden leaks in your donor funnel. In this episode, I break down the four biggest leaks that cost nonprofits thousands every year, and how to fix them before the giving rush begins: 1...

A board member once read me the riot act because I never told her that a friend of hers had given to our year-end campaign. She was right. I hadn’t closed the loop, and her friend ended up asking her why nobody had thanked them. I still think about that call. I’ve now worked with dozens of boards across the country, and I haven’t met one that didn’t care about the work. What I’ve met are boards th...

I came into this conversation thinking I knew how to raise money. Turns out, I've been fundraising with a broken financial house and didn't notice until Susan DeMarco walked me through it. Susan DeMarco is the CEO of Brand K Partners , an accounting firm that works exclusively with small to mid-size nonprofits. She provides everything from basic bookkeeping to fractional CFO services. She&...

I came into this thinking email was dead. Ben Smithee and Brad Duff-Hudkins from NextAfter walked me back from the ledge with 17 million email subscribers worth of actual data. Spoiler: email is fine. You're just bad at it. Ben Smithee is Chief Growth Officer at NextAfter. Brad Duff-Hudkins is VP of Data & Analytics. Together, they've run 8,000+ experiments on nonprofit email and published res...

I'll admit it. I came into this conversation ready to talk about "those damn kids." They give me the blank stare. They call me bro. My friend in staffing says they show up for one day of work and never come back. Phil Putnam walked me back from the ledge. (Mostly. The bro thing still bugs me.) Phil Putnam is a workforce behavior strategist and keynote speaker who spent 20+ years as a...

Most nonprofit leaders think the problem is the workload. I had a week that told me otherwise, and it took a coaching call to see it. I was venting about year eight feeling harder than year three when my coach said, "You're upset because life does not fit your model of reality." Somewhere around year two I quietly built a model where by now I'd be sipping mai tais while the busin...

Most nonprofit leaders think their biggest problem is raising money. Ny Whitaker says the real problem is influence, and money follows influence. Ny is the founder and chief strategist of Project NYNE , a former White House senior advisor and NYU professor of leadership who has spent 30 years building relationships with elected officials and teaching nonprofits to do the same. We cover why you bui...

Donor-advised funds are everywhere. But for a lot of nonprofit fundraisers, they’re still a little mysterious. So I invited Liza Carballeira onto the podcast to break them down. She brings a pretty unique perspective. Liza spent more than 10 years as a frontline fundraiser, then seven years working on the other side with a major DAF institution, advising philanthropists and helping distribute char...

Your year-end plan is actively insulting a segment of your donor file. It's September and that plan is nearly locked, so let's fix it before it goes out. When I was a baby ED, we'd get a $7,500 check from Schwab Charitable in December and I'd code it to Schwab. Not to Susan, who actually made the gift. In my file, Susan looked like she'd bought a gala ticket. She was a major do...

I had a board member, let's call her Lena, who told me she'd rather stick hot needles in her eye than ask her friends for money. So I asked if we could count on her for the $35,000 check instead. She said yes, done, no problem. Then she spent the next several years opening her home and hosting people for us. Lena wasn't refusing to fundraise. She had no idea what fundraising was. In 20 years I hav...

Why AI Cannot Replace Fundraising Strategy I use Claude every day, he's literally my side piece. And I'm telling you to stop buying AI tools. Here's what I'm seeing across nonprofit shops right now: everyone's buying wealth screening software, AI donor tools, personalization platforms. They think the tool will fix it. It won't. AI amplifies what you already have. If your st...

When I started this podcast in 2018, I had no strategy. No content calendar. Just a cheap microphone and a genuine desire to connect with busy nonprofit friends who never had time to grab coffee. I didn't think I was doing marketing. I thought I was just... connecting. Turns out, that's exactly what I was doing. But here's what I resisted for years: I didn't want to believe that vi...

Here's what nobody tells you: when a founder gets $47M in liquidity, they don't call you. They call their advisor. And by the time you find out they exist, the giving decision's already locked in with someone else. Most nonprofits are still running the old playbook. Cold outreach to newly wealthy people (who get 100 asks a day). Hoping they land on your website. Betting on a gala where you can som...

In this episode, I'm calling out the thing nobody says out loud: your major gift program isn't really a program. The gifts come in, but you can't predict them. Your board member lands a home run, then goes quiet. Your ED holds all the relationships in their head, and when they leave, the revenue leaves with them. I've lived this, and I know you have too. I start by naming what I ca...

The biggest gift your organization will ever receive might come from a donor who's been quietly giving you $10 a year for two decades. And most of you are ignoring them. Planned giving evangelist Tony Martignetti , retired attorney and author of the upcoming Planned Giving Accelerated , is back to bust the six nasty myths keeping small and mid-size nonprofits out of the game. It's not too...

I love a good transformation story, and Lucy Madden's is one of my favorites. Lucy was a middle school science teacher who ran a snail mail pen pal program in her classroom, pairing her students with STEM professionals around the world. She watched her kids start imagining bigger futures for themselves, so she turned it into an organization: Letters to a Pre-Scientist. Now she's the CEO, a...

This episode is a little different. It's a bit of a public service announcement. I recently read new nonprofit sector data, and honestly, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The numbers tell a pretty clear story: organizations that rely heavily on grants and government funding are feeling more pressure than ever, while nonprofits with strong individual giving and major gift prog...

One of my favorite takeaways from this conversation with Claire Wang is that fundraising and pricing have more in common than you might think. At their core, both are about understanding people their values, motivations, and the stories they tell themselves about who they are. Claire shares how great pricing isn't just about numbers; it's about listening deeply, understanding what someone...

I sat down with my friend  Glennda Testone , CEO of the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, to talk about what we're both seeing across the sector right now: burnout, funding uncertainty, increasing demand for services, and nonprofit leaders trying to do more with less. It's easy to get caught up in the anxiety of the moment, but one thing became crystal clear in our conversation: the organizations...

One of my favorite parts of this work is watching nonprofit leaders grow into fundraisers not because they become slick salespeople, but because they discover that fundraising is really about relationships. That's exactly what happened with my guest this week, Andrew Murphy. When Andrew stepped into the Executive Director role at the Wisconsin Inmate Education Association, he inherited an incredib...

Ever feel like your major gifts program is held together by spreadsheets, good intentions, and crossed fingers? This week, I'm joined by my client and friend Amy Lester, Major Gifts Officer at Polar Bears International, for a candid behind-the-scenes look at how she transformed her fundraising program in just over a year. When Amy started, she inherited a portfolio, a giant spreadsheet of pros...

This episode honestly changed the way I think about planned giving. I sat down with Tess Conrad and walked away realizing that planned giving isn’t just for giant institutions with fancy development teams. Tess made the case that even small nonprofits can start building a legacy giving program—and that some of your best future donors may already be quietly sitting in your database. We talked about...

In this episode of Nonprofit Lowdown, I sat down with Janine Quijije to talk about AI but probably not in the way you’re used to hearing about it. Instead of asking, “How can AI help us do more?” Janine asks a much more important question:  How can AI help us preserve our energy and prevent burnout? We talk about the reality of being overextended in the nonprofit sector, the pressure to constantly...

This episode felt personal for me because I’ve been watching so many development directors quietly disappear from organizations lately. And honestly? It’s not just about burnout or “bad hires.” Most of the time, it’s a systems problem. In this episode, I’m unpacking the two biggest reasons development directors leave, what it’s really costing nonprofits when they do, and why so many organizations...

This episode felt personal—because it is. In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I sat down with Lauren Carson (Black Girls Smile) and April Walker (Philanthropy for the People), and we got real about what’s actually happening right now—in our work, in our communities, and in our bodies. If I’m honest, it feels like a lot. And I know I’m not the only one. We talked about how the pressure out i...