The Intentional Fundraiser Podcast

Where did last year's lessons go? The donor who told you why she stopped giving. The appeal that worked and nobody knew why. For most of us, those lessons went nowhere. They got buried under the next appeal, the next event, the next "Where are we against goal?" A development director I'll call Marcus canceled his year-end debrief every December. There was always a reason. Last year, he held the li...

A salary is certain. A gift is a gamble. That's what one CFO told his development director. She left his office sure she'd lost. Her program director was worried a big donor would hijack the mission. A board member said, "Our donors just don't give like that." Three skeptics. Three different fears. So she stopped pushing and started asking one question: "What would need to be true for you to feel...

Ever sat in your car after a donor visit just to catch your breath? Me too. And I think we need to talk about it. Raising big gifts is emotional work. In one week, you might hold a donor's grief, a board member's impatience, and your ED's worries about cash flow. Then you walk into the next meeting and show up warm and curious anyway. A major gift officer I'll call Alisha did that for months. Then...

A donor rode a city bus at 6:15 a.m. He hadn't been on one since college. The woman next to him had lived in that neighborhood for forty years. She was about to change his $250,000 gift. They were riding the route families take to the local food pantry. One hour and ten minutes. One transfer. And when they arrived, the doors didn't open until ten. He looked at his watch and said, "Nobody who works...

A 6:45 a.m. call from London. A donor wanted to give $1.5 million to the children's hospital that saved her little brother. Her gift officer was thrilled. Thirty seconds later, she was terrified. Because the donor was a US citizen living in London. Her husband was British. The money was in pounds. Their business had accounts in two countries. Who gets the tax benefit? Which account does the money...

Her mother's name was spelled wrong. It was on the plaque. On dedication day. In front of her grandkids. The mistake didn't end the relationship. What came next almost did. The clinic took six weeks to fix it. Nobody called. The apology email said, "We apologize for any inconvenience." The family went silent for a year. Then a new major gift officer picked up the phone. She named what happened. Sh...

My worst December as a fundraiser? I spent it chasing a stock transfer with no name on it. My plan had been "we'll get serious after the gala." The gala ended in mid-November. You can guess how that year went. Here's what I learned the hard way. December isn't where year-end is won. It's where you find out how well you planned in October. And year-end 2026 raises the stakes. New tax rules. Donors...

One page changed everything. A donor said it was the first report she'd ever kept. Two years later, she made the largest gift in the organization's history. It wasn't a glossy annual report. No pie charts. No forty pages. Just one number she cared about, one note from a teacher, and one honest line about what the team was learning. The difference? Her development director asked her what success lo...

One question. A lasting legacy. Andrea almost didn't ask it. She was afraid it would muddy her donor's renewal. Her donor, Walter, had given faithfully for eleven years. He was about to renew his major gift. And he kept asking one thing: "Will this program still be here someday?" Andrea realized Walter was already having the legacy conversation. She just hadn't joined it yet. So she asked: "What w...

He went quiet for two months. She thought she'd blown the ask. She hadn't. The donor had watched his business take a hit, watched the news every night, and frozen. He wasn't saying no to her $250,000 proposal. He was saying he didn't know how to say yes to anything right now. Here's what she finally did. She sent a note that had nothing to do with the gift. She just asked how he was thinking about...

She gave me four minutes. It changed my career. Almost thirty years ago, I had a donor meeting with a man who genuinely intimidated me. My development director stopped by my desk and asked what I planned to ask him. I recited my agenda. She listened, then said, "That's fine. But what do you really want to know about him?" I said I wanted to know why he kept giving to us when he clearly didn't need...

The lobby test. Your website is the lobby of your building. It never closes the gift. But it absolutely sets the tone for everything that happens around it. In this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser, I tell the story of a six-figure donor who tried to give on her phone in December, gave up three screens in, and mailed a check instead. The gift still came. The dashboard still looked heal...

"What's our plan if we only raise nine?" A campaign chair asked that in a planning meeting for a $14 million campaign, and the room went completely quiet. She wasn't being negative. She'd run a manufacturing business for thirty years, and she said, "I've never run a three-year plan that came in exactly where the model said it would." So we built an answer. Three of them, honestly. Conservative, mo...

A donor wall almost cost them their best donor. At the opening of a gorgeous new wall, one of their most generous donors leaned in and said, "I didn't give so my name could be up there. I gave for the kids. I wish the wall told me about them." That one sentence is the whole episode. On this week's Intentional Fundraiser Podcast, Recognition That Feels Right Today, I dig into what donors are signal...

Urgency can steal our future. I’ve watched it happen in nonprofit teams everywhere. We race from grant deadlines to events to year-end goals, doing everything possible to meet today’s needs. But somewhere along the way, the relationship-building work that creates tomorrow’s major gifts gets pushed aside. In my conversation with Mark Stuart, President and CEO of San Diego Foundation, I was reminded...

What if the ask isn't for money? What if it's a question? A donor of fifteen years told one of my clients, "Nobody ever asked me what I thought. They just told me what they'd done." He'd made peace with being a checkbook. I keep hearing versions of that story. Loyal donors who'd give more, and stay longer, if we simply asked them what they see. On this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser,...

If you vanished tomorrow, would anyone else in your building know how to talk about a donor with warmth? I've watched two organizations, same size, same budget, same tactics. One had a major gift officer carrying every donor relationship alone. The other had a program director who told donor stories unprompted, because she'd been invited to sit in on a visit once and it stuck. Same resources. Comp...

He asked to sit in on hiring. She almost said yes to that too. Here's what changed her mind. On this week's episode, I tell the story of a major gift officer whose biggest donor had slowly taken over her evenings, her weekends, and nearly her hiring decisions. We walk through the power dynamics that show up in almost every major gift relationship, the red flags worth naming early, and the reset la...

A gift once took eleven months to close. Not because the donor said no. Because one person was carrying five jobs. On this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser, I tell the story of a major gift that stalled for nearly a year, and what finally unstuck it. Spoiler: it wasn't a better pitch. It was the right people in the room. We talk about: Why cross-functional collaboration is non-negotiab...

Her gala cost $40K. Her dinner cost $200. Guess which one got a bigger gift. On this week's episode, I tell the story of two events that happened the same spring, one an eleven-month gala, one a Wednesday dinner for eight people. Only one of them led to real major gift conversations. It wasn't the expensive one. We walk through the 3P framework I now use with clients: purpose, people, program, plu...

6:30 a.m. Calendar chaos already. By 10 a.m., she hadn't talked to a single donor yet. Six months later, same alarm, same portfolio. Totally different morning. On this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser, I walk through what changed for a major gift officer named Renee, and exactly which categories of work she handed off to AI and automation, and which she never will. In this episode, Wor...

A gala put them on stage. Then ghosted them for good. Three community leaders invited up front, never contacted again. Zero gifts. One hurt feeling that traveled fast. On this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser, I tell that story next to a very different one. A major gift officer who spent four months building trust with a community before she ever made an ask. No agenda. No pitch. Just...

What if your major donors wanted to commit longer? Most of them already do. They just haven't been asked. In this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser podcast, I'm talking about one of the most underused strategies in major gifts: recurring and multi-year commitments. Not because donors resist them. Because most fundraisers don't have the language to invite them in. Here's what we cover: W...

$5k a year. For 12 years. Then she sold her business. The fundraiser said, "congratulations," and changed the subject. Sixty days later, with one different question, that same donor transferred $400,000 in appreciated stock before the sale closed. Same donor. Same relationship. Different question. This week on The Intentional Fundraiser, I'm pulling back the curtain on what most major gift teams a...

Your CEO is not your critic. They might be your scariest internal customer. Once I understood that, everything changed. For years I walked into meetings with my ED ready to defend my portfolio. Why hadn't the gift closed. Why we were behind. Why the donor needed more time. I left those meetings smaller. He left them more anxious. And the donor at the center of it had no idea any of it was happenin...