Missions to Movements

We talk with Birce Altay, Director of the GivingTuesday Europe Hub, about how a global generosity movement grows when it stays local and community-owned. We dig into distributed leadership, why participation is a core metric, and how a simple invitation can mobilize people who were never asked.  Birce's move from digital journalism into civil society communications and philanthropy work  How...

Monthly giving shouldn’t be a line item or a one-off campaign. It should be core infrastructure. In this special announcement episode, I sit down with Justin McCord, EVP of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Development at RKD, to share something we’ve been working on.  After two years of partnering on Monthly Giving Awareness Week, RKD and Positive Equation are launching the Monthly Giving Acce...

I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking to nonprofit leaders about monthly giving, and after studying more than 400 audits, one thing became REALLY clear. 76% of nonprofits can set up a monthly gift in under three clicks, but the real gap starts after someone gives. In this solo episode, I’m breaking down the five biggest gaps I found, why a $36 monthly gift can actually be worth more than $2,0...

46% of nonprofit CEOs say burnout is “very much” a concern, so what needs to change for nonprofit leaders to stay in this work? For a very special final conversation in my Atlanta CEO series, I’m bringing ALL four leaders together to talk about relationships, community, visibility, sustainability, and what it takes to lead an organization right now. Carolina, Tammy, Chidi, and Kenita get into why...

Once a CEO, always a CEO? That's not how my current guest sees it. Tammy Tibbetts started She’s the First at 23, became its first employee after landing two $25,000 grants, and spent nearly 17 years leading the organization through growth, workforce reductions, and ultimately a merger with Girl Rising .  Her biggest lesson from that entire arc? The unglamorous work you’re doing every day is b...

Did you know that 88% of nonprofits operate on less than $500,000? Kenita Smith started H.O.P.E, Inc . with no nonprofit experience, no donors, and no grants, AND grew the organization from $11,000 to nearly $900,000 (!) Kenita founded H.O.P.E after her own experience as a single parent trying to finish college, and one of her biggest growth strategies was getting out and telling that story. Whene...

What if the boldest thing philanthropy could do is to hand an organization $250,000, and $50,000 directly to the individual to support the whole leader? My next guest runs a foundation around that exact idea.  Carolina García Jayaram, founding CEO of the Elevate Prize Foundation , believes that strategic visibility can be just as catalytic as funding, especially for social entrepreneurs trying to...

When a high schooler at NewComm manages a $10,000 budget, the money is real. So is the authority, and so are the neighborhoods they're designing solutions for. Chidi Asoluka spent 16 years as a classroom teacher before founding NewComm, a civic design studio where high schoolers from historically marginalized communities pair literature with real community challenges. He joins me in Atlanta f...

When World Central Kitchen shows up within hours of a disaster, that response didn’t start that day. The relationships, infrastructure, and funding were already in place, and more than 80,000 Kitchen Corps members are a huge reason why. Monthly Giving Manager Lindsey Latham joins me to share how WCK turned an already successful recurring donor base into a true community, including a monthly newsle...

Use code: MOVEMENTS for 25% off Monthly Giving Builder  Join the Sustainer Slack Group (FREE)  Is monthly giving on your year-end fundraising plan, or is it just one email? In this tough love episode, Dana Snyder shares two quotes from Emma Grede that changed how she thinks about her work: "If everything feels important, you haven't made a decision" and "The work you avoid woul...

During a funding crunch, Lucy Madden, CEO of Letters to a Pre-Scientist , recorded a video asking volunteers if they could spare $5 a month to help the organization finish the school year. That first ask brought in 300 monthly donors, and today, more than 90% of Stamp Squad members have also been penpal volunteers. We get into why this worked so well, including how Lucy embedded the monthly giving...

If you've ever wondered whether a membership model could work for grassroots organizing and not just traditional fundraising, today's guest is going to show you exactly how. The African American Roundtable (AART) won this year’s Monthlies award for Strongest Sense of Community, and Executive Director Markasa Tucker-Harris is joining me to share how AART created a five-tier membership str...

Recurring giving now makes up 27% of ALL online revenue, and for many nonprofits, 30-40% of total online revenue can arrive in the final three weeks of the year. Is your monthly giving program actually positioned to take advantage of all that attention and generosity? Today’s episode is your front row seat into my Q3 State of Recurring Giving webinar, where I brought together the team from STella!...

Your next donor may never visit your website! Peter Byrnes, CEO of Fundraise Up , is joining me to explain agentic giving and the shift he sees happening RIGHT now from discovery, to recommendation, to delegation.  Donors are already asking AI tools where they should give, and soon they may be asking those same tools to actually make the donation for them. We get into what nonprofits need to do no...

Global Catalyst  is on a mission to mentor girls around the world to become powerful advocates and confident leaders. They went from just 7 monthly donors in July 2025, to growing their Girls First community by 500% to 35 monthly donors. As a girl mom, this episode with Courtney Stricklin Burgan hits deep to my heart. In her role as VP of Engagement and Communications, Courtney leads a passionate...

Planned giving does not have to be complicated OR expensive, and you don’t need an estate attorney to get started. What if your nonprofit already has planned giving prospects sitting inside your donor database, but you just haven’t asked them yet? Tony Martignetti worked with a historical society who mailed just 250 people about planned giving. SIX donors responded that they had already included t...

If you've ever wondered what's possible with zero full-time paid staff and zero development budget, this episode is for you. Magical Creatures Sanctuary is a 100% volunteer-run farmed animal rescue on Hawaii Island that cares for more than 100 rescued animals, and today, 48% of their individual donor revenue comes from recurring gifts, with an 83% donor retention rate. Executive Director...

How do you walk into the end of the year with your monthly giving program finally built? More than HALF of the nonprofit professionals who joined my recent monthly giving webinars either had no recurring giving program or had started one and stalled.  And after analyzing feedback and behavior from more than 1,000 nonprofit leaders, I found that there are three primary barriers keeping organization...

August is Black Philanthropy Month, so consider today’s episode the kickoff! Kaci Patterson has helped raise and leverage more than $86 million for Black-led organizations.  As the founder of Social Good Solutions and the Black Equity Collective , she joins me to get into their incredible study. 220 Black-led nonprofits across California created more than 4,000 jobs and generated over $335 MILLION...

Shilpa Alva is on a mission to fix one of the world’s most fundamental problems: the fact that hundreds of millions of people don’t have access to safe, clean water. Surge for Water is a women-led nonprofit that went from a nights-and-weekends passion project into a global organization delivering clean water, sanitation, hygiene, and women’s health solutions. And after operating across 12 countrie...

Most nonprofits start with the tools. The better question is, what’s the scalable opportunity technology can solve so your team can stay focused on the human interactions that matter most? With 1 in 2 people impacted by cancer in their lifetime, Mike Osborne and his team at Cancer Council Victoria are applying that thinking to one of their biggest pressure points: freeing up counselors from diggin...

Way too much of our human capacity is spent on tasks that DON’T require human empathy. That’s how Tim Bachta from Children International is thinking about growth as his team works to expand from 220,000 to 275,000 children served. Tim shares how his team is using Microsoft Copilot to eliminate the manual work that’s been slowing them down (like letter translation processes that once took months, t...

What does the latest recurring giving data actually tell us? In this special State of Recurring Giving episode, three leaders from CharityEngine , GivingTuesday Data Commons , and World Central Kitchen are joining me to unpack the latest recurring giving benchmarks AND one of the most compelling monthly giving case studies of the year. Together, we're exploring the trends shaping recurring gi...

Did you know 92% of donors say giving is part of who they are? And that 94% say they're MORE motivated to give when they know exactly where their money will go? Today I'm doing one of my favorite things – diving into the data and research from Bloomerang's 2026 Giving Signals Report , and sharing the major opportunity gaps every nonprofit should be paying attention to. Generosity is...

With AI adoption exploding, what does that actually mean for how you grow your team, your donors, and your impact? Naria Santa Lucia brought SO much energy and joy to her MC role at the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit, that I had to sit down with her to hear how nonprofit leaders can build practical pathways for using AI in their day-to-day work and cut through the hype. Naria also bring...