The Influential Nonprofit

About Cody Hayes: Marketing Mission. In his past seven years as a nonprofit marketing strategist, he has worked with 30+ nonprofits to streamline their marketing efforts and reclaim their team's time. He specializes in nonprofit marketing. The individuals he assists the most are nonprofit fundraisers, founders, and executive directors who typically face the challenges of being overworked and overw...

Key Takeaways: Praise and criticism are the same things. Those are just other people's opinions of you. A whole person doesn't need praise to make themselves feel good and doesn't let criticism derail them. The internal defines the external, not the other way around. Don’t wait for someone else to define who you are and what you are, stand in your value and embrace your own worth. People will conn...

Kel Haney has over 17 years of experience as a fundraiser, coach, and consultant. She began her journey as a theater director, taking on fundraising calls as a means of supplementary income. Over time, she transitioned into becoming a full-time Outbound Fundraising Expert. Her expertise lies in assisting artists, creatives, administrators, and board members in discovering and harnessing their inhe...

Evan Wildstein is a nonprofiteer with over 20 years of experience in fundraising and strategy. Throughout his career, Evan has worked with organizations like The Juilliard School, Asia Society, Rice University, and Houston Grand Opera to raise funds and develop innovative programs. He is passionate about the intersection of philanthropy, creativity, and learning, and has dedicated his career to su...

Key Takeaways: Releasing the outcome means deciding that you’ll be okay before anything happens. It means letting go and not tying your happiness and your worth with the outcome of your goals. It’s important to release the outcome because people can feel your energy. When somebody sells from a place of desperation, you can feel it and it will make you feel uncomfortable. Attachment creates fear, a...

Key Takeaways: Preparation is critical when it comes to having difficult conversations. Don’t think of what to say on the spot, instead, ask yourself these three questions: “What do you want to have happen?”, “What is not okay for me?”, and “What is the story I’m telling myself right now?” Release the outcome. Create a structure that’s going to further the conversation - don’t make people feel div...

Kelly Garrity is the owner of the company, the Savvy Generalist and she talks about three things: demystifying corporate relationships, outside-the-box program development, and teaching team members to manage to achieve their goals and organization goals.    Key Takeaways: Look for your people, think of what kind of place the kind of people you want to be around gather in. Don’t pitch, don’t sell,...

Key Takeaways: Focus on one thing: make people feel seen and heard. Your job isn’t to pitch, sell, or convince, your job is to make people feel seen and heard.  Listen to the person and toss aside your agenda when you see that they are in struggle. Honor their struggle and witness it, remember that you don’t have to get involved in order to do that.  When people are in slow mode, that means that t...

About Jordana Merkin: With an outsider’s perspective and an insider’s knowledge, she equips small nonprofits with the tools and knowledge to share their big stories — raising awareness and funds for their missions. She has worked with both local and national organizations with varied missions, budgets, and resources, developing and executing marketing plans for multichannel fundraising campaigns,...

Key Takeaways: How we think and feel about money affects our ability to raise it. Words shape our reality which is why we’ve got to be aware of what are the beliefs that we hold around it that are related to our “money story”.  We all have a different story about money. We bring the beliefs that we acquired in our childhood into our daily lives. The key to being able to make objective decisions is...

About Zach Thanasilangkul: He is a communications coach and founder of Mission Driven Impact a training company that helps nonprofits clarify their message + get the word out online so they can raise awareness, increase revenue, and make the impact they were called to make.   Key Takeaways: Digital marketing isn’t different from human relationships. It’s fundamental to know who it is you’re speaki...

Key Takeaways: Mobilize your board and have them do connection conversations. Have them go out into the community and see who’s interested in furthering their connection and pass the lead along to the development team or executive director for follow-up.  Keep your people in momentum, and encourage them to keep going. Don’t have just one meeting about it, keep it going. Let them each come up with...

Key Takeaways: In Newtonian physics, we all experience the same thing, and the possibilities are fixed. In quantum physics, all possibilities exist in every moment and time is not linear.  A fixed mindset relies on what happened in the past to determine what’s possible in the future. A growth mindset considers all that can be and is open to all the possibilities for great things that the future ho...

She has a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan - Flint, and she has been a freelance writer for over 15 years. In that time she has written for nonprofits large and small, as well as healthcare, tech, and marketing companies. She has been the content marketing manager for Virtuous CRM, written a bunch of grants, covered local news for community newspapers and written for national trade...

Key Takeaways: We need to release the board from any pressure while also making sure that they have direction on how they could connect people to the organization. This would require consistency and building systems inside your organizations that make these things become a habit. Address your thoughts and feelings about fundraising. Correct any misconceptions that you have about it. Remember that...

Key Takeaways: Fundraising is more than just asking for money. The process goes as follows: awareness, interest, connection, and action. The action may be giving money or volunteering time. Each activity must fit into one of these categories. Awareness is indirect contact. It can be from social media, publicity, speaking, or any other event that generates broad-level awareness. Interest is when th...

Key Takeaways: The best way for organizations to grow their community is to aim to attract like-minded people, rather than convince people who are not necessarily aligned with what they do.  The philanthropic heart is the ability to define who a person is, what their values are, and how the things you care about connect with what they care about. It’s centered on the intention that you’re not ther...

Whitney Anderson is the principal for camping services at Fox advancement, a fundraising firm that provides capital campaign consulting, grant research and writing, and fractional Development Officer support.    Key Takeaways: Capital campaigns involve a lot of change and tend to be very emotional. People absorb different levels of change at different rates. There's tons of transition and change m...

Bailey Lewis, founder of Words First Content Strategy, coaches leaders, teams, and professionals all over the world to cultivate a humans first approach to digital content practices and make their corner of the digital world a little better place for everyone involved, on both sides of the screen—all through the power of words. The Words First approach to digital content strategy practices and pro...

Key Takeaways: Older generations and younger generations are struggling because of a gap relating to emotions. Boomers are more inclined to believe that feelings don’t matter while younger generations put heavy emphasis on understanding and being in touch with what they feel.  The mature generation is more generous and loyal to an organization. To them, everything is about sacrifice, loyalty, and...

Lauren Ready is an Emmy award-winning storyteller, keynote speaker, and the Principal Storyteller of Forever Ready Productions. The Forever Ready team tells mission-driven stories for nonprofits and businesses so they can realize and harness their collective purpose and impact. Lauren Ready started her TV news career as a production assistant at 17. She then spent the next ten years as a video jou...

Matt is the executive director of the The Blackbaud Giving Fund. He leads the organization's mission to unleash generosity by connecting people to the causes they care about throughout the world.   Key Takeaways: Donor Advised means that the donor tells the organization where to send the money. Then as long as that charity is in good standing with the IRS, they’ll send the funds to that charity. W...

With more than a decade working in the nonprofit sector, Susan is passionate about the power of philanthropy and helping organizations meet and exceed their goals to fulfill their missions. Based in Chicago, Susan has experience working with major gifts, mid-level donors, planned giving, capital campaigns, and creating and executing fundraising strategies and events. Beyond Chicago, Susan has work...

Key Takeaways: Organizations start off small and grow bigger over time. However, you can never be too big to notice who your people are. You must make sure not to leave long-time supporters forgotten. Be curious about who is in your community and train your staff to be curious as well. Create a system that documents people’s stories and shares those stories with other people in the community. Peop...

Elyse Wallnutt is a senior marketing and tech leader with 16 years of experience driving results at the intersection of revenue, advocacy, brand, and policy objectives.  She has delivered $39M+ in net new revenue for organizations over the past five years. She built the digital activation campaign for the clean future plan that powered the majority of President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. She...