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Disrupting the Space of Disaster Philanthropy: A View from the Front Lines
I am the CEO of After the Fire USA (ATF), a leading nonprofit in the space of megafire, climate change, and disaster recovery. We help communities navigate the complexities and stages of recovery post-megafire disaster. Prior to 2015, megafires were fa …
Investing in Relationships with Donors: 5 Phases of Securing a Major Gift
Whether your organization considers $500 or $5,000 a major gift, you must take the time to invest in building a relationship with the prospective donor. If you have not started to build those relationships, the time is now. Major gifts are not just for …
What I Learned as a Funder: Frank Tips for Nonprofits
Over decades in the social sector, I spent countless hours in the grant-seeking trenches and saw my share of things that left me wondering whether to laugh or cry. But then I became a foundation funder and encountered a prospective grantee’s “toxic dia …
Scarcity or Abundance? An Experiment in Collaborative Fundraising
As a recovering lawyer, I wasn’t professionally trained in development when I became an executive director three years ago, yet my Board expected me to get to work fundraising…fast. When I began exploring the field, I quickly learned there are a lot …
The New Fundraising Frontier: Impact Investing
Capital campaigns can be a slog! Most organizations face similar challenges: donor fatigue, the time it takes to raise funds, rising development costs, and concerns about falling short of your fundraising goals. But what if there were another way to ra …
The Best Route to Approaching Donors: Hand-Head-Heart
As someone who began her career as a fund raiser and migrated to become a funder as head of a large corporate foundation, I have a somewhat unique vantage point on the struggle many nonprofits endure when engaging funders and major donors to support th …
Point-Counterpoint: Too Much Influence or Not Enough – Should Nonprofits Be Allowed to Support Political Candidates?
After signaling his intentions to do so at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, on May 4, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at weakening the Johnson Amendment, an act that has received mixed reaction from the nonprofit world. …
From Black Panther to Nonprofit CFO
Norma Mtume is my hero. As a college student she joined the Black Panther Party and went on to serve as director of the Alprentice Bunchy Carter and the George Jackson People’s Free Medical Clinics. She also co-founded a nonprofit in a broken-down trai …
I Followed A Founder: A First-Person Nonprofit Tale
Too often the focus on nonprofit executive transitions is about the departing executive. We’re in the middle of interviewing 58 executives who followed founders or long-time leaders. Here’s just one of their stories; we’ll call her “Amanda”: The …
Fundraising in Nonprofits of Color
Almost all research on fundraising is done on mainstream nonprofits, and almost all advice and guides on fundraising are addressed implicitly to mainstream nonprofits. Yet because they have different development trajectories, nonprofits in communities …
