Why I started From Scratch…
You know how when you don’t know any differently, your experience seems normal?
Let me tell you about my first fundraising job. I was hired by an organization that intended to grow my position. They’d gotten a three-year $1 million grant from a funder for the sole purpose of building their fundraising capacity, which meant two new hires and robust resources for professional development and fundraising tools. I walked into my first fundraising job with a coach and the money to attend multiple conferences. I worked for a CEO who had the foresight to apply for said capacity building grant, and hired us with three years of time to build a successful program. Once I knew the ropes, when I said “jump” she said “how high?” And my board of directors was a dream…they loved networking and made their networks infinitely available to me. They are still some of my favorite people I’ve ever met.
Amazing! Fundraising was so much fun, not just that, it was a breeze. What a cool profession to have landed myself in.
Unfortunately, that job required massive amounts of travel, and when I had my first child, I knew being gone 1-2 weeks out of every month was not how I wanted to be a mom. So I left that job for my second fundraising job. And I had quite an awakening.
The CEO wanted to wash his hands of fundraising the second I came on staff. They were already about to go off of a financial cliff by the time they thought to hire a fundraiser. And I had to fight for every dollar I needed to implement things like a donor CRM and adequate online fundraising tools. And the board…well, one member really liked me and tried to help me…and that’s all I’ll say about that.
Yikes. That sucked. And while the CEO was impossible to work with, my colleagues (the program staff) knew how critical my job was. They tried so hard to help me be successful. And when I left, a bunch of them left as well. One of them told me afterwards, “I knew if you couldn’t change the organization, nobody could, so I got out.”
After that, I worked with a friend who had started her own nonprofit. They were just starting out, so resources were limited, but we had creativity and willpower on our side (and luckily I had loads of fundraising expertise). And in two years, we’d raised almost $1 million together to launch the nonprofit and keep it sustainable for the long term.
While my first fundraising job was a dream, the other two were fraught for completely different reasons. I saw what most organizations had to deal with–disengaged boards, disinterested leadership, lack of knowledge, no investment in capacity building, limited resources, and so much more. During that time, I searched and searched… I looked again at the cost of the coach and the conferences I’d used in my first job. I couldn’t afford them. I looked at the salaries offered by big, established organizations and knew my personal life would be a heck of a lot easier if I worked there than doing the hard work of sticking it out at the organizations I was working for. But my heart was in the small, community-based nonprofits, and I didn’t want to leave the trenches for a job at a big nonprofit.
So then I got mad. I got mad that small nonprofits simply can’t compete with bigger organizations–for talent, for board members, for institutional funding. I got mad that consultants cost so much to deliver boilerplate fundraising strategies. I got mad that I saw so much need in my community, but the people working hardest to address it had the most limited resources.
Then the pandemic hit, and I got furloughed…and it’s the best thing that could have happened to me.
I took that mad, and I channeled it into something. I decided, while I was on unemployment income, that I would build a different kind of fundraising consultancy. One that provided high-quality, individualized fundraising strategy for as little as I could possibly afford to deliver it. One that got its hands dirty and did the work for our clients. One that made every nonprofit we worked with feel like they had access to a fundraising professional at a price their budget could bear.
That is From Scratch Fundraising.
We don’t do boilerplate. We don’t do templates. We don’t do one-size-fits-all.
We roll our sleeves up and dive in with our clients. We help each nonprofit we work with craft the perfect recipe for fundraising success using the ingredients (budget, community, staff, volunteers) they have at their disposal. And the thing I’m most proud of is that we have a service to meet every budget, from $25/month to $10,000/month.
We’ve supported someone who was formerly incarcerated in starting a mentorship program for returning citizens. We’ve shown a restorative justice organization how to leverage their community to build a donor community to fund home and business ownership in disenfranchised communities. We’ve started building a donor base where there was none for a nonprofit that supports independence for people with disabilities and severe mental illness (they’d previously been subsisting on medicare payments).
I started this business to knock down walls, to rip open gates. Fundraising expertise is gatekept, and it’s gatekept on purpose. From the scarcity mindset making nonprofits scared to share what works with one another, to consultants wanting to keep their methods proprietary. From the fear of asking for help to the fear of creating competition. From consultants who keep their prices high to funders who don’t understand the importance of capacity building.
Nonprofits all need money…but only a few know how to get that money. To me, that’s unacceptable.
We offer do-it-yourself, done with you, and done for you programs to keep our pricing fair, scalable, and accessible to nonprofits.
Do It Yourself: Sustain & Thrive is an incredible, nurturing twelve-month program that trains nonprofit founders, executive directors, and development directors how to build sustainable fundraising programs through an online course, weekly coaching calls, and 24/7 online forum. Starting at just $25/month…so everyone has a fundraiser on call, no matter what.
Done With You: A hybrid of our Sustain & Thrive program and Nurture & Grow program, we take on coaching clients who go through our Sustain & Thrive online course, but get 1:1 mentoring. Starting at $1,000/month.
Done For You: Our Nurture & Grow program allows our team to become your fundraising team for a fraction of the cost of a full-time fundraiser. Starting at $3,500/month for strategy oversight and scaling to $8,000/month for full department offload.
New Fundraiser Mentorship: An add-on to our Nurture & Grow Program, we can train your organization’s first fundraiser. We get your program up and running, then we help you find your first full-time fundraiser and we train them to become successful. My commitment to building new fundraising talent is fierce. I can teach anyone to fundraise. Bring me your former clients, talented interns, or intrepid volunteers. We can take them from novice to expert in 12 months.
From Scratch Fundraising can build your fundraising program from scratch, hence the name. We can build up your program that is failing. We can make your systems work for you so that your program is efficient and effective. But most importantly, we’re committed to making sure no nonprofit leader is facing the challenge of fundraising without a qualified expert on hand…whether that’s us or someone we train for you.
We’re in this for you. How can we help?
