Where am I coming from?

When I speak with prospective new clients, I ask them to tell me about themselves…where they’ve come from, what their experiences are, what background are they bringing to the fundraising conversation? And of course, I share a little bit about my background…but more than my background I’m sharing my framework and my results so clients can decide (without me wasting a lot of their time) if I’m the right fit for their organization.

But as I always tell clients, people give to people. Why do I know what I know? Why should you trust me when I say I know how to grow individual giving programs while banishing burnout?

Well, like most of you, I didn’t actually mean to end up a fundraiser…

I’m a girl that loves a goal and a challenge. At 18, I knew where I wanted to work—a prominent, but niche, human rights advocacy nonprofit. Specifically, I wanted to work in communications there. All through college, I’d look at their job postings and think, “that’s where I’m going to be when I graduate.” I studied political communications, economics, and foreign languages (Spanish, French, and Arabic)…thinking that those degrees would land me that dream job.

I’d interned with grassroots advocacy campaigns to learn the grassroots side of advocacy. I’d interned in Washington, D.C. to learn the top-level side of advocacy. I got my Masters degree in social justice and human rights, with a specialization in nonprofit management. I thought I was sooooo ready.

Right when I graduated, they posted a job for a communications assistant. It was the first job I applied for after graduating, and—miracle of miracles—I got the job!

And six months into the job, I was miserable!!!!

You see, I studied political communications because I am fascinated with the process of changing people’s minds. How do you get people to care about a cause? How do you convince someone to change their mind on an issue? How do you teach people to act with empathy and make decisions in a way that takes others’ needs and lives into account, and not just themselves? I thought “that must be what working in a comms office at an advocacy group does.”

But that’s not what it was. The communications office was more or less a press office. Did I get to help craft stories with journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post? I did, and that was an amazing experience. But I was talking about current affairs, the take on the day’s news…not how to get more people to care about U.S. foreign policy and the human rights implications of foreign policy. 

I was so sad that what I’d worked for all those years wasn’t in fact what I was doing. I didn’t even know if what I wanted to do was a job outside of academia. Now that I was in it, I felt nonprofits moved too fast to think deep about those things. Was nonprofit communications just PR? That’s not at all what I wanted to be doing.

But then I was given a gift. The development department of this nonprofit was short staffed and in a bind (sound familiar?). The director was a gifted grant writer and raised lots of money from foundations—but many of the organization’s foundation supporters were changing their funding priorities. They were looking to fund the organization’s partners outside of the U.S. (a great goal the organization had advocated for!), but they were pulling back funding of U.S. human rights groups. So this organization had a big problem: they needed to go from a niche human rights advocacy group to building a big individual giving program.

I got put on loan. The communications department had me start writing pieces for the two-person development department…and I fell in love. THIS was it. THIS was what I’d studied for in school. How do I write a direct mail piece to random strangers and convince them to care about people in a country they’ve never traveled to? How do I sit across from a donor and, in the time it takes to drink a coffee, get them to part with a six-figure donation? I was head over heels in love…with fundraising. 

I was lucky. I had great bosses there–the leadership team, I maintain, was the best of any nonprofit anywhere ever. They saw I was miserable in one department, but incredibly skilled in another. They moved me laterally within the organization. And now I was tasked with what seemed impossible to everyone there: grow the organization’s fledgling individual donor program from a small, underperforming, hap-hazard program to a powerhouse to fund the massive scale-up the leaders had in mind.

So at 23 years old, with 6 months of real, professional work experience (outside of internships and some “put me through college” jobs), I was in charge of an individual giving program that needed to become the organization’s $1 million+ funding backbone. 

Being the force that grew this nonprofit was what I wanted more than anything in the world…

…and I had absolutely no idea how to do it. 

(I’m guessing that sounds really familiar to you…I’ve not yet met someone who dreamed of being a fundraiser when they were little or majored in fundraising in college.)

Ever the student, I assumed someone out there could teach me how to do it. Surely there was a course somewhere, a training or a mentor. Nope.

Well, there was, but not within my measly professional development budget. So I did what everyone else in this crazy, “I fell into this job” profession does…I took a million free webinars, went to intimidating conferences, and I put my head down and hustled. I worked 80 hour weeks; I traveled all over the country to meet with our donors; I made mistakes that embarrassed the heck out of me and my (thankfully very understanding) boss. 

But slowly, I learned. My Executive Director trusted me; she let me take risks, and she let me do things really differently. She listened, she gave feedback, and she helped me figure out what worked and what didn’t. The more I proved my worth, the more she invested in my professional development. And the board sat up and took note too…and they got activated, then excited, then invested.

After four years, I’d done it. The organization’s on-again/off-again individual giving program (raising $200-300k depending on the year, mostly through their gala) was raising a reliable $1 million dollars each year, most of it from major gifts and direct mail appeals. The $1.2 million annual budget blossomed into a $3.2 million budget (because as foundations saw our powerhouse individual giving program, they stepped up more too). The small staff of 16 grew to 32. Our development department grew from 2 to 5.

I discovered I had a superpower: I was really good at creating systems–especially systems that were flexible to incorporate new learning. As I built the program, I built it in checklists, then spreadsheets, then in Asana projects. I wasn’t doing what the organization had done for so long—run a program based in one-off efforts. I was building a donor community…a donor community that cared about one another and the organization’s mission, that showed up for events to see the difference they were making and to do more for the organization. I learned how to show the impact of advocacy work, that elusive, intangible impact that was there one day and gone the next. And it was all systematized so I could put much of the program on auto-pilot so I could focus on the next big idea.

In fact, our individual giving program had grown so reliable after a few years, it got route; it got routine. The program went from challenge to checklist. We’d found out what worked, and we were just doing it again and again…and growing 25-30% per year. 

Now, that seems like the dream, right? Dream job, massive success…just take the win, Kelly.

The problem is that I got bored. I don’t like easy buttons. I don’t like routine. 

I like mess. I like challenge. I like problem solving. I like puzzles.

So, after painstakingly handing off all my work to make sure the organization continued this trajectory (it did!), I left. I found another organization with another messy, disorganized, and underperforming individual giving program at a nonprofit I believed in. And I applied everything I learned at my first job–my systems, my checklists, my templates–and I turned that program around in two years. 

But that too started feeling too easy. Once that program was going right, I trained up my replacement and left. And I did it again…this time helping a brand new nonprofit raise $350k in just 18 months to restore a historic cinema (while also growing their membership program and general fundraising). 

And when I started getting bored there and started looking for my next challenge, my husband said “maybe instead of doing this over and over, you should think about teaching other people to do what you do. Then instead of helping one organization every two to three years, you can help dozens of organizations each year.”

I’m lucky I’m married to a very smart man. Once I sat down and looked at what I’d done, there was a clear formula–a framework! It all could be taught as a system, and adapted to each organization. No one strategy or tactic always worked, but there was a system that always helped me identify which strategy or tactic would work. Eureka!

Three years ago, I launched From Scratch Fundraising to help train nonprofits to succeed in individual giving–and because it’s all built on a framework, it not only grows individual giving, but it also helps fundraisers banish burnout while they’re at it. 

And the system works for any nonprofit needing to grow an individual giving program. I have clients that have a staff of one–where ED stands for “Everything” Director, not just Executive Director. I have clients that are 20 year old organizations with multi-million dollar budgets based on grant funding that need the flexibility that individual giving provides. I have clients that are 100% volunteer run organizations where it takes 5 people to be one development director because they only have a few hours a week each. I have clients where there is a full-time Development Director–but they just fell into the job from corporate marketing and don’t know a thing about nonprofit fundraising. The Framework works for each of these clients equally well. 

And that’s why I want to be your BFF–your Best Fundraising Friend. I know you have the passion to grow your mission, so wherever you are in building your nonprofit let me teach you the skills to build a burnout-free individual giving program that gives you the unrestricted revenue to grow your nonprofit on your terms. 

Now that you know me better, can we be BFFs?

I’m one of those that believes that when you walk through a door, you hold it open for the people who come after you. I did a heck of a lot of work, and I don’t want anyone else taking a million webinars or leaving conferences more overwhelmed than you went into them. 

I want to teach you my formula, so you have the building blocks to grow a great program from scratch. (Then, when you go to the conferences and take the webinars, you’ll know where they fit in your strategy, rather than feeling overwhelmed about how you ALSO do that stuff.)

Schedule a discovery call today to see if we can bake up a better fundraising recipe for your nonprofit so this year’s bake can rise to new heights!