This is for major gift officers, development directors, and nonprofit CEOs who are watching good donors slow down. After reading, you will be able to spot the behavioral signals of donor anxiety, use four conversational moves that lower the emotional temperature, and offer five gift structures that make a large commitment feel safer.

This is for development directors, chief development officers, and senior major gift officers who want to grow the people on their team instead of replacing them every eighteen months. By the end, you'll be able to name what the fundraisers coming up now need, coach inside work you're already doing, and build a development plan in about thirty minutes.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who want their digital presence working with their relationship building instead of against it.

This is for development directors, major gift officers, and executive directors who are running or preparing a campaign and feel stuck waiting for conditions to settle. By the end, you'll be able to set a working goal and build three response scenarios around it, name the assumption your plan is quietly resting on, and talk to your board about uncertainty in a way that increases their confidence.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who want their recognition to match how values-driven and next-generation donors want to be seen. By the end, you’ll have a practical recognition audit to run, a way to distinguish meaningful recognition from vanity recognition, and a clearer framework for navigating sensitive naming questions.

In my recent conversation with Mark Stuart, President and CEO of the San Diego Foundation, one idea kept coming back to me:

Fundraising is not a department.

It is a team sport. Listen in to learn what that means in practice.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who want to deepen trust with their closest donors and move beyond one-directional reporting. By the end of this post, you'll be able to design a listening touchpoint, tell a listening session apart from an advisory council, and turn what you hear into decisions donors can actually see.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who feel like the only person in the building who thinks about donor relationships. By the end of this post, you'll be able to describe what a culture of philanthropy looks like in practice, name the small steps that shift it, and understand why your internal communication channels matter more than you'd expect.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who want to honor generous donors without absorbing behavior that crosses a line. By the end of this episode, you'll understand the power dynamics that show up in major gift work, you'll know the red flags that a relationship has drifted out of balance, and you'll have language you can use this week to reset expectations while protecting everyone's dignity.

This article is for major gift officers, development directors, and executive directors who want a practical way to bring the right internal partners into their biggest donor relationships. After reading, you will know why this kind of collaboration matters more in 2026 than it used to, exactly who belongs at your table and why, and how to run a coalition meeting that produces real next steps instead of another calendar entry.

This is for development directors, major gift officers, executive directors, and event volunteers who want their donor events to build real relationships without draining the team. By the end of this post, you'll understand why donors increasingly value depth over spectacle, you'll have the 3P framework for designing your next gathering, and you'll know what a real follow-up system looks like once the event ends.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, executive directors, and small teams who want more hours for donor relationships without adding more hours to the week. By the end of this episode, you'll know the three categories of work that are safe to delegate to AI and automation, two workflows you can pilot this week, and the guardrails that keep any of it from feeling impersonal to a donor.

Today we're talking about inclusive major gift fundraising. Not as a campaign theme. Not as a single event with a diverse photo lineup. As a daily discipline that shapes how you build relationships with every donor, especially the donors whose culture, identity, or lived experience differs from your own.

Today's episode is called Building Predictable Major Gifts Revenue, and we're going to talk about how recurring and multi-year commitments can change the shape of your fundraising program in ways that annual campaigns simply cannot.

This is for major gift officers, development directors, and nonprofit leaders who want to grow major gift revenue without leaning harder on the same cash donors. By the end of this post, you'll know how to spot the donors most likely to give a non-cash asset, how to open the conversation warmly, and how to steward the gift so well your donor wants to do it again.

In this week's episode, “Leading from the Major Gifts Seat,” of The Intentional Fundraiser Podcast, I talk about managing up as a leadership practice, including the empathy shift that changes everything and the briefing template I use with my own clients.

On this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser podcast, "Story and Data: What Major Donors Really Need," I break down:

Why even your most analytical donor needs an emotional connection; The Story Spine: a 5-beat framework for major donor narratives; How to weave data inside the story, not bolt it on after; and Why dignity-first storytelling is the new bar in 2026.

In this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser podcast, “Designing Impact Together with Donors,” I walk through the full co-design meeting flow, the donor psychology behind why it works so well, and the simple tools and digital aids that make it feel natural. If you have ever left a donor meeting thinking "that was fine, but we did not really get anywhere," this episode is for you.

This week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser podcast is called "Peer Power: Ambassadors and Giving Circles." I share the story behind a gift that came in because of a peer, walk through the four most useful peer roles I've seen, and offer design tips for peer-led gatherings that feel like an invitation, not a pitch.

In this week's episode of The Intentional Fundraiser podcast, I'm sharing why the metrics most major gift programs lean on, raw visit counts, dollars to goal, dials made, often miss the actual work.