Stories, tools, and tactics that actually work. Five pillars: Major Gifts, Capital Campaigns, Digital & AI, Leadership, and Org Resilience.
Brazen Solutions
Field notes from the fundraising grind. Stories, tools, and tactics that actually work. New pieces when we have something worth saying.
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Your board isn't broken. It was never built to fundraise.
Six reasons your board nods along to the fundraising plan and never does anything — and one honest conversation that changes it.
Cheap is the most expensive way to run a nonprofit.
She thought sharing hotel rooms would save the budget. Six months later she was rebuilding a team. Scarcity math: the receipt always comes due.
Donor retention isn't about the ask. Donors leave because of the silence.
How the six-year-old asking grandma for another gift became the thing I tell every fundraiser to picture before the next appeal goes out.
The board approved the capital campaign. That doesn't mean the organization can run it.
Most campaigns don't stall at execution. They stall at the conversation nobody had before the vote.
Is it ethical to use AI on our donors without telling them?
The trust recession is real. AI isn't what's driving it yet — but it's the thing that's going to land it on us. The choice is whether we make it on purpose or get caught.
Capital campaign feasibility study cost: $30,000 to $60,000 — and the question it won't answer
A capital campaign feasibility study costs $30,000 to $60,000 and answers one question — will the donors give? The question it doesn't answer is the one that sinks campaigns.
Ready for a capital campaign? You already know. You just haven't written it down.
Capital campaign readiness comes down to eight pillars. Here are the questions under each one — the version you can sit down and answer tonight, at your own kitchen table, without hiring anybody.
“I just don't know what you're asking me to do” — what board members mean when they won't fundraise.
How to get board members to fundraise starts with a document nobody has written yet. Board fundraising expectations that name the job, the number, and the person — small enough to say yes to.
The capital campaign consultant's quote said ten percent of goal. She hadn't asked what she was buying.
What a capital campaign consultant costs in Canada, plainly — the percentage-of-goal number, flat retainers, feasibility pricing, what drives the fee up, and the years when hiring anyone is the wrong move.
The phases of a capital campaign, in the order they actually happen — including the one nobody writes down.
How long does a capital campaign take? Two to five years, usually. What happens in each phase, what it costs in time, and where campaigns come off the rails.
What is a capital campaign? Restricted, time-bound, top-heavy, board-carried — and why it asks something the annual fund never does.
Capital campaign vs annual fund, in plain words. What makes a campaign a campaign: restricted, time-bound, top-heavy, board-carried. And the organizations I'd tell to wait.
A capital campaign gift table with no names on it is a wish list with arithmetic.
How to build a gift range chart that tells the truth — the math of the top ten gifts, the prospect ratios, LAI in plain words, and what an empty name column is actually telling you.
Most of the money gets raised before anyone hears about it. That's the quiet phase of a capital campaign.
What the quiet phase is, why campaigns go public only after the majority is committed, and why 'we'll go public to raise the rest' is usually a campaign asking for help without saying so.
Everybody asks how to get ready for a capital campaign. Almost nobody asks what order to do it in.
You have twelve to eighteen months before you'd launch. Here's what to prepare for a capital campaign first, what comes second, and why doing it backwards means paying for the same work twice.
We put the biggest name in town at the head of the capital campaign committee. He chaired eleven meetings and never made an ask.
Campaign cabinet roles, in plain terms — the door-opener, the host, the asker, the chair — and why the person with the most recognizable name usually belongs in a different chair.
Most case for support examples you'll find online are beautifully written. That's a different thing from fundable.
What actually separates a case for support that raises money from one that just reads well — the change-in-a-life test, the brother-in-law test, and the numbers a donor quietly checks before saying yes.
A capital campaign plan template will hand you the headings. The blank spaces underneath them are the actual campaign.
What a real capital campaign plan contains, which sections are theatre, and why the document is for alignment rather than decoration — the test being whether the campaign can move while the ED is away.
The board asked what the building would cost. Nobody asked what the capital campaign would cost to run.
What a capital campaign actually costs to run in Canada — the dime-on-the-dollar rule of thumb, everything hiding inside it, and the four lines organizations forget until the money is already committed.
The donor asked about naming rights. We had a capital campaign gift table and no naming policy, so we answered him across the table.
How donor recognition actually works in a campaign — naming levels priced against the gift table, what a board-approved naming policy has to settle before the first big ask, and the multi-year cost tail sitting behind the donor wall.
The number at the top of your fundraising plan came from somewhere. Most of the time, nobody can say where.
What goes in a fundraising plan when the goal starts with your operating budget instead of last year's total — the gift types your team can actually run, a calendar with real dates, and where the hours go, because different money costs different amounts of time.
Should our nonprofit have an AI policy? Yes — and writing it is the easy part.
What an AI policy actually covers, what Canadian privacy law already expects of you the day donor data touches a chatbot, and why the document is the smallest piece of the work.
The executive director is carrying all the fundraising alone. Nobody ever decided that.
Every funder relationship runs through one calendar, and nobody planned it that way — it accreted, one reasonable decision at a time. What that costs the organization, why the development hire never arrives, and the first move out.
Your donor retention rate is the number that explains a flat year.
What a donor retention rate actually is, what the AFP benchmarks say — under half of donors come back, and roughly one in five first-timers — and what that churn costs you. Plus how to calculate your own number this week from any CRM export.
You've run the same fundraising calendar for six years. A fundraising audit asks what each piece actually returns.
What a fundraising audit examines — where the revenue really comes from, who came back, how much of it you're allowed to spend, and what each approach costs in staff hours. When it's worth doing, and the three things you can check yourself this month from a spreadsheet export.
In a small nonprofit, the fundraising plan is really a decision about where ten hours a week go.
A fundraising plan sized for a small shop — the budget-derived goal, two approaches, the thank-you calendar, two numbers. What to keep, what to drop, and where the ten hours go.
Diversifying your revenue is how a small team ends up running five things badly.
Depending on one funder is a real risk — you are one decision away from a layoff. But every stream a small team adds comes out of the hours running the streams it already has, which is why the fix is usually deepening two or three sources instead of finding a fourth.