Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

 

You can create a systemic fundraising model that drives revenue, delivers a high return on investment, and scales to the impact you need to make.​

​

​But there is one (not so) small catch. You will need to change your operating model.​​​​​​

​​​​​​​

The phrase “new era of philanthropy” is increasingly used to describe a fundamental shift in how giving is practiced and understood. The new era prioritizes deeper relationships with fewer donors, resulting in much larger average gifts and exponential increases in total fundraising. The old model resembles marketing and sales—direct mail, gala events, and transactional fundraising.

​

New-era fundraisers adopt a highly personal approach, focusing on long-term engagement, measurable impact, and alignment with donors' individual values. It’s not just about more money—it’s about different expectations, values, and strategies shaping the way philanthropy operates.​

​

Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​​​​​​​We came into the nonprofit sector from a for-profit business background, so a scarcity mindset never made sense to us. While nonprofits are undoubtedly different from for-profit enterprises in many ways, the fundamental truths of how finance works remain the same—you can’t do more with less. Life-changing missions require a significant investment in resources, tools, and people.

​

What will this series of free classes do for you?​​

• You will identify what’s really blocking your overall revenue growth and keeping you from becoming a high-ROI operation.

• You will learn the path to steady, predictable revenue so you can grow your shop’s capabilities and capacity to build relationships with investment-level donors.

• You will understand how to speak the language of finance to a board and organization that does not understand the economics of high-performance fundraising.

• You will learn to create a step-by-step action plan that aligns hours with dollars, dictating which new activities you will start, which current ones you will decide to continue, and those low-return activities (including “sacred cows”) which you will stop.

• You will know how to align your staff’s time within a critical path framework to achieve a high-ROI model.

• You will be empowered to break free from the activities that limit growth, create cash flow issues, and never secure the investment-level gifts needed to grow.​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

 

We’ve been paid millions of dollars in consulting fees to provide this information. Now we’re offering it in a series of free educational sessions.

 

Are we nuts?

​

No, just ambitious.

​

We’ve been in business since 1983, running campaigns and performance improvement initiatives with a relatively small number of large organizations. Our official mission is Helping People Succeed. Our informal mission is to drive meaningful performance improvement in the nonprofit fundraising sector.

 

​​​​​​​​​​​​We’ve realized we’re not going to do that by continuing to focus on a limited number of larger clients. We’ve earned and learned a lot in the past 20 years. But the only way we’re going to make real change in the sector’s fundraising model is to change our business model. So, we created and sponsored the Fundraising Performance Institute.

​

​​​Here’s a brief look at the Master Class curriculum.

​

Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

​

Operational Efficacy
The Overlooked Predictor of Success in Fundraising​

The Capability Maturity Model was originally a software engineering assessment tool funded by the Department of Defense and developed at Carnegie Mellon University. This section, first offered at the 2025 AHP International Meeting, focuses on how organizations can benchmark themselves against five defined maturity levels of operational efficacy for fundraising organizations. It also introduces Lean Six Sigma, advanced management science, and metric-measured process concepts that set the stage for the online performance improvement master classes that follow.​​

​

Your Focused Frontline

Discover Your Organization’s Potential​

The key to more than incremental gains in fundraising is finding and retaining high-value donors. This section focuses on the economics of fundraising. It starts with an exercise to determine, based on where your organization is now, how much more it can raise over the next three years using the Fundraising Performance Improvement Framework. Success comes from a focus that shifts resources away from transactional fundraising practices toward those with a rate of return up to 5 times higher. Your resources will then be result-focused, with 75% directed to where >80% of your return will come from.

​

The Core Process

The Critical Path Engine at the Core of the FPI Framework​

The Critical Path Method is an algorithm for managing a set of activities to optimize time use and ensure the achievement of planned outcomes. This section focuses on the Fundraising Performance Improvement Core Process, a criteria-gated, multi-stage, critical-path way of building authentic, personalized donor relationships that result in larger gifts and lasting donor retention. The Lean Cycle Time concept is key to reducing the average time-to-ask target from 18 to 9 months. Stage Gates keep the focus on the right prospects at the correct times.

​

The Integrated Development Team

The Structure that Makes Your Critical Path Engine Run​

Most fundraising programs are set up based on diversification as if they were stock market portfolios. Donors are seen more as a type than as an individual. A divide often exists between back-office operations and frontline fundraising. The result is way too little time spent on actual donor-facing work. This section focuses on restructuring a fundraising organization into a team that enables frontline fundraisers to concentrate exclusively on what they do best—more donor-facing time within a donor-centric process. The strategy is to use specialized team roles and technology-supported sub-processes within the context of a critical path process.

​

Pipeline Development

Data, Outreach, and Qualification​

Most fundraising databases include transactional donors who make much larger, individually solicited gifts to other organizations. Databases also list larger donors who are never asked to help enlist other high-value donors. Meanwhile, fundraising staff are struggling to reverse the irreversible trends in acquisition, retention, and costs with smaller-dollar donors through direct mail, digital, and events. This section focuses on the Pipeline Development phase of the Core Process, which facilitates recruiting process partners and structures an ongoing, high-value donor-acquisition process. A structured, ongoing outreach process is the reciprocal of the time spent with an active, individually solicited gift prospect process, which provides the criteria, tools, structure, and support for enlisting potential high-value donors.

​

Active Prospects

Dialogue, Stage Gates, Cycle Time, and Progressive Asks​

The Active Prospect phase is the “core” of the Core Process. The sequence is the Identify, Engage, Cultivate, and Solicit stages—including the Information Ask, Comfort Ask, Trial Ask, and Formal Solicitation. This section focuses on how to begin a dialogue with the potential donor’s philanthropic passions to create mutually purposeful relationships with donors, based on key concepts: Listen & Learn, Connect the Dots, Many Points of Glue, and Make the Process the Ask. It identifies the need to resist early inclinations or even invitations to “pitch,” so in later stages the relationship manager can act as a philanthropic advisor, knowing what resonates with the donor.

​

Portfolio Management

Balancing the Core Process for Donor Loyalty​

While the Pipeline Development phase of the Core Process is a one-time journey, the Active Prospect and Portfolio Management phases together bring ongoing balance to the donor-focused individual giving experience. This section focuses on the staff teamwork necessary to maintain engagement and build donor loyalty over time through Portfolio Management, the third phase of the process. This is a non-linear phase. The Recognize, Report, and Relate stages are not necessarily sequential. Like the Return to Active Prospect stage, for which the date is set upon entry to the Portfolio Management phase, the intent of each ongoing stage is to ensure important aspects of the engaged donor relationship are planned and never overlooked.

​

Managing Culture & Change

The Intertwined “How We Do Things Here”​

Any change of significance is intertwined with culture because both are about “how we do things here.” This section focuses on how to take a structured approach to transitioning from a current state to a desired future state. It addresses both culture change within the fundraising team and moving beyond traditional fundraising thinking to create an authentic culture of philanthropy within the larger organization. The Five Key Steps and Three Best Practices in  Change Management Processes apply to both initiatives.​

​

Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

 

But if all this is free, you might ask, how do we pay our bills?

​

Optional premium upgrades, of course.

​

Some organizations will see the need for even more ambitious gains in their level of philanthropic support. We can bring them the infrastructure, support services, and latest technology necessary for higher levels of gain.​

​

But premium services aren't necessary to gain added production through our Fundraising Performance Institute Master Classes.​

​

There’s no risk. Click here now to reserve your absolutely free Master Class seat.

​

Click to sign up for this series of free classes!

​

                                         Claim this opportunity now! 

                                         You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

​