Inspired Nonprofit Leadership

Show Notes Planned giving often lands on the someday list right beside the wealth screen a nonprofit can't yet afford. Tony Martignetti says you can launch it this week with one honest conversation about a gift in a will. No campaign, no brochure, no page. Sarah sat with Tony Martignetti , a front-line planned giving fundraiser since 1997 and author of the new book Planned Giving Accelerated, to discuss how a small or mid-size nonprofit launches planned giving in a single week, without a wealth screen or a legal background. In This Episode, You'll Learn How Tony's three steps get planned giving, and launched inside a single week Why your best prospects are your most loyal donors, not your wealthiest ones What to say when you ask a donor to consider a gift in their will How to respond when a donor says no, yes, or let me think about it Why lifetime giving tells you almost nothing about the size of a planned gift Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors who have been told that planned giving belongs to hospitals and universities • Fundraisers who want major gifts but have no budget to build a whole program first • Anyone who keeps putting off the will conversation because it feels awkward to raise About the Guest Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving. In September, he publishes his book, Planned Giving Accelerated, to help small- and mid-size nonprofits launch by making Planned Giving fundraising easy, accessible and affordable. Pre-orders are at PlannedGivingAccelerated.com . He started as a front-line Planned Giving fundraiser in 1997 and kicked off his consulting in 2003. He's active on LinkedIn and would be honored to connect. Tony is a lawyer, but he doesn't talk like one. Instead, he weaves in his stand-up comedy and improv past to bring Planned Giving within reach for small- and mid-size nonprofits. About the book Tony's new book, Planned Giving Accelerated , is a practical guide for small- and mid-sized nonprofits that want to start a planned giving program without making it complicated. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience, Tony shows how organizations can launch in just one week, starting with bequests. The book covers how to identify your best prospects, build donor relationships, overcome common planned giving myths, and create a sustainable program without a huge budget or specialized legal expertise. Connect with Tony: LinkedIn: LinkedIn Website: tonymartignetti.com Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio: Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio Email: tony@tonymartignetti.com Resources mentioned Get Tony's book, Planned Giving Accelerated, here: plannedgivingaccelerated.com The LinkedIn episode Sarah mentioned is "Show Up Stand Out with Bafda M. Imam," and you can find it at inspirednonprofitleadership.com . Sarah Olivieri: Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Thank you to our sponsor, Donorbox. More than a suite of helpful fundraising tools, Donorbox is a partner that helps you raise more money and supports you in retaining your donors.

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat strategy, operations, and team as three separate pillars in their organization, but in fact, they are part of one integrated system. In this episode, Sarah goes into strategy, operations, and team as the who, what, where, when, and how of running a great nonprofit. She shares how these are built into her Impact Method®, which she developed back in 2017. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why strategy, operations, and the team have to work as one system How the who, what, where, when, and how fit together Why a team problem may actually start with strategy or operations How the Impact Method® keeps strategy current every two months Why distributed leadership removes decision bottlenecks Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors whose weeks feel like one long game of Whack-A-Mole • Leadership teams working on strategy, operations, and people separately • Leaders who fix one problem only to watch another one pop up • Anyone whose strategy looks good on paper but stalls in practice About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Join the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly tips and inspiration for leading your nonprofit: https://www.inspirednonprofitleadership.com/ Resources mentioned: Work with Sarah (short application, for teams of three or more leaders): saraholivieri.com/application Sarah Olivieri: Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Thank you to our sponsor, Donorbox. More than a suite of helpful fundraising tools, Donorbox is a partner that helps you raise more money and supports you in retaining your donors.

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat turnover as a problem to solve after someone resigns. The organizations that handle it well plan for it before the hire, in how the job itself is designed. Sarah invited Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer and the person who grew the company from 400 people to 4,000 while the median tenure on his own staff was nine months, to talk about how to build an organization that works when people come and go, and how to stay connected to the good ones after they leave. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why Steve says no job should take more than six months to learn How to design a role around a hire who will stay three years What to do with a good employee after they leave, and why it pays off Why Steve hires for how fast someone learns, not what they already know How to make a major donor relationship belong to the organization, not one person Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors who just lost someone they were counting on • Leaders whose roles take eighteen months to ramp when staff stay three years • Anyone about to have a hard conversation with an employee who has outgrown the job • CEOs who have decided the sector cannot attract talent, and built accordingly About the Guest Steve Cadigan is a globally recognized talent strategist, culture architect, and author with over 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth and transformation. As LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer, Steve helped scale the company from 400 to 4,000 employees, building a culture that set the standard for tech companies worldwide. Today, through his firm Cadigan Talent Ventures, he advises high-growth companies, venture firms, and global leaders on how to win the talent war, design future-ready workplaces, and use culture as a competitive edge. He's a sought-after keynote speaker and the author of Workquake , a #1 Amazon bestseller that reimagines how we work in a post-pandemic world. Steve's insights have been featured in outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg, and his work has been the focus of business school case studies Connect with Steve: Official website: https://stevecadigan.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cadigan Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevecad/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thestevecadigan/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders pick a marketing tactic first- a gala, a Facebook fundraiser, a social media takeover, and then hope it works. The organizations that get a real return pick the goal first and let the goal decide the tactic. Sarah goes solo to work through how to build a marketing strategy simple enough to fit on one page, drawing on the years she spent running a marketing agency for nonprofits. In This Episode, You'll Learn Executive directors about to spend money on a tactic a board member suggested Leaders whose fundraising activity is busy but whose donor numbers are flat Small organizations wondering whether a website is the right first investment Anyone who has run a fundraising event that cost more than it brought in Who This Episode Is For • Why picking a tactic before a goal is where the money goes • What the three marketing goals are and how to spot yours • Why a website converts people who already found you, and does not create them • How Sarah defines a real donor, and why the second gift is the line • What to do about lifetime value when you have almost no donors yet About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Show Notes: Most nonprofit leaders treat retention as a problem to fix after the hire. The organizations that keep people for decades treat it as something they build into the hire itself. Sarah invited Crystal FitzSimons , the president of the Food Research and Action Center and someone who has been at FRAC for twenty-four years leading a team where staff routinely stay ten, twenty, and even forty years, to unpack what actually holds people in a nonprofit for the long term. This episode is for: Executive directors and nonprofit CEOs who are watching good people leave and unsure why Founders and EDs about to make a key hire and wondering how much process is actually worth it CEOs who have stopped sitting on interviews because if feels like too much time What you'll hear: Why hiring is the single most important thing Crystal's forty-person team does, and how that belief changes the calendar The reason the CEO belongs in every final interview, even at forty people, even at five hundred What Crystal has kept, and what she has added, to sustain a culture where people stay through leadership transitions Why mission alignment is only the price of admission, and what actually keeps someone in the seat How Crystal is holding the team steady through a marathon-and-a-sprint policy season, and what that requires of a president How to think about a hiring process as a cultural transmission instead of a selection task Crystal has been at FRAC for twenty-four years and just stepped into the president role. Her chief government affairs officer recently celebrated forty years with the organization. This is what genuine longevity looks like, and it is not luck. Related Links: Sign up for the The Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter Connect with Crystal on LinkedIn Check out the good work FARC is doing ❤️ And a big thank you to our caring sponsor Donorbox

Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri The thought shows up quietly and then keeps coming back. Maybe this person is not right for us. Then it sits there for months while you look for more evidence and rehearse a conversation you never have. Meanwhile the person you are worried about is stuck in a job that is grinding on them too. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to know when it is time to let someone go, and how to do it in a way that leaves everyone intact. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why Sarah has never seen the instinct "I think I need to let this person go" turn out to be wrong, and what to do with that The two categories to check before you act, fit with the team and fit with the role, and why only one of them is fixable Why a bad hiring process is usually the thing that produced the conversation you are dreading How to turn a firing conversation into a quitting conversation, and when that serves both of you What nonprofit staff in particular need to hear before they can let themselves leave Who This Episode Is For • Leaders who have been carrying the same thought about the same person since spring • CEOs who keep reshuffling a role hoping it will fix a fit problem • Anyone who has avoided a hard conversation because they were afraid of how the person would react Practical takeaways • Run the two-category check. Is this about the team and your guiding principles, or is this about the role • Check your state's employment laws before you plan anything else • Have the clear conversation first. To be clear is to be kind, and simple, explicit, unjudgmental language is the whole skill • Decide your boundaries before you walk in. Last day, terms, severance, what is flexible and what is not • Do not surprise people with money. Be as generous as the timeline allows • Leave room to ask them what would make this transition feel best About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Show Notes Most nonprofit leaders already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've said it out loud in meetings and retreats. They want more decisions happening close to the work. Then a year later, they're still the bottleneck. Sarah sat down with Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight and co-founder of ideo.org, to unpack why distributed leadership stalls inside organizations that say they want it, and what it actually takes to make it real across a global team of over two thousand humanitarians. Here's what you'll hear: p]:pt-0 [&>p]:mb-2 [&>p]:my-0"> How Alight's executive directors run their own countries: setting strategy, raising funding, structuring teams, and making the calls, with the global team in a support role instead of a headquarters role p]:pt-0 [&>p]:mb-2 [&>p]:my-0"> Why Jocelyn had to teach distributed leadership through every level of the organization, and what happened when she assumed proximity to the work would produce co-creation on its own p]:pt-0 [&>p]:mb-2 [&>p]:my-0"> The shift from "human-centered design" to "co-creation" to just "proximity and agency," and why the language kept changing p]:pt-0 [&>p]:mb-2 [&>p]:my-0"> Safe Rides in the Nakivale refugee camp in Uganda: how Alight backed entrepreneurs who already wanted to run boda boda taxi businesses, and what that reveals about designing under constraint p]:pt-0 [&>p]:mb-2 [&>p]:my-0"> Why curiosity is the leadership trait Jocelyn most wants nonprofit CEOs to protect, and what happens to distributed leadership without it If this conversation sparked something, the thinking goes further. Sarah wrote a full reflection on why distributed leadership fails when it's announced instead of designed, and what actually makes it work. Read it here: [ Why Distributed Leadership Fails (And What Actually Makes It Work )]. It's a standalone read, built for leaders who want to go deeper than the episode alone. Press play, and then read the article.

Lunch Is Leadership with Sarah Olivieri Lunch is the first thing to go. The calendar fills up, something has to give, and the hour in the middle of the day is the one that looks optional. Skip it enough times and you start making your biggest decisions of the week on an empty tank. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why lunch is a leadership decision, and exactly how to get it back on your calendar and keep it there. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why your blood sugar spikes during intense work even when you have not eaten, and what that does to your thinking What skipping the hour actually costs you in decision quality, which is the part of your job nobody else can do Why sharing a meal with one person, a new team member, a donor, a potential program partner, does something no meeting does What your team learns about work habits from watching whether or not you take the hour The recurring calendar block Sarah walks every leader she coaches through, live Who This Episode Is For • Leaders eating at the desk with one hand on the keyboard • CEOs whose afternoons feel foggier than their mornings and cannot figure out why • Leaders who want their team to stop working through lunch but have never modeled it themselves • Anyone who has told themselves that skipping lunch buys them more time Practical takeaways • Open your calendar today and create a recurring lunch block. Noon, one, eleven, whatever time you actually want to eat • Do not overthink the placement. Check it once a week, move it when it collides with something, and let it settle into a consistent time • Aim for the full hour. Sarah often splits hers, half an hour to eat and half an hour to do whatever she wants • Tell your team you are taking it, so the permission travels • Book one lunch this month with a person whose relationship matters to your organization About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Is Your Budget Killing Your Major Gifts Program? Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall. They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves. So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask. Here's what I often find when I see an organization trying to do major gifts but struggling. They're actually operating with systems and processes that work against major gifts. Systems like: annual fundraising strategies a schedule of campaigns an annual budget that rewards short-term gifting, which often comes at the expense of building the proper long-term relationship that leads to true, significant, sustainable funding from major donors Relationships operate on systems as well, but these are not the systems that relationships run on. When the wrong systems are in place, people rarely call out the system. They compensate with effort instead. In fundraising, that effort goes into activity that can be measured this quarter. Events. Appeals. Data entry. All of it visible, all of it defensible, and very little of it building the thing that tends to produce seven-figure gifts. A version of this came up on almost every strategy call I had this spring, which is why I was glad to sit down with Bill Crouch and talk it through. Bill has spent more than forty years inside this work, first as a college president raising private money in the shadow of a state flagship, now advising nonprofits nationally. He has lived this work and he has taught it, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. What the conversation gave me was not a new idea. It was a sharper explanation of why the patient approach holds up and why so few organizations are structured to survive the wait. The Annual Budget Is the Clock Everything Else Runs On Start with the operating budget, because everything downstream inherits its timeline. A relationship with a high capacity donor takes eighteen months. Sometimes three years. Bill spent eighteen months getting the first million dollar commitment for a giving group at his own college. Six weeks after that, he had five more, because the first person made calls to friends. Eighteen months of nothing, then five gifts in six weeks. Now put that curve inside an organization that closes its books every twelve months and asks the development office what it brought in. The gap is rarely a matter of discipline. The organization has committed to a reporting cycle that cannot see the work until it is already finished. So the work does not get funded, does not get protected on anyone's calendar, and does not survive the first cash flow scare in month seven. I write and talk a lot about how the layout of your budget shapes the decisions you make , and this is the most expensive version of that. A twelve-month frame makes long horizon relationship work look like underperformance. Then leaders respond to the number in front of them, which is the only responsible thing to do with the information the system gives them. The Desk Always Wins Bill described development work as needing two different capabilities. The technical side, sitting in the office getting things done. And the relational side, out in the world with people. Two skill sets, often two different humans. In a small shop, one person holds both. Ask that person what they did last week and you will hear about the database, the appeal, the grant report, the reconciliation. Not the coffee that took ninety minutes and produced no measurable outcome. The desk wins because the desk has deadlines. The relationship has none. This is a design flaw with a simple mechanism. Every task in the office has a due date attached to it and a visible consequence for missing it. Relationship building has neither. Give one person both jobs and the work with a deadline tends to consume the work without one, week after week, however much that person believes in the relational side. Which means the fix is structural. Protect the time in a way the person cannot trade away, or separate the roles. Telling someone to prioritize relationships more is asking them to out-discipline their own job description. The Mechanism, Named One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "That forces nonprofits to make short-term decisions that hurt long-term strategies." What I appreciate about this framing is that it locates the problem in the design rather than in the people executing it. The short-term decision is the rational one given the reporting cycle. Change the cycle, or build a revenue floor that takes the pressure off it, and the same team will often behave differently. Not much had to change in anyone's character. The structure stopped charging them for patience. Turnover Is What the Design Produces Forty years ago, the number one problem in nonprofit fundraising was development staff turnover. It is still the number one problem. Bill named four causes, and the timeline inside them is the part worth sitting with. It takes about sixteen months for the wrong hire to realize they do not want this job. It takes the supervisor about sixteen months to accept the same thing. So roughly a year and a half of relationship equity walks out the door, and the next person starts from zero with donors who have now been handed off twice. Run that loop three times and you have a decade of fundraising with no compounding whatsoever. The organization has been paying for major gifts capacity the entire time and never accumulating any. And the third cause Bill listed is the one nonprofits could fix tomorrow. The only way to get a meaningful raise in this field is to leave. We hand out cost of living adjustments and call it compensation strategy. Then we act surprised when the person holding four years of donor history takes a call from a recruiter. The turnover looks to me like an output. The design tends to produce it, and hiring better rarely changes what the design produces. If you want to see the same mechanism from another angle, emotional intelligence functions as retention infrastructure inside these teams, not as a soft add-on. Relationship Building Is a Practice You Can Teach Here is the part that gets skipped. The long horizon only pays off if something real happens inside it, and most organizations treat what happens in the room as a matter of charm. Some people have it. Some people do not. Hire for it and hope. Bill asks every high capacity person he meets about their favorite childhood toy. That is the whole thing. A simple question about a toy, and within a couple of minutes he is hearing what someone actually cares about, in their own words, before any case statement enters the conversation. I have been collecting strategic questions for years, and I recently started a separate collection just for get to know you questions. His goes at the top of that list. I asked my next podcast guest the same thing, and it changed the shape of the whole interview. Which tells you something about the mechanism. A good question is repeatable. It can be written down, taught, practiced, and handed to a nervous program director who has never asked anyone for money. Charm cannot. So when an organization decides that relationship building is a talent rather than a practice, it has quietly made that work impossible to train, impossible to delegate, and impossible to sustain past the tenure of whoever happened to be good at it. Bill also brings brain science into how he approaches this, and that tracks. Relationship building, brain science, and psychology go hand in hand. People give when they feel seen, heard, and valued, and there is a physiological story underneath that, not just a sentimental one. Which means the patient work is doing something specific in those eighteen months. Those months are where the ask becomes possible. Skip them and you are asking a stranger. Titles Are Structure Bill told a story about interviewing a researcher at a large university. She had put the institution in her will. She had been there sixteen years. She had identified and researched a donor who eventually gave a million dollars. No major gift officer had ever walked into her office to thank her. Nobody, in sixteen years. She stayed because her children had a tuition waiver. His response to this pattern is to give every person in the development operation the same title: "Every person in the development shop should have the same title. Director of Major Gifts." This makes sense given the setup. A title describes what the organization believes a role is for. When the researcher's title says researcher and the gift officer's title says major gifts, the org chart has already suggested who is doing the real fundraising and who is doing support work. Most people read that correctly and behave accordingly. I coach clients on titles constantly, usually while helping them build a first development department, and my rule is that people should have whatever title helps them do their job best. Bill's version goes further, and I think he is right about it. It does two things at once. Inside the organization, it tells the researcher and the data entry person that they matter, which is the same thing every donor is trying to find out about themselves. Outside the organization, it gives every one of those people a title they can carry into a room and use to build a real relationship. Give everyone the title that names the actual goal, and you have used structure to say something that a values statement on the wall never manages to say. The Board Question That Is Easy to Sequence Wrong Then there is the board, where two incompatible jobs get stuffed into one body. Bill's framing came from a retired chamber of commerce CEO. Most nonprofit boards are made up of sparrows. Sparrows come to the quarterly meeting, sit through staff reports, argue about whether to spend two hundred dollars on a computer, write a thousand dollar check, and buy a seat at the gala. Most nonprofits could not operate without them. Plenty of boards also want an eagle. Someone who can write a seven-figure check. Eagles tend to hate meetings, do not care about the computer, and rarely sit through reports. Put one on your board and within a year they will often either turn into a sparrow or quit. So Bill builds his clients a separate group. Five or six people, all high capacity, meeting twice a year in each other's homes rather than at your facility, with a single agenda item. Which of our friends can we ask. I give the same advice and I get there differently. I do not want money, power, and decision-making consolidated into the same group of people. Your governing board should be the people who want to do the careful, unglamorous work of oversight, checking that nothing is going off the rails. Not the people with the biggest checkbooks, who are usually the furthest from the weeds and the least accountable for the outcome. So give the givers their own structure where giving is the actual job. Two groups, two purposes, no competition between them. This is also why the board chair and executive director relationship works better when the governance lane is clearly drawn. What a Built System Looks Like Build the plumbing first. Here that means a small number of specific things in place before anyone worries about scripts. The CEO carries a real portfolio, ten people or fewer, and treats it as a standing commitment rather than a fourth quarter push. The relational time is protected structurally, not aspirationally. Compensation is designed so that staying is financially rational. There is a revenue floor that does not depend on this year's major gift closing, which is what makes waiting affordable. And there is a group whose entire purpose is giving and opening doors, separate from the group that governs. Fully built or partially built matters enormously here. A partially built major gifts function has all the cost and none of the compounding. You are paying for the staff, the software, and the events, and you are still starting over every eighteen months. Diversifying and de-risking your revenue base is part of the same picture, which is why revenue design deserves attention before the ask does. What This Makes Possible When leaders see this clearly, the fear around major gifts usually drops several notches. The conversation stops being about whether anyone on the team is brave enough to ask a person for a million dollars and starts being about whether the organization can hold a relationship for three years without flinching. That is a design question, and design questions have answers. What can stop being so heavy is the self-blame. Chances are nobody failed at fundraising here. The organization was built with a twelve-month clock and then asked to do multi-year work, and it did roughly what that setup tends to produce. You are where you are, it is what it is. Once the structure changes, the same people, the same mission, and the same donor list start producing something entirely different, because the effort finally accumulates instead of resetting. Doing Work That Compounds This is not about asking bigger. It is about building an organization that can hold a relationship long enough for the ask to make sense. Nonprofits can raise transformational money.They can pay their fundraisers well enough to keep them.They can stop rebuilding donor relationships from scratch every eighteen months. Not by pushing harder, by building systems that hold. About the Guest Bill Crouch is the CEO of BrightDot Fundraising Advisors and has spent more than 40 years helping nonprofits transform fundraising into meaningful, lasting relationships with donors. A former college president, fundraising expert, author, and Honorary Fellow at Oxford University, Bill is the author of Mattership™: Making Donors Feel They Matter, where he shares practical strategies for building trust and inspiring generosity. Connect with Bill: Website: http://thebrightdot.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brightdot LinkedIn personal: Bill Crouch LinkedIn Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri Strategic planning gets treated like a decision you make in a quiet room, then hand down to the team. So leaders sit down to "set direction," invent something new from scratch, and spend the next year trying to force it into existence. The resource burn is real. The traction usually isn't. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why strategy is mostly discovered rather than decided, and how to tell the difference before you commit the year to it. In This Episode, You'll Learn The two sides of strategy — fixing what's already running and growing what's new — and why they need different thinking Why deciding a brand-new direction is one of the most resource-intensive moves a leader can make, and when it's actually worth it What "sprouts" look like inside your organization and out in the wider world, and how to spot them early Two strategic questions Sarah keeps coming back to (including the Dan Sullivan three-year question) Why listening — to words, data, body language, and energy — is a core strategic skill, not a soft one Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors staring at a blank strategic plan template wondering where to start • CEOs who feel like every new direction is being pushed uphill • Leadership teams heading into a planning retreat and wanting to walk in with better questions • Anyone who has ever committed to a bold new strategy and watched it stall out by Q2 More on the subject • Before you decide a new direction, list what's already emerging inside your team, your programs, and your data • Run the Dan Sullivan question with your leadership team: if we were meeting in three years and everything had gone really well, what would need to have happened? • Ask the One Thing question: what's the one thing that, if solved, would make everything else easier or unnecessary? • Treat listening as a strategic activity, not a management courtesy — put time on the calendar for it About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Top 5 Episodes Countdown Five episodes rose to the top over the last two years of this show. Trauma. Cash flow. Starting a nonprofit from scratch. Health equity. Organizational design. On the surface they have nothing in common. Underneath, all five are making the same argument, and none of them tell you to work harder. Sarah pulled the download data on the last hundred episodes and ranked them across thirty-day, ninety-day, and lifetime windows. The same five came out on top every time. In this solo episode she counts them down and reads the lines that made each one land. In This Episode, What you'll hear: Dr. Melanie Gray on why all money is not good money, and how a grant your team can't deliver on manufactures overwhelm inside your own organization The capacity nobody budgets for, and why the strain almost always lands on your admin and finance staff Neil Shah on why net income hides your real financial story, and the number to watch instead Katerina Manoff on why grants have never worked for her organization, and what funds it instead Dr. Eugene Manley's one-sentence test for whether your program is actually equity work Pierre Berastain on nonprofits as civic laboratories, and what changes when you stop operating as society's backstop Why the sector that invented hospice, domestic violence shelters, and harm reduction gets asked to justify experiments that tech companies get praised for The through-line: your culture, your reporting, your funding model, and your experience of scarcity are all design choices. Design can be changed. Every episode is linked below. Start anywhere. If you only have time for one, start with Pierre. If you're tired right now, start with Melanie. Linked Episodes Trauma Informed Leadership with Dr. Melanie Gray More Than Just Budgets: The Evolving Role of Nonprofit CFOs with Neil Shah How to Start and Run a High-Impact, Scalable Nonprofit with Katerina Manoff Leading An Equity Focused Nonprofit with Dr. Eugene Manley, Jr. Nonprofits Aren't Broken: The Design Is with Pierre Berastain About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri Most programs are built middle-out. Someone has an idea for a workshop, a curriculum, a service, and the design starts with the activities. The end result is fuzzy, the beginning state is assumed, and the middle is a stack of sessions that made sense in the moment. Then clients start drifting between steps, going quiet, and finishing without really finishing. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to design a program on purpose so it actually delivers the change it promises. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why every program design starts at the end, and how to define the exact state a client is in when they're done How to define the client's beginning state, including who is a good fit and who is not How to map the emotional journey alongside the operational steps, so anxious moments get support and energized moments get testimonials How to close the handoff gaps where clients quietly fall through the cracks Why front-loading a quick win matters more for confidence than for the outcome itself Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors and program directors redesigning a service that is not landing the way it should • Nonprofit CEOs whose programs get good feedback but weak completion or weak results • Leaders launching a new offering who want to design it right the first time • Anyone who has ever handed a client off to a colleague and watched them disappear Practical takeaways • Write the client's end state in one clean sentence before you touch the middle • Add an emotional journey layer to your program map, and name the anxious and energized moments by name • Pick one handoff in your current program this week and add a warm handoff or a redundancy so nobody falls through • Move one small, satisfying win to the very front of your program, even if it is not the logical first step About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... "Run It Like A Business" There is a quiet belief inside a lot of nonprofits that running things like a business would somehow cheapen the mission. That budgets, product thinking, and direct asks belong to the for-profit world, and that the nonprofit world runs on something purer. Heart. Passion. Care. The care is real. The problem is that heart gets asked to do a job it was never built to do. When there is no clear product, no business-grade financial forecasting, and no habit of quantifying value in dollars, people compensate with effort. They work harder. They care louder. And the organization still stalls. Running a nonprofit like a business is not the thing that threatens your mission. Avoiding it is. A version of this tension shows up almost every time I talk with a founder who built something meaningful and then hit a ceiling they cannot explain. I had a conversation recently with Barb Clapp, who built a workforce development organization from nothing into one that has trained thousands of people, and it sharpened how I think about this. The idea was not new to me. What she did was name exactly why the business lens holds up, and why the absence of it quietly breaks things. Mission Is What You Do. Method Is How You Do It. One of the most expensive confusions in the nonprofit world is treating the mission and the method as the same thing. Your mission is fixed. It is the reason you exist. Your method is everything else. How you deliver, how you fund it, how you structure the team, how you ask. The method is allowed to change. In fact it has to, or the mission gets stuck inside an approach that stopped working. I am a sailor, so forgive me, my sailing references tend to pop up. An America's Cup boat can sail several times faster than the wind pushing it. The wind does not change. The boat design does. Your mission is the wind. Your method is the boat. When leaders feel stalled, they almost always reach to protect the mission by clinging harder to the method. That gets it backwards. You honor the mission by being willing to rebuild the boat. The business lens is a method decision. It changes nothing about who you serve. It changes how much of them you can actually reach. You Have a Product, Whether You Name It or Not Here is where most organizations lose the thread before they even start. Barb said something in our conversation that I have not stopped thinking about: "People do not understand what their product is. They don't have a clear picture of what it is they're doing, why it makes a difference, and how they're going to tell a story." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. Every organization has a product and a buyer, even when it refuses to use those words. Your product is the specific change you create. Your buyer is the funder or donor who pays for that change to happen. When you cannot say clearly what your product is, everything downstream gets harder. Your messaging blurs. Your fundraising softens. Your team cannot rally around a result they cannot name. More detail does not equal more clarity here. Organizations often try to fix a fuzzy product by adding more program descriptions, more impact language, more mission poetry. That adds volume, not clarity. The fix is narrower. What is the one thing you produce, why does it matter, and who benefits enough to pay for it. Answer that and the rest of the machine has something to organize around. If you have never separated your product from your good intentions, that is worth doing before you touch anything else. I wrote more about the marketing side of this in what marketing really is and where it fits into your nonprofit . Business Values Do Not Replace Heart. They Protect It. The fear is that a business lens will crowd out the reason people came to the work. It does the opposite when it is done well. Barb put it plainly. She brought real business-based values into her nonprofit in addition to the heart-based ones. Budgets that get made and then actually followed. A strategic plan. Clear annual goals that everyone in the organization understands. Real job descriptions. None of that dilutes the caring. It gives the caring somewhere to land. At the end of the day, an organization without a real strategy cannot protect its mission for very long. A strategy is what tells you which opportunities to say yes to and which to let pass, which programs to double down on and which to sunset, where the next dollar should go and where it should not. Without one, every decision gets made in the moment, and moments add up to drift. Mission and money are not in conflict. They are mutually dependent. The money is what lets the mission keep showing up next year, and the year after that. Leaders who run everything from a heart place alone often feel like they are being noble. What they are actually doing is putting the mission at risk, because a mission with no financial floor under it is one bad quarter away from disappearing. This is one of the six things nonprofits can learn from the for-profit world , and it is the one that changes the most when a leader finally lets it in. Growth With Heart Alone Has a Ceiling You can grow a nonprofit on heart alone. You just cannot scale it that way. Growth is doing more. Scale is doing more per dollar, per person, per hour. Scale is what happens when you apply efficiency and leverage to the work, so that each resource produces a larger result than it did before. Heart gets you off the ground. It does not get you altitude. At some point, the leader who is running on care alone hits a wall, and because they care so much, the wall is deeply frustrating. Barb's organization scaled because she thought in terms of leverage from the start. She repurposed existing structures instead of rebuilding from scratch. She built revenue that funds the mission instead of chasing every dollar cold. She hired people who could own outcomes. Every one of those is a leverage decision, and leverage is a business concept that nonprofits need more than almost anyone, because the work matters more than almost anything. If you are feeling stalled right now, working harder is rarely the way out. Working differently is. That difference usually lives in structure, and structure is fixable. I made the fuller case for that in structure holds vision, the leadership system CEOs need . What Changes When You Let the Business Lens In When a leader finally stops treating business thinking as the enemy of the mission, the whole organization gets lighter. The product gets clear, so the story tells itself. The budget holds, so the panic drains out of every funding cycle. The asks get sized correctly, so the money starts matching the need. The team fits the phase you are actually in, so the turnover stops. None of this makes the work smaller. It makes the work hold. The heart is still the whole point. It finally has a structure strong enough to carry it. This isn't about caring less. It's about building something that can carry how much you care. Nonprofits can name their product. They can keep a budget. They can make the ask. Not by trading away the mission, but by giving it a business strong enough to keep it alive. About the Guest Barb Clapp is not just a leader—she is a force of transformational change. A successful entrepreneur and nationally recognized business leader, Barb has always been committed to giving a voice to the voiceless. What makes her truly inspirational is how she draws on her own experience of overcoming adversity to empower others by providing the resources, support, and solutions they need to overcome their own challenges and achieve lasting success. As CEO of the nonprofit Dwyer Workforce Development (DWD), Barb is disrupting the traditional approach to solving the healthcare workforce crisis and creating a new paradigm for healthcare workforce training. DWD Bio: Dwyer Workforce Development (DWD) is an innovative, national nonprofit with a mission to provide comprehensive support to individuals who lack opportunity and aspire to build careers in healthcare, alleviate a critical healthcare workforce shortage and improve the lives of seniors and the community at large. DWD provides CNA and GNA training and job placement support to underserved individuals and need-based wraparound services — including financial support for housing, childcare, and transportation — to eliminate barriers to success. As Scholars achieve key milestones, they become eligible for continued training and educational opportunities, creating pathways to become Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), Registered Nurses (RNs), and advance into additional roles in healthcare. Connect with Barb: https://dwyerworkforcedev.org https://www.facebook.com/dwyerworkforcedevelopment https://www.instagram.com/dwyerworkforcedev/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/dwyer-workforce-development/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

The Budget Layout Trap with Sarah Olivieri Money gets tight. The bank balance looks thin, or the bottom line slips into the red, and the first move almost everyone reaches for is the same one: cut expenses. It feels responsible. It feels like control. And when your budget lumps every expense into one big pile, it is also the fastest way to cut the very spending that was bringing money in. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why the standard budget layout quietly sets nonprofits up to make the wrong cut, and how she structures a budget so the right money stays protected. In This Episode, You'll Learn The three kinds of expenses every budget hides: revenue-generating, impact-generating, and the necessary "flushing it down the toilet" ones Why a development director is a money-making machine, not a cost, and what happens the moment you cut one The mass-firing of development directors early in the pandemic, and the losses that followed How Sarah sections a budget: direct program income and expenses, operations, then revenue-generating expenses The mindset shift from "we need to spend less" to "we need more money, so how do we get it" Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors staring at a red bottom line and reaching for the scissors • Leaders whose budgets pile every expense into one undifferentiated column • CEOs who treat fundraising salaries as overhead instead of investment • Anyone who has ever cut a cost to save money and watched revenue fall instead Practical takeaways • Pull your revenue-generating expenses out of the pile and label them clearly so they are the last thing anyone reaches to cut • Reorganize your budget into three sections: program, operations, and revenue-generating • Before cutting a revenue-generating expense, check whether it is actually generating revenue, then decide whether to shift the spending, not slash it • When money is short, ask how to put more into the money-making machine before you ask what to remove About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Trap of Being the Most Capable Person in the Room There is a particular kind of nonprofit leader who is very good at almost everything. They can build the budget. They can write the grant. They can run the intake, fix the database, cover the front desk, and close the books when the bookkeeper leaves. When something breaks, they already know how to fix it, so they do. This is where nonprofit CEO leadership capacity quietly becomes the ceiling on the entire organization. When the most capable person keeps doing the work, the organization can only grow as large as that one person's hours. Everything routes through them. Every decision waits for them. And because they are competent, nobody notices the bottleneck until the organization is straining against it. This looks like a time management problem or a delegation problem, when in fact it's a leadership design problem. Let's talk about how to fix it. A Leader Who Has Made the Shift A version of this comes up almost every time I talk with a leader who is running a good organization and running themselves into the ground to do it. I had a conversation recently with Janelle Miller Moravek, who has led a growing mental health organization since 2009. She has been the fundraiser, the strategist, the operator, and the person who learned every function the hard way. And she has arrived somewhere most leaders need to go, but don't even realize yet. She knows how much to know, and she knows when to take her hands off. Know Enough to Be Dangerous There is a level of knowledge every CEO needs about every function of their organization. Not enough to run it. Enough to tell whether it is being run well. If you know nothing about your finances, you cannot tell a good accountant from a bad one. If you know nothing about your fundraising, you cannot tell whether your development director is stuck or coasting. You do not need to do the work. You need to know enough to provide real oversight. This is the balance that trips people up. Leaders tend to land at one of two extremes. Either they know a function so well that they cannot stop doing it, or they know it so poorly that they cannot supervise it. Neither one is oversight. Oversight lives in the middle, where you know enough to be dangerous and then let go of the doing. The truth is, most leaders overshoot toward doing because doing feels productive and supervising feels like nothing. Sitting in a meeting you do not strictly need to attend, reading a book, walking through the building, thinking about what is coming in eighteen months. None of that feels like work. All of it is the work. The Most Important Job Nobody Schedules The single most valuable thing a CEO can do is figure out what is around the corner that nobody else sees yet. When you plan for that, you are ahead of everyone. When you are ahead, your organization makes a bigger impact with less scramble. I call it brain time. The problem is that brain time never makes it onto the calendar, because everything else is louder. The payroll approval, the bank call that only the CEO is allowed to make, the fire that flared up this morning. Those tasks are real, and someone has to clear them so the rest of the team can move. But they are not the job. They are the price of admission to the job. When leaders let the loud, clearable tasks crowd out the quiet, high-value thinking, the organization loses its ability to see around corners. It becomes reactive. It handles what is in front of it and gets blindsided by what was predictable all along. Leadership You Can Buy Before You Can Afford It Here is the move that changes the math for organizations in the one-to-five-million range. You can bring in leadership without adding it to your management structure. When you outsource a function to a strong fractional or contracted firm , whether that is finance, HR, IT, or billing, you are not just buying task execution. You are buying leadership. A good outsourced finance team does not wait for you to direct them. They lead you. They tell you what you are missing. They bring a level of expertise you could never afford to hire full-time and could never provide yourself. This is what lets a leadership team stay lean. Janelle runs a nearly three-million-dollar organization with a management structure of two people, herself and a deputy director, because the CFO brain, the HR strategy, the billing compliance, and the fundraising all live with expert partners outside the building. The leadership is baked in. The payroll taxes, the turnover, the recruiting, the risk of getting a specialized compliance task wrong, all of that belongs to someone whose actual job it is. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "It really hampered our growth before we outsourced." What I appreciate about this framing is that it names the mechanism. When a leader hoards functions they are not expert in, the organization does not just carry the cost of their learning curve. It carries the cost of everything that leader could have been doing instead. The growth that never happens is the most expensive line item, and it never shows up on any budget. Delegating Outcomes, Not Just Tasks There is a difference between handing someone a task and handing someone a result. Task delegation is "process this batch of invoices." Outcome delegation is "own our financial health and tell me when something is off." Most leaders get comfortable with the first and never make it to the second. So they stay busy checking work instead of free to lead. This is the shift from managing tasks to distributing outcomes and decisions across the organization. The shift usually becomes possible when the right person is in the right seat. And the right person is almost never the one with the most polished resume. It is the one with learning agility and curiosity, the one who can grow into responsibility you have not even defined yet. Hire for that, and you can eventually hand over not just the doing but the deciding. That is what frees a visionary leader to actually be one. I say this to clients constantly, and I had to learn it on myself first. For years my rule was that just because I can do something does not mean I should. I am a highly capable person. If I keep doing everything I am capable of, I will hold my own organization back, and I will not be a very happy human either. The capability is not the question. The choice about where to point it is. What Changes When You Stop Being the Doer When a leader stops being the doer, the whole organization stops waiting on one person. Decisions get made closer to the work. The team develops instead of stalling. And the leader finally has room for the thinking that only they can do. The heaviness that comes from being the answer to every question starts to lift. The work has not disappeared. It is finally sitting where it belongs. The organization stops being an extension of one person's stamina and starts being a system that can carry its own weight. That is what staying power actually looks like. It is not a heroic leader holding everything together. It is a structure built so that no single person has to. The Marathon This is not about doing less work. It is about doing the work that only you can do. Nonprofits can grow past the founder's capacity. They can build leadership they could not otherwise afford. They can run without one person anchoring every decision. Not by that person working harder. By building an organization that no longer needs them to. About the Guest Janelle Miller Moravek is a nonprofit leader & mental health advocate. She has led Youth & Family Counseling as Executive Director since 2009, driving its growth and impact across Lake County, Illinois. With a deep commitment to increasing access to mental health services, she oversees strategy, programming, and operations while fostering strong partnerships throughout the community. Janelle also plays a key leadership role in the region, serving on the board of the Lake County Alliance for Human Services and co-chairing the Lake County Behavioral Health Action Team. Her prior experience includes development roles at Carmel Catholic High School and Barat College. She holds a BA in French Studies from Wesleyan University and lives in Libertyville with her husband and three children. Connect with Janelle: Website: CounselingForAll.org/ LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/janelle-miller-moravek-903a815b/ Janelle's profile: accessspeakers.biz/speaker/janelle-miller-moravek-nonprofit-leader-mental-health-advocate/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Episode Description Most leadership books focus on the individual, their style, their skills, their presence. What rarely gets named is the leadership structure itself, the actual model your organization runs on. Sarah would argue that structure is at least half of good leadership, and without it, even a strong visionary creates whiplash instead of momentum. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why leadership structure matters, why the org chart tends to make things worse, and what a distributed, outcomes-based model looks like inside a nonprofit. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why leadership structure is at least half of leadership, and why most training skips it How visionary founders unintentionally create whiplash when the structure can't hold the pace The uncomfortable history behind the classic org chart, and why sticking with it by default is worth questioning How a distributed, outcomes-based model gives decisions to the people accountable for the outcome Why the "where we're going" seat and the "optimum speed and capacity" seat need to be held by two different people over time Who This Episode Is For • Founders and executive directors who feel like decisions are bottlenecking around them • CEOs whose teams are running to keep up with the next new direction • Boards or leadership teams sensing the current structure is holding the organization back Practical takeaways • Name the outcomes your organization needs to run well, then assign accountability for each one • Separate the visionary seat from the "optimum speed and capacity" seat before both get worn down • Picture your structure as a trellis on a moving wagon, enough support to hold the mission, not so much that nothing can grow • Question any process that only exists because "we've always used an org chart" About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Power Of Shared Infrastructure There is a quiet assumption baked into how most nonprofits operate. If you need something, you build it yourself. Need a fundraising event, plan one. Need HR, handle it in-house. Need systems, cobble them together. The nonprofit shared infrastructure that could carry all of this rarely enters the conversation, because the default is to go it alone. I understand where the instinct comes from. Nonprofits are scrappy by necessity. Budgets are tight, and doing it yourself feels like the responsible, frugal choice. But there is a hidden cost to building everything from scratch, and it shows up in the same place every time. Your team's time. Your leadership's attention. The liability nobody was watching. The event that ate six months of staff capacity to net twelve thousand dollars. When an organization tries to be its own event company, its own HR department, and its own back office all at once, it is running several businesses it never meant to start. And none of them get the focus they need to be excellent. I've been thinking about this lately I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Bob Burbridge, founder of the Battle Green Run Foundation and a longtime leader in the HR world. He built something that lets small nonprofits plug into infrastructure they could never build on their own, and that changes what is possible for them. Running An event is a business, not a fundraiser Here is the thing most nonprofits underestimate. A run, a walk, a gala, a conference. These are not fundraisers you tack onto your year. Each one is a whole business, with its own logistics, systems, vendors, permits, marketing, and expertise. Bob's foundation exists to run one road race well. Twelve board members. A website that handles all the fees. Relationships with sixty local restaurants. Decades of accumulated knowledge about how to actually pull it off. That is what it takes to do an event at a level where the numbers work. Now picture a small nonprofit deciding to launch its own 5K to raise money. Same permits. Same logistics. Same insurance. Same marketing. Except now it is being done by two staff members who already have full-time jobs, learning it all for the first time, for an event that might clear ten thousand dollars if everything goes right. The math rarely favors building your own event from zero. The work is enormous and the expertise is real, and both are invisible until you are standing in the middle of them. Before any organization takes on an event, it helps to ask a hard question. Are we prepared to run this like the business it actually is? If the honest answer is no, that is worth knowing before you commit a year of your team's life to it. Shared infrastructure changes the math This is where Bob's model gets interesting, because it solves the problem from a completely different direction. Instead of each nonprofit building its own event, one organization builds the event infrastructure once, and many nonprofits plug into it. A small nonprofit brings a team of runners. They raise money through a website that already exists, run by people who already know what they are doing, with fees already covered. When the race is over, the proceeds come to them. They got the full benefit of a professionally run event without having to become an event company to get it. He built the same thing in his professional life through the professional employer model, where small businesses pool together so they can access group health plans, HR expertise, and compliance support that no single small employer could afford alone. The logic is identical. Specialized infrastructure is expensive to build and cheap to share. When you pool it, small organizations get access to a level of capability that would otherwise be completely out of reach. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "We become a platform for these nonprofits to raise money on their own. We pay all the fees, and then when the race is over and our bills are paid, we take all that's left and share it with all the teams." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The value is not that Bob's group is generous, though they are. The value is structural. One entity absorbs the fixed cost and the expertise, and many organizations draw on it. That is leverage, and it is available far more often than nonprofits assume, if they stop defaulting to building alone. Some things should never be built in-house The same principle applies to the least glamorous part of running an organization. Human resources. Bob spent decades in the HR world, and his advice was direct. For most small nonprofits with paid staff, HR is not something to handle yourself. The regulations span fifty states and the federal government. The liability is real. And the power imbalance, when something goes wrong, is enormous. I know this one personally. Years ago I had an employee in another state and I had done everything correctly. New York State decided otherwise and started sending me fines that climbed toward thirty thousand dollars. I had to hire a lawyer. I spent many hours on paperwork. In the end I was right, I had done nothing wrong, and it still cost me thousands of dollars and a mountain of time. The lawyers on the other side had resources my small organization simply did not. Being in the right was not enough to make it painless. That is the kind of risk that lives quietly inside "we'll just handle it ourselves." HR compliance is specialized work, and specialized work is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from shared infrastructure. When it starts eating too much of your time, or when the liability is more than you can responsibly carry, that is the signal to bring in people who do it for a living. Community is the return most events forget to count There is one more piece of Bob's model worth naming, because it reframes what an event is even for. When you make an event a real community experience, the money is not the only return. The nonprofits at Bob's race network with each other. Startups learn from organizations that have been around for decades. Runners come back year after year because it feels like something, not just a transaction. The Minutemen fire a volley. A buffet from sixty restaurants. Families showing up to help. That community is an asset, and it compounds in a way a check never will. The fortune in fundraising is in the follow up, and an event that builds real relationships gives you something to follow up about. I had such a good time with you. Would you like to come tour our facility. Those conversations are where major gifts and lasting support actually come from, and they only exist if the event was built to create connection, not just to collect donations. Giving days and one-click donations have their place. But an experience people participate in creates relationships, and relationships are the quiet engine underneath every organization that fundraises well. What this makes possible When a leader sees this clearly, the pressure to build everything shifts. The question stops being how do we pull off our own event, our own HR, our own everything, and becomes what infrastructure already exists that we could plug into instead. That question opens doors. It means a small organization can access a professionally run event without becoming an event company. It means HR risk can be shared instead of shouldered alone. It means leadership attention goes to the mission, not to running four accidental businesses at once. The work does not disappear. It gets focused. And focus, applied to the few things only your organization can do, is what separates the nonprofits that thrive from the ones that stay stuck doing everything themselves. The bottom line This is not about doing less. It is about not building alone what someone has already built. Nonprofits can run excellent events. They can protect themselves from risk they cannot afford. They can grow without becoming experts at everything. Not by shouldering every function themselves, but by plugging into the infrastructure that is already there. About the Guest Bob Burbridge is a lifelong Lexington resident, community leader, and accomplished business executive with decades of service in both the nonprofit and human resources sectors. He is the founder and former CEO of Genesis HR Solutions, which he led from 1991 to 2023, growing it into one of New England's largest accredited professional employer organizations. Deeply committed to his community, Bob has held numerous leadership roles, including Chair of the Lexington Housing Assistance Board, Director of the Battlegreen Run Foundation, and founder of the Genesis Community Fund. His extensive civic involvement spans local government, youth athletics, and charitable initiatives, earning him honors such as Lexington's White Tricorne Hat Award. Throughout his career, Bob has also been a prominent figure in the HR industry, serving as President of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations and helping shape key legislation across New England. Connect with Bob: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093515606579 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/battlegreenrunfoundation/?hl=en Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Stop Using To-Do Lists Every time you look at your to-do list and ask "what should I do next," your brain drops into a small version of strategic planning. That mode burns real energy, and you do it over and over all day long. Add in the secret to-do list, the tasks you never even write down but still have to do, and the list stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a weight. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the to-do list trap and the calendar-based system she uses instead, the same one she teaches inside the Impact Method and runs her own business on. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why working from a to-do list quietly forces you back into planning mode all day, and what that costs your brain The difference between time management, which is really repeated planning, and calendar management, which is visual and fast How Sarah plans everything once every two weeks in about an hour, then treats the rest like a jigsaw puzzle with her calendar Why unfinished lists keep you from the psychological "it's done" that actually sustains you The connection between a calm nervous system and your best decision-making as a leader Who This Episode Is For Executive directors whose to-do list feels never-ending and stress-inducing Leaders who keep a "secret to-do list" of work that never officially counts Anyone who ends the day feeling behind no matter how much got done Practical takeaways Move recurring tasks off your list and into your calendar as recurring events Block one hour every two weeks to plan your projects and tasks, then stop re-deciding daily When something doesn't get done, drag it to an open block later in the week instead of re-planning Build in a daily "done" signal so you feel completion, even on the days you don't finish everything About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Episode Description Imagine a burning building with three people trapped in three rooms. You run to the first and free them halfway, then the second, then the third, then back to the first. You spend all your time running and never fully free anyone. That image is what split focus actually costs an organization, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, drawing on her years as an executive director and her work coaching organizations through it. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why context switching keeps you running from fire to fire without ever fully solving one The shortcut to prioritizing: you don't need to understand every problem before you pick the one to solve first Why team and money are the two problems that jump the line, and how to decide which comes first when you have both Where programs, technology, space, and vision fit in the order of operations, and why visioning rarely comes first The fire bucket, and the leadership habit of asking "is there a fire?" instead of "oh no, a fire" Who This Episode Is For Executive directors who inherited a hard situation and feel pulled in five directions at once Leaders meeting department by department, problem by problem, without a single clear priority Anyone whose days feel like running room to room in a burning building More on the subject Pick one priority, singular, and address it to the point that it no longer needs your focus before moving on If you have wrong-fit team members and a money problem, look at the people problem first, since it often frees the resources to fix the money Before you treat something as a fire, stop and ask whether it is actually a fire, or something you can let time and space resolve About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... $20 Million in Grants, Suddenly Gone: How One Nonprofit Survived A year ago, a single nonprofit had $20 million in federal grants on the books. Three awards from three different agencies. By every conventional measure, the funding base looked strong. Then federal priorities shifted. All three grants were eliminated. The organization went from 30 staff to 18 in a matter of months, but they are still standing. That nonprofit is From Prison Cells to PhD, and its founder, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, is the guest on this week's episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership. The story has stayed with me, and this article is where I want to go deeper on the part of it that most fundraising conversations skip. The part most people focus on is the funding loss itself. That is the dramatic surface. The part that actually explains why this organization is still standing, and rebuilding faster than most would, sits one layer underneath. Their grant portfolio was huge, but every single dollar of it was aligned to their core mission. There was no program built to chase money that drifted from what they exist to do. When the grants disappeared, what was left was a smaller version of the same organization, not the wreckage of a stretched and confused one. That is the lesson I want to draw out here. Diversified funding gets the headlines in nonprofit strategy conversations. Mission alignment gets less airtime. The truth is, neither one works without the other. An organization with five revenue streams and a sprawl of mission-drifted programs is just as fragile as an organization with one revenue stream and a tight mission. The combination matters, and the combination is what makes a nonprofit shock-resistant. Mission Creep Is The Hidden Cost Of Grants Most leaders I work with know about mission creep in the abstract. They have heard the warning. Where it actually shows up is in the language of a grant application. A funder wants outcomes the organization does not currently produce. A funder wants a population the organization does not currently serve. A funder wants a program design the organization does not currently run. The grant is large. The deadline is short. The board is anxious. The cash flow is tight. The leader makes a small adjustment to fit the application. The grant lands. A program gets built around the requirements. Six months in, the staff is running a workstream that no one in the organization is particularly proud of, but the money is keeping the lights on, so it stays. Multiply that pattern by three or four grants over five years, and the organization no longer looks like itself. The mission statement on the website has not changed, but the actual portfolio of work has drifted significantly. From the inside, leaders rarely notice. They are too close to it. The drift only becomes visible when something forces them to subtract. This is the trap. Grants do not just bring in money. They bring in shape. Every restricted grant is a small set of constraints applied to the organization. A few of those constraints, aligned to the mission, sharpen the work. A lot of them, applied without discipline, distort the work into something else. What Mission Alignment Actually Protects When From Prison Cells to PhD lost $20 million in a single year, the organization did not face the second crisis that usually follows a funding crisis. The second crisis is the realization that half of what you have been doing was never really the work you wanted to do, and now you have to dismantle programs that staff and stakeholders are emotionally attached to in addition to surviving the revenue gap. Because every grant had been mission-aligned, the response was straightforward. Smaller staff. Same work. Same scholars. Same outcomes at a smaller scale. The organization could be honest about what it was paring back without having to defend choices made to chase prior funders. There were no orphaned programs to wind down. There was no donor narrative to untangle. The proportional scale-back was clean. This is what mission alignment actually protects. It protects the speed of your response in a crisis. It protects the morale of your team. It protects your credibility with the funders you still have, because the work that survives is recognizable as the work you have always done. And it protects your ability to rebuild, because the case for support stays consistent. You are not selling a new version of yourself to new donors. You are inviting them into the version that has always been there. Diversification Is The Other Half Of The Equation A mission-aligned organization that has built only one funding pipeline is still fragile. When that pipeline cuts off, the response is still hard. The work stays clear, but the resources to do it disappear. This is where the funding cake framework comes in. I use this language with clients all the time. Major donors are the base layer of the cake. They give unrestricted. They stay for life. They refer their friends. They are insulated from political swings because their decision is personal, not policy-driven. Individual donors at lower giving levels are the next layer. Corporate sponsorships, where they fit, are another layer. Planned giving sits with the major donor layer. Grants are the icing. Icing is wonderful in the right proportion. It is also the most exposed layer of the cake. It melts under the wrong heat. Organizations that treat grants as the foundation are running a cake made of icing, and the first political shift becomes an existential event. Organizations that treat grants as one accelerant among several can lose a major grant and stay upright. From Prison Cells to PhD did not have only grants. They had foundation relationships. They had city and state partnerships. They had philanthropic supporters who had given before and gave again. The grants were significant, but they were one layer in a stack. When that layer disappeared, the stack got shorter, not flat. Why The Two Pieces Have To Move Together This is the part I want every nonprofit leader reading this to take away. Mission alignment without diversified funding is admirable but exposed. Diversified funding without mission alignment is broad but distorted. The combination is what produces an organization that can take a hit and keep going. Picture the inverse of From Prison Cells to PhD's experience. Imagine an organization that took the same $20 million in grants, but each grant required a slight pivot, a new population, a new methodology, a new geography. When the grants disappear, that organization does not just lose revenue. It loses the programs the grants were funding, programs that were never quite the work the organization exists to do, programs that other funders will not back because they do not fit the brand of the organization either. The rebuild from that position takes years. The rebuild from From Prison Cells to PhD's position takes months, because the foundation underneath was always intact. Mentorship was another thread that came up in the conversation, and it deserves a mention here. Dr. Andrisse's own story turns on a mentor who saw a capacity in him that nothing in his environment was reinforcing. That same posture, applied at the program level, is part of what makes the organization's work effective. It is not separate from the funding story. The organizations that hold their mission tight enough to attract long-term funders tend to be the same organizations that hold their participants tight enough to produce real outcomes. Identity discipline at the leader level shows up as program discipline at the participant level and as funding discipline at the development level. It is the same muscle. What This Means For Your Next Grant Decision The practical implication is uncomfortable, because it asks leaders to leave money on the table sometimes. When a grant application asks you to describe work you do not actually do, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires a population shift or a methodology shift that pulls you off your core, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires you to invent a program to fit the funder's interests, the right answer is almost always no. The leaders who get this right tend to share a habit. Before applying for any significant grant, they ask one question. If this funder disappeared tomorrow, would this program still belong inside our organization? If the answer is yes, the grant is aligned. The work compounds. The grant lands and strengthens the organization. If the answer is no, the grant is a trap dressed up as a windfall. The work distorts. The grant lands and weakens the organization's center. This discipline is hard in the moment. The deadline is short. The cash flow is tight. The board wants the win. The discipline is also what produces the From Prison Cells to PhD outcome instead of the cautionary tale outcome. What Becomes Possible When mission is the filter and funding is the stack, the leader stops running the organization in reactive mode. There is room to say no to grants that distort the program. There is room to build the slower, deeper donor relationships that produce unrestricted gifts. There is room to develop staff into leadership rather than burning them out chasing the next application. There is room to take a $20 million loss and still be standing, smaller, but recognizable, and ready to rebuild on the same foundation that has always been there. The work is still hard. The mission is still complex. The world is still unpredictable. What changes is that the organization is no longer fragile. It can take a hit. It can take three hits. It can keep going. This isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that compounds. Nonprofits can survive losses that would close other organizations. They can rebuild faster than seems possible. They can stay recognizable to themselves through hard seasons. Not by pushing harder, but by holding the mission steady and building the stack underneath it. About the Guest Dr. Stanley Andrisse is an endocrinologist, scientist and assistant professor at Howard University College of Medicine is researching type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. Dr. Andrisse is a visiting faculty at Georgetown University Medical Center, held a visiting faculty position at Imperial College London, and held an adjunct professorship at Johns Hopkins Medicine after completing his postdoctoral training. Dr. Andrisse completed his PhD at Saint Louis University and his MBA and bachelor's degree at Lindenwood University, where he played three years of collegiate football. Dr. Andrisse's service commitments include: Executive Director and Founder of From Prison Cells to PhD, Vice President of the board for the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, board member on The Endocrine Society, past president of the Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Association, founder of the Diversity Postdoctoral Alliance, member of several local and national committees, motivational speaker, and community activist. Connect with Stanley: Breaking Chains, Building Futures: Pathways to Redemption, Education, and Excellence — Amazon link Facebook: @Prof.Andrisse Instagram: @dr_andrisse LinkedIn: Dr. Stanley Andrisse X (Twitter): @Dr_Andrisse From Prison Cells to PhD (P2P) Website: www.fromprisoncellstophd.org Facebook: @fromprisoncellstophd Instagram: @prison2pro LinkedIn: From Prison Cells to PhD X (Twitter): @prison2pro TikTok: @prison2pro YouTube: From Prison Cells to PhD Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .