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The Nonprofit Show is the nation’s daily broadcast for the business side of nonprofits — bringing you practical insights, expert interviews, and real-world strategies to help your organization run smarter, lead stronger, and fund better.
Each weekday, our co-hosts and guests break down the most current topics in fundraising, board governance, leadership, staffing, technology, communications, and financial strategy — giving nonprofit professionals the tools they need to build sustainable, high-performing organizations.
With more than 1,400 episodes and growing, our on-demand library is a trusted resource for executive directors, team members, fundraisers, board members, and sector leaders who are ready to move beyond inspiration and into implementation.
🎥 Watch the daily show on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3A0Dqlw
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how nonprofits set goals that actually move revenue, relationships, and results. They start with the metric many teams avoid because it can be a rude awakening: donor retention. Tony walks through a simple way to calculate it, then connects the number to what leaders feel every day, time and budget pressure. His reminder lands like a CFO truth bomb: “The data doesn’t lie.” If your team assumes things are fine because a few familiar names show up at events, this episode brings you back to real...
Year-end doesn’t “arrive” in nonprofits so much as it ambushes us. And that’s exactly why this conversation with John Tiso, VP of Revenue and Service Delivery at JMT Consulting, and Buu Lình Tran, SVP of Financial Solutions at JMT Consulting, feels like a shot of espresso for your finance, accounting, and operations leadership. Host Julia C. Patrick frames the real business challenge: you’re not only closing the books you’re leading humans through a high-pressure stretch where accuracy, speed...
Starting a nonprofit is often treated like a simple administrative step: fill out a few forms, wait a bit, and you’re off to the races. But in this episode, Julia C. Patrick and cohost Ellie Hume sit down with Christian LeFer, CEO of Instant Nonprofit, to talk about what it really takes to launch—and sustain—a mission-driven organization with business discipline. Christian shares how many founders arrive at the nonprofit moment almost accidentally: the garage is full of dog crates, the commun...
Consistency is not glamorous, but it’s the engine that keeps a nonprofit’s business model running when the calendar flips and the pressure spikes. In this conversation with Matt Glazer, Founder and CEO of Blue Sky Partners (Austin-based, national reach), we talk about building consistent engagement without burning out your team or betting the whole year on a Q4 miracle. Matt brings a practical operator’s lens: simplify what repeats, template what you can, and stop trying to cram “97 thi...
Founder syndrome gets tossed around like a diagnosis, but this conversation reframes it as a leadership and governance challenge that shows up in real nonprofit operations: decision rights, communication, accountability, and the organization’s ability to scale beyond one person’s willpower. Guest Brittan Stockert (Donorbox) opens by rejecting the blame-heavy tone of the phrase and naming the real risk: “Founder syndrome is really when… you treat your nonprofit as if it’s yours personally… as ...
Fundraisers Friday is back, and Julia C. Patrick and Tony Beall (Mr. Nonprofit Consultancy) tackle a topic that quietly runs the business side of fundraising: donor tier levels. If you’ve ever stared at your donor list and wondered, “Where do we start, and how do we keep this manageable?” this episode is your playbook. They begin with the “why.” Tony frames donor tiers as a practical operating system, not a fancy fundraising accessory. Done well, tiers let you personalize messaging and protec...
Finishing the year “strong” is not just a slogan for nonprofit leaders; it’s a finance and operations project. Regional Director Ellie Hume from Your Part-Time Controller walks through five concrete steps to wrap up the year with fewer surprises and more control. She starts with yearend giving appeals. Too many organizations accidentally lock donations into narrow buckets by saying things like “your gift will buy two backpacks.” Donors then reasonably assume their dollars can only be used for...
Around the world, women and girls walk long distances every day to fetch water, losing education, income, and safety in the process. On this global episode of The Nonprofit Show, we welcome Shilpa Alva, founder and executive director of Surge for Water, beaming in late at night from Samarkand, Uzbekistan. From the first moments, Shilpa reframes water as a gendered economic issue, not just an infrastructure problem. As Shilpa puts it, “The water crisis is a woman’s crisis” — and it is also a p...
Donor retention is not just a feel good metric it is one of the most powerful levers in the business model of a nonprofit. We sit down with Kirsten Wantland, Principal Industry Strategist at Bloomerang, to explore how organizations can move beyond fear and confusion and actually use retention data to protect revenue and grow lifetime value. Kirsten begins by explaining her new role at Bloomerang, serving as a bridge between fundraisers in the field and the engineering and product teams. She b...
Labor myth buster Dana Scurlock, Director of Recruitment at Staffing Boutique, reframes temporary staffing as a sophisticated business tool for nonprofit leaders—not a last-resort move when things are on fire. Dana steps in to show how strategic temp and temp-to-perm staffing can stabilize teams, protect budgets, and protect sanity. She starts with a fundamental question: how many staffing firms does a nonprofit really need? From organizations that have never used an agency to those calling t...
In this thoughtful Fundraisers Friday conversation, cohosts Julia C. Patrick and Tony Beall take viewers inside one of the most persistent tensions in fundraising: the distinction between donor appeals and donor relationships. Using real experiences, honest stories, and decades of shared sector knowledge, they walk through why these two ideas are often treated as opposites—when in reality, they function best in tandem. Their convo opens with warmth and camaraderie, quickly shifting into a sub...
A valuable and thought-provoking conversation with Carrie Wright, consultant and coach at Wright Consulting. Joined by cohosts Julia C. Patrick and Wendy F. Adams, Carrie guides leaders toward a more thoughtful, rigorous, and human-centered approach to nonprofit organizational performance. Rather than rushing into resolutions and planning cycles, Carrie urges leaders to adopt a practice of year-end reflection—an intentional look backward before charting the year ahead. As she states, “There’s...
Rethinking nonprofit success usually begins with new metrics or another training calendar. In this conversation, educator and learning strategist Nancy Bacon of Nancy Bacon Consulting proposes something far more disruptive: stop confusing information with action. Drawing on adult learning research and decades inside associations, state agencies, and community organizations, she challenges the sector’s default response to problems—more workshops, more webinars, more content. Nancy names the un...
Nonprofits love to talk about growth. New markets, new programs, new grants, new everything. But our guest, Aila Malik, founder of Venture Leadership Collective, flips the script and asks the question most boards and executives skip: Have you actually earned the right to scale up? Coming out of Silicon Valley’s “grow or die” mindset, Aila warns that scaling is not a badge of honor—it’s a high-risk move that can quietly hollow out your organization if your foundation is shaky. She walks throug...
Interim leadership is no longer just a stopgap in the executive director’s seat—it’s becoming a strategic engine for sustainable fundraising. Joan Brown, Chief Operating Officer at Interim Executives Academy, and David M. Nicole, CFRE, founder of Headwinds Consulting, share why interim development leadership may be one of the most underused tools in the nonprofit sector. Together, Joan and David contrast short-term revenue fantasies with the realistic, process-based nature of fundraisin...
What happens when a kid who scribbles “play soccer at Ohio State” in kindergarten actually does it—and then decides his story shouldn’t be the exception? That question sits at the center of this episode with Channing Chasten, professional athlete and founder of The One Percent Kid Foundation. From the start, Channing describes a childhood shaped by two steady forces: the soccer pitch and a mother who refused to let academics trail behind. Homework came first, the ball came second. Years later...
Year-end generosity is a perfect storm for cybercrime—and most nonprofits don’t see the danger until after the damage is done. We talk with Alex Brown, Director of Business Development at Richey May, about why the busiest time of your fundraising year is also one of the most hazardous for your systems, donors, and reputation. Alex explains how attackers watch for holiday chaos: staff on vacation, rushed year-end gifts, last-minute tax receipts, and overloaded inboxes. “Attackers know you’re n...
Grant writers and fundraisers share the same mission, but often work in different corners of the building—and sometimes entirely different worlds. In this Fundraisers Friday convo, cohosts Julia C. Patrick and Tony Beall peel back the curtain on how these two roles can move from quiet coexistence to true collaboration. Julia opens with gratitude—for long standing sponsors who have never tried to steer the show’s content, and for a sector that now offers far more professional development than ...
Tech, data, and generosity are not abstract buzzwords—they’re concrete levers that can stabilize funding, expand impact, and re-energize exhausted fundraisers. Chief Fundraising Officer Kimberly O’Donnell of Bonterra joins us to map out how recurring giving, trust-based philanthropy, and AI-powered tools can move the entire sector from scarcity thinking into a new “generosity generation.” Kimberly starts by reframing recurring giving as non-negotiable infrastructure, not a nice-to-have tactic...
Donor love is measurable, and in this lively discussion, guest Lynne Wester, Principal and Founder of Donor Relations Group, brings the receipts. Drawing on data from her seventh global donor relations survey, conducted every two years since 2013 with more than 1,000 participants, Lynne shows us why retention, not the next big campaign, is where the real money is. Her core message is blunt and refreshing: we obsess over the ask even though it represents a tiny slice of our contact with suppor...
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