I'm Keith
Hi!
I help nonprofits figure out AI.
She was sitting in a conference, listening to another AI expert tell her why she needed to figure this out.
She already new why...
What she needed was someone to show her how.
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She found my email that day, signed up for my course, and later told me she'd been frustrated for months by speakers and consultants who filled rooms with urgency about AI and then left fundraisers with nothing actionable to take back to their desks. Theory dressed up as expertise. Important-sounding, and completely unhelpful.
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I hear this constantly. And I get it, because I lived on the other side of that frustration for a long time.
I'm a fundraiser who figured out AI the way most of us figure things out.
On my own. Because I needed it. Because I was doing the actual work and wanted tools that would make that work better, faster, and more confident. Not because I had a tech background or a research budget or a team. Because I had a job to do and I kept asking myself, "there has to be a smarter way to do this."
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I spent 15 years as a frontline fundraiser, the kind who inherits programs that need turning around and organizations that have never really done this before. I've started annual giving programs from scratch. I've completed comprehensive campaigns in organizations where the most sophisticated fundraising previously was a checkbox on a membership dues form. I've rebuilt major gift pipelines after years of neglect. I've done all of this in lean shops, in hard economies, in a global pandemic, on an active volcano.
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(More on the volcano in a moment.)
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The AI tools I teach are the ones I built for myself when I was still doing that work. I wasn't preparing a curriculum. I was trying to write better appeals, think more clearly about donor strategy, and stop feeling like I was always a step behind, or doing it all on my own. When those tools started working, I started sharing them. That's the whole story.
"Your newsletters make me feel very seen as a fundraiser."
That message lands in my inbox more than any other. It's the thing I'm most proud of.
The numbers, since you're probably wondering.
I know the credential conversation feels complicated in this field, especially when you're comparing yourself to consultants who claim credit for nine-figure campaigns. My experience is different. I was the person doing the work, not advising on it. Here's what that looked like.
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I also hold my CFRE, which means I've met the field's standard for professional knowledge and ethical practice. And I earned it the way most CFREs do: by doing the job long enough and well enough that the credential actually means something.
$350K → $800K
Annual giving growth over 4 years at a performing arts center, starting in 2008 when the Great Recession began
$4.2M
Comprehensive campaign completed and exceeded $3M goal, for an organization that had never run one
$150K → $600K
Annual giving built from the ground up in hospice, during a pandemic that wiped out $350K in event revenue
$4.5M
Raised for a university within 28 months, after two years of no major gift activity
A few things people always want to know.
The Disney chapter. Before fundraising, I was a trainer at Walt Disney World. For about the first decade of my nonprofit career, that one line on my resume got me more interviews than anything else. Every CEO wanted someone with Disney training, and for good reason. Disney takes the craft of delivering an experience, and delivering it consistently, more seriously than almost any organization I've ever encountered. I learned how to teach there. How to make complex things feel accessible and even delightful. That hasn't left me.
The Hawaii chapter. As a little kid I lived in Lahaina, on Maui, where my parents opened an art gallery. Some of my earliest memories are from that beach where we were in the last set of houses before it turned into sugar cane fields. Years later, in 2017, I moved back, this time to the Big Island, looking for the version of Hawaii I remembered from childhood. I found it in the Puna district, in a neighborhood cut off from the rest of the world and bordered by forest reserves.
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In 2018, Kilauea erupted. I watched it from my lanai.
I'm now back in Santa Fe, New Mexico, close to where I grew up, in Taos, after that early Hawaii chapter. It turns out the places that shape you have a way of calling you home.
The Apple chapter. Between Disney and fundraising, I spent time at Apple, which layered another kind of training onto the Disney foundation: how to talk about complex, unfamiliar technology in a way that makes people feel capable rather than overwhelmed. I didn't realize until much later how directly that would apply to what I do now.
Join fundraisers who finally feel seen.
My newsletter is where the real conversation happens. Practical thinking, honest takes, and actual implementation guidance from a fundraiser who's been where you are. No theory without a path forward. And if something resonates, or you have a question, just hit reply. I read every response that comes in.
Are you a conference organizer or association leader? You're in the right place to get a sense of who I am, but the details on my speaking work, keynotes, and session topics live at keithgreer.me. I'd love to connect there.