Hi!
I'm Keith
I help nonprofits bring in the big bucks and figure out AI.
Most people teaching fundraisers about AI have never actually done the raising.
I have. For 15 years, before I taught anyone anything.
You're at a conference, listening to another "AI expert" tell you why you need to figure this out. You already know why. What you need is someone to show you how.
That's exactly what one of my first newsletter subscribers told me. She'd sat through session after session on AI in fundraising, all urgency and no path forward, theory dressed up as expertise, important sounding and completely unhelpful. She signed up for my Major Gift AI System anyway, hoping for something different, and later told me it was the first time anyone had shown her how instead of just telling her why.
I hear versions of that 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.
I figured it out on my own, because I needed to, 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 behind me. I just had a job to do, and I kept asking myself, is there a smarter way to do this.
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, rebuilt major gift pipelines after years of neglect, and completed comprehensive campaigns in organizations where the most sophisticated fundraising before I showed up was a checkbox on a membership dues form. And I did all of it in lean shops, in hard economies, in a global pandemic, on an active volcano. 🌋
(More on the volcano in a moment.)
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, and 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.
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 a $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 small school at a university within 28 months, after two years of no major gift activity
Where most fundraising AI advice falls apart.
Most shops adopting AI right now are running it as a free for all. No security protocols, no policy on what's safe to put into a tool, no training for the people actually using it, no one approving which tools get used, and work going out the door without anyone checking it or telling the donor it was AI generated in the first place. That adds up to a real accountability problem, work that gets worse instead of better without anyone catching it, and a team whose skills start to erode because the thinking got handed off exactly where their judgment mattered most.
That's the part most AI advice skips. It's the part I actually teach.
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, and that hasn't left me.
Back in 2005, when I was working at EPCOT Guest Relations
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.
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.
Me and my coworker, Lani, in Hawaii
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.
Want to go deeper?
If you're ready to talk about what this could look like for your team, book a call with me and let's dig into it directly.
My newsletter is where the real conversation happens if you'd rather get to know me first. 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.