Keith Greer

The return from a major fundraising conference follows a predictable arc. You come home fired up, pages of notes, a list of things you want to change. Two weeks later, the session handouts are buried under grant reports, and you are doing exactly what you were doing before you left. This is not a you problem. It is a structure problem, and it is fixable. In this post, I'm sharing the framework I taught at AFP Icon in San Diego, along with what I actually observed in the AI sessions there and...

Most major gift officers who have been paying attention already understand, at some level, that AI belongs somewhere in this work. They have seen what it can do. They have experimented. Some have gotten genuinely useful results. What most of them do not have is a system that is actually integrated into how they work, week after week, inside a real portfolio. This post is about the gap between those two things, what creates it, and what it costs to leave it open. At the beginning of my...

There is a specific kind of quiet that happens right after a donor meeting ends. You’ve wrapped up the conversation, shaken hands, maybe walked them to the lobby or out to the parking lot. And then you’re back in your car with the engine off and your notebook on the passenger seat. You sit there for a moment, trying to get a read on what just happened. Not bad, necessarily. The donor was warm. The conversation flowed. You covered a lot of ground. But now, sitting there, you’re realizing...