Keith Greer

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...

There’s a moment I hear about again and again from fundraisers. It usually happens somewhere between the third and fourth episode of this podcast. Something shifts. You stop asking “is this even relevant to me?” and start asking “okay, but how would this actually work in my portfolio?” That’s the move from theoretical to possible, and it matters. But almost immediately after that moment, something else shows up. A different kind of voice. It sounds a little something like this: I’ve never...

About six or seven months into my first dedicated major gift role, I started to panic. Not loudly. Nobody around me could see it. On the outside, everything probably looked just fine. I was showing up, doing the work, having meetings, moving things forward on paper. But internally, it was a different story. Nothing was closing. Not one major gift. And one day I sat at my desk, looked at my portfolio, thought about all the activity I had generated over the past several months, and realized I...