Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Inspired Nonprofit Leadership
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 459: What to Ask Before AI Touches Your Data with Sam Fankuchen | 01 Oct 2026 | 00:41:13 | |
Show Notes Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations. Sarah shares this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps her stay connected, and ways to give people something to look forward to together. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Thank you to Donorbox for sponsoring Inspired Nonprofit Leadership and supporting these conversations. In this episode, Maria and Sarah discuss giving donors control over their recurring gifts. Follow Donorbox on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. | |||
| 458: A Simple Follow-Up Process for Major Gifts with Sarah Olivieri | 28 Sep 2026 | 00:13:38 | |
Episode Description Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations. Sarah walks through this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps her stay connected, and ways to give people something to look forward to together. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Links Website: saraholivieri.com Substack: Sarah Olivieri's Substack publication Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter: weekly tips, resources, and updates on training opportunities. Thank you to DonorboxThank you to our sponsor, Donorbox, for supporting Inspired Nonprofit Leadership. We appreciate your support for the show and the nonprofit leaders who listen. | |||
| 457: Why Ethical Storytelling Raises More Money with Maria A. Bryan | 24 Sep 2026 | 00:45:00 | |
A fundraising story asks people to care and act. How you gather and share that story matters to the person who lived it, the audience hearing it, and the donor relationships you hope to build. Sarah invited Maria A Bryan, a trauma-informed storytelling trainer who helps nonprofits tell difficult stories while protecting the people involved, to unpack how consent, safety, and choice belong in fundraising. They discuss asking for stories without pressure, preparing audiences for difficult content, and building donor relationships around shared impact rather than guilt. Who it's for
Thank you to Donorbox for sponsoring Inspired Nonprofit Leadership and supporting these conversations. In this episode, Maria and Sarah discuss giving donors control over their recurring gifts. Follow Donorbox on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. | |||
| 456: When Preparing for a Meeting is NOT Helpful with Sarah Olivieri | 21 Sep 2026 | 00:11:17 | |
Show Notes Arriving at a team meeting with a solution already worked out can feel like you're helping everyone get ahead. When the work needs several people's perspectives, leaving the solution open gives the team a chance to develop something together that none of them could have created alone. Sarah discusses when preparing a solution before a meeting can get in the way of collaboration, drawing on her experience helping teams create something new together. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Nonprofit leaders who want more people on their team taking initiative. • Teams who want meetings that draw on everyone's ideas and experience. • Executive directors who want to share the responsibility for moving their organization forward. • Leadership teams who want to develop solutions they couldn't create on their own. About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Join the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly tips and inspiration for leading your nonprofit. Resources mentioned: • Apply to talk with Sarah about working together • Explore ways to work with Sarah • Email Sarah about your experience Connect with Sarah: Thank you to our sponsor Donorbox. More than a suite of helpful fundraising tools, Donorbox is a partner that helps you raise more money and supports you in retaining your donors. | |||
| 455: Make Trust Tangible with Kim Bohr | 17 Sep 2026 | 00:38:44 | |
Episode Description Trust can be measured. It grows through honest communication and fair treatment, and it can break when leaders mishandle change. Sarah invited Kim Bohr, President and CEO of SparkEffect, whose annual research tracks organizational trust across the US, to discuss what builds trust, what breaks it, and how leaders can protect it through disruption. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors leading teams exhausted by constant change • Leaders bringing in AI while staff fear for their jobs • Anyone avoiding a hard conversation with a wrong-fit staff or board member • CEOs hearing "we have a communication problem" without finding the cause About the GuestKim Bohr is the President and Chief Executive Officer of SparkEffect, where she helps executive teams navigate change while building trust and strong organizational performance. With more than 25 years of leadership experience, she's a board advisor, speaker, podcast host, and author who specializes in helping leaders build resilient organizations during times of disruption. Connect with Kim: Resources mentioned: Sarah Olivieri: Thank you to our sponsor, Donorbox. More than a suite of helpful fundraising tools, Donorbox is a partner that helps you raise more money and supports you in retaining your donors. | |||
| 454: Planned Giving Made Simple with Tony Martignetti | 09 Sep 2026 | 00:33:50 | |
Show Notes Planned giving often lands on the someday list right beside the wealth screen a nonprofit can't yet afford. Tony Martignetti says you can launch it this week with one honest conversation about a gift in a will. No campaign, no brochure, no page. Sarah sat with Tony Martignetti, a front-line planned giving fundraiser since 1997 and author of the new book Planned Giving Accelerated, to discuss how a small or mid-size nonprofit launches planned giving in a single week, without a wealth screen or a legal background. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors who have been told that planned giving belongs to hospitals and universities Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving. In September, he publishes his book, Planned Giving Accelerated, to help small- and mid-size nonprofits launch by making Planned Giving fundraising easy, accessible and affordable. Pre-orders are at PlannedGivingAccelerated.com. He started as a front-line Planned Giving fundraiser in 1997 and kicked off his consulting in 2003. He's active on LinkedIn and would be honored to connect. Tony is a lawyer, but he doesn't talk like one. Instead, he weaves in his stand-up comedy and improv past to bring Planned Giving within reach for small- and mid-size nonprofits. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience, Tony shows how organizations can launch in just one week, starting with bequests. The book covers how to identify your best prospects, build donor relationships, overcome common planned giving myths, and create a sustainable program without a huge budget or specialized legal expertise. Connect with Tony:
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| 453: Are You Playing Leadership Whack-A-Mole with Sarah Olivieri | 07 Sep 2026 | 00:21:12 | |
Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat strategy, operations, and team as three separate pillars in their organization, but in fact, they are part of one integrated system. In this episode, Sarah goes into strategy, operations, and team as the who, what, where, when, and how of running a great nonprofit. She shares how these are built into her Impact Method®, which she developed back in 2017. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors whose weeks feel like one long game of Whack-A-Mole Join the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly tips and inspiration for leading your nonprofit: https://www.inspirednonprofitleadership.com/ Resources mentioned: Work with Sarah (short application, for teams of three or more leaders): saraholivieri.com/application Sarah Olivieri: Links Website: saraholivieri.com Thank you to our sponsor, Donorbox. More than a suite of helpful fundraising tools, Donorbox is a partner that helps you raise more money and supports you in retaining your donors. | |||
| 452: Why Your Former Employees Still Matter with Steve Cadigan | 03 Sep 2026 | 00:37:33 | |
Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat turnover as a problem to solve after someone resigns. The organizations that handle it well plan for it before the hire, in how the job itself is designed. Sarah invited Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer and the person who grew the company from 400 people to 4,000 while the median tenure on his own staff was nine months, to talk about how to build an organization that works when people come and go, and how to stay connected to the good ones after they leave. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors who just lost someone they were counting on Steve Cadigan is a globally recognized talent strategist, culture architect, and author with over 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth and transformation. As LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer, Steve helped scale the company from 400 to 4,000 employees, building a culture that set the standard for tech companies worldwide. Today, through his firm Cadigan Talent Ventures, he advises high-growth companies, venture firms, and global leaders on how to win the talent war, design future-ready workplaces, and use culture as a competitive edge. He's a sought-after keynote speaker and the author of Workquake, a #1 Amazon bestseller that reimagines how we work in a post-pandemic world. Steve's insights have been featured in outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg, and his work has been the focus of business school case studies Connect with Steve:
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 451: How to Build a Simple Nonprofit Marketing Strategy with Sarah Olivieri | 31 Aug 2026 | 00:18:14 | |
Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders pick a marketing tactic first- a gala, a Facebook fundraiser, a social media takeover, and then hope it works. The organizations that get a real return pick the goal first and let the goal decide the tactic. Sarah goes solo to work through how to build a marketing strategy simple enough to fit on one page, drawing on the years she spent running a marketing agency for nonprofits. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Why picking a tactic before a goal is where the money goes Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 450: Hiring Is Your Culture with Crystal FitzSimons | 27 Aug 2026 | 00:31:24 | |
Show Notes: Most nonprofit leaders treat retention as a problem to fix after the hire. The organizations that keep people for decades treat it as something they build into the hire itself. Sarah invited Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center and someone who has been at FRAC for twenty-four years leading a team where staff routinely stay ten, twenty, and even forty years, to unpack what actually holds people in a nonprofit for the long term. This episode is for:
What you'll hear:
Crystal has been at FRAC for twenty-four years and just stepped into the president role. Her chief government affairs officer recently celebrated forty years with the organization. This is what genuine longevity looks like, and it is not luck. Related Links:Sign up for the The Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter Connect with Crystal on LinkedIn Check out the good work FARC is doing ❤️ And a big thank you to our caring sponsor Donorbox | |||
| 449: Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri | 24 Aug 2026 | 00:14:25 | |
Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri The thought shows up quietly and then keeps coming back. Maybe this person is not right for us. Then it sits there for months while you look for more evidence and rehearse a conversation you never have. Meanwhile the person you are worried about is stuck in a job that is grinding on them too. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to know when it is time to let someone go, and how to do it in a way that leaves everyone intact. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Leaders who have been carrying the same thought about the same person since spring • CEOs who keep reshuffling a role hoping it will fix a fit problem • Anyone who has avoided a hard conversation because they were afraid of how the person would react Practical takeaways• Run the two-category check. Is this about the team and your guiding principles, or is this about the role • Check your state's employment laws before you plan anything else • Have the clear conversation first. To be clear is to be kind, and simple, explicit, unjudgmental language is the whole skill • Decide your boundaries before you walk in. Last day, terms, severance, what is flexible and what is not • Do not surprise people with money. Be as generous as the timeline allows • Leave room to ask them what would make this transition feel best About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 448: Distributed Leadership That Actually Works with Jocelyn Wyatt | 20 Aug 2026 | 00:32:03 | |
Show Notes Most nonprofit leaders already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've said it out loud in meetings and retreats. They want more decisions happening close to the work. Then a year later, they're still the bottleneck. Sarah sat down with Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight and co-founder of ideo.org, to unpack why distributed leadership stalls inside organizations that say they want it, and what it actually takes to make it real across a global team of over two thousand humanitarians. Here's what you'll hear:
If this conversation sparked something, the thinking goes further. Sarah wrote a full reflection on why distributed leadership fails when it's announced instead of designed, and what actually makes it work. Read it here: [Why Distributed Leadership Fails (And What Actually Makes It Work)]. It's a standalone read, built for leaders who want to go deeper than the episode alone. Press play, and then read the article. | |||
| 447: Take The Full Hour with Sarah Olivieri | 17 Aug 2026 | 00:07:12 | |
Lunch Is Leadership with Sarah Olivieri Lunch is the first thing to go. The calendar fills up, something has to give, and the hour in the middle of the day is the one that looks optional. Skip it enough times and you start making your biggest decisions of the week on an empty tank. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why lunch is a leadership decision, and exactly how to get it back on your calendar and keep it there. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Leaders eating at the desk with one hand on the keyboard • CEOs whose afternoons feel foggier than their mornings and cannot figure out why • Leaders who want their team to stop working through lunch but have never modeled it themselves • Anyone who has told themselves that skipping lunch buys them more time Practical takeaways• Open your calendar today and create a recurring lunch block. Noon, one, eleven, whatever time you actually want to eat • Do not overthink the placement. Check it once a week, move it when it collides with something, and let it settle into a consistent time • Aim for the full hour. Sarah often splits hers, half an hour to eat and half an hour to do whatever she wants • Tell your team you are taking it, so the permission travels • Book one lunch this month with a person whose relationship matters to your organization About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human…
Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 446: Build Fundraising That Compounds with Bill Crouch | 13 Aug 2026 | 00:41:22 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Is Your Budget Killing Your Major Gifts Program?Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall. They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves. So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask. Here's what I often find when I see an organization trying to do major gifts but struggling. They're actually operating with systems and processes that work against major gifts. Systems like:
Relationships operate on systems as well, but these are not the systems that relationships run on. When the wrong systems are in place, people rarely call out the system. They compensate with effort instead. In fundraising, that effort goes into activity that can be measured this quarter. Events. Appeals. Data entry. All of it visible, all of it defensible, and very little of it building the thing that tends to produce seven-figure gifts. A version of this came up on almost every strategy call I had this spring, which is why I was glad to sit down with Bill Crouch and talk it through. Bill has spent more than forty years inside this work, first as a college president raising private money in the shadow of a state flagship, now advising nonprofits nationally. He has lived this work and he has taught it, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. What the conversation gave me was not a new idea. It was a sharper explanation of why the patient approach holds up and why so few organizations are structured to survive the wait. The Annual Budget Is the Clock Everything Else Runs OnStart with the operating budget, because everything downstream inherits its timeline. A relationship with a high capacity donor takes eighteen months. Sometimes three years. Bill spent eighteen months getting the first million dollar commitment for a giving group at his own college. Six weeks after that, he had five more, because the first person made calls to friends. Eighteen months of nothing, then five gifts in six weeks. Now put that curve inside an organization that closes its books every twelve months and asks the development office what it brought in. The gap is rarely a matter of discipline. The organization has committed to a reporting cycle that cannot see the work until it is already finished. So the work does not get funded, does not get protected on anyone's calendar, and does not survive the first cash flow scare in month seven. I write and talk a lot about how the layout of your budget shapes the decisions you make, and this is the most expensive version of that. A twelve-month frame makes long horizon relationship work look like underperformance. Then leaders respond to the number in front of them, which is the only responsible thing to do with the information the system gives them. The Desk Always WinsBill described development work as needing two different capabilities. The technical side, sitting in the office getting things done. And the relational side, out in the world with people. Two skill sets, often two different humans. In a small shop, one person holds both. Ask that person what they did last week and you will hear about the database, the appeal, the grant report, the reconciliation. Not the coffee that took ninety minutes and produced no measurable outcome. The desk wins because the desk has deadlines. The relationship has none. This is a design flaw with a simple mechanism. Every task in the office has a due date attached to it and a visible consequence for missing it. Relationship building has neither. Give one person both jobs and the work with a deadline tends to consume the work without one, week after week, however much that person believes in the relational side. Which means the fix is structural. Protect the time in a way the person cannot trade away, or separate the roles. Telling someone to prioritize relationships more is asking them to out-discipline their own job description. The Mechanism, NamedOne line from that conversation has stayed with me: "That forces nonprofits to make short-term decisions that hurt long-term strategies." What I appreciate about this framing is that it locates the problem in the design rather than in the people executing it. The short-term decision is the rational one given the reporting cycle. Change the cycle, or build a revenue floor that takes the pressure off it, and the same team will often behave differently. Not much had to change in anyone's character. The structure stopped charging them for patience. Turnover Is What the Design ProducesForty years ago, the number one problem in nonprofit fundraising was development staff turnover. It is still the number one problem. Bill named four causes, and the timeline inside them is the part worth sitting with. It takes about sixteen months for the wrong hire to realize they do not want this job. It takes the supervisor about sixteen months to accept the same thing. So roughly a year and a half of relationship equity walks out the door, and the next person starts from zero with donors who have now been handed off twice. Run that loop three times and you have a decade of fundraising with no compounding whatsoever. The organization has been paying for major gifts capacity the entire time and never accumulating any. And the third cause Bill listed is the one nonprofits could fix tomorrow. The only way to get a meaningful raise in this field is to leave. We hand out cost of living adjustments and call it compensation strategy. Then we act surprised when the person holding four years of donor history takes a call from a recruiter. The turnover looks to me like an output. The design tends to produce it, and hiring better rarely changes what the design produces. If you want to see the same mechanism from another angle, emotional intelligence functions as retention infrastructure inside these teams, not as a soft add-on. Relationship Building Is a Practice You Can TeachHere is the part that gets skipped. The long horizon only pays off if something real happens inside it, and most organizations treat what happens in the room as a matter of charm. Some people have it. Some people do not. Hire for it and hope. Bill asks every high capacity person he meets about their favorite childhood toy. That is the whole thing. A simple question about a toy, and within a couple of minutes he is hearing what someone actually cares about, in their own words, before any case statement enters the conversation. I have been collecting strategic questions for years, and I recently started a separate collection just for get to know you questions. His goes at the top of that list. I asked my next podcast guest the same thing, and it changed the shape of the whole interview. Which tells you something about the mechanism. A good question is repeatable. It can be written down, taught, practiced, and handed to a nervous program director who has never asked anyone for money. Charm cannot. So when an organization decides that relationship building is a talent rather than a practice, it has quietly made that work impossible to train, impossible to delegate, and impossible to sustain past the tenure of whoever happened to be good at it. Bill also brings brain science into how he approaches this, and that tracks. Relationship building, brain science, and psychology go hand in hand. People give when they feel seen, heard, and valued, and there is a physiological story underneath that, not just a sentimental one. Which means the patient work is doing something specific in those eighteen months. Those months are where the ask becomes possible. Skip them and you are asking a stranger. Titles Are StructureBill told a story about interviewing a researcher at a large university. She had put the institution in her will. She had been there sixteen years. She had identified and researched a donor who eventually gave a million dollars. No major gift officer had ever walked into her office to thank her. Nobody, in sixteen years. She stayed because her children had a tuition waiver. His response to this pattern is to give every person in the development operation the same title: "Every person in the development shop should have the same title. Director of Major Gifts." This makes sense given the setup. A title describes what the organization believes a role is for. When the researcher's title says researcher and the gift officer's title says major gifts, the org chart has already suggested who is doing the real fundraising and who is doing support work. Most people read that correctly and behave accordingly. I coach clients on titles constantly, usually while helping them build a first development department, and my rule is that people should have whatever title helps them do their job best. Bill's version goes further, and I think he is right about it. It does two things at once. Inside the organization, it tells the researcher and the data entry person that they matter, which is the same thing every donor is trying to find out about themselves. Outside the organization, it gives every one of those people a title they can carry into a room and use to build a real relationship. Give everyone the title that names the actual goal, and you have used structure to say something that a values statement on the wall never manages to say. The Board Question That Is Easy to Sequence WrongThen there is the board, where two incompatible jobs get stuffed into one body. Bill's framing came from a retired chamber of commerce CEO. Most nonprofit boards are made up of sparrows. Sparrows come to the quarterly meeting, sit through staff reports, argue about whether to spend two hundred dollars on a computer, write a thousand dollar check, and buy a seat at the gala. Most nonprofits could not operate without them. Plenty of boards also want an eagle. Someone who can write a seven-figure check. Eagles tend to hate meetings, do not care about the computer, and rarely sit through reports. Put one on your board and within a year they will often either turn into a sparrow or quit. So Bill builds his clients a separate group. Five or six people, all high capacity, meeting twice a year in each other's homes rather than at your facility, with a single agenda item. Which of our friends can we ask. I give the same advice and I get there differently. I do not want money, power, and decision-making consolidated into the same group of people. Your governing board should be the people who want to do the careful, unglamorous work of oversight, checking that nothing is going off the rails. Not the people with the biggest checkbooks, who are usually the furthest from the weeds and the least accountable for the outcome. So give the givers their own structure where giving is the actual job. Two groups, two purposes, no competition between them. This is also why the board chair and executive director relationship works better when the governance lane is clearly drawn. What a Built System Looks LikeBuild the plumbing first. Here that means a small number of specific things in place before anyone worries about scripts. The CEO carries a real portfolio, ten people or fewer, and treats it as a standing commitment rather than a fourth quarter push. The relational time is protected structurally, not aspirationally. Compensation is designed so that staying is financially rational. There is a revenue floor that does not depend on this year's major gift closing, which is what makes waiting affordable. And there is a group whose entire purpose is giving and opening doors, separate from the group that governs. Fully built or partially built matters enormously here. A partially built major gifts function has all the cost and none of the compounding. You are paying for the staff, the software, and the events, and you are still starting over every eighteen months. Diversifying and de-risking your revenue base is part of the same picture, which is why revenue design deserves attention before the ask does. What This Makes PossibleWhen leaders see this clearly, the fear around major gifts usually drops several notches. The conversation stops being about whether anyone on the team is brave enough to ask a person for a million dollars and starts being about whether the organization can hold a relationship for three years without flinching. That is a design question, and design questions have answers. What can stop being so heavy is the self-blame. Chances are nobody failed at fundraising here. The organization was built with a twelve-month clock and then asked to do multi-year work, and it did roughly what that setup tends to produce. You are where you are, it is what it is. Once the structure changes, the same people, the same mission, and the same donor list start producing something entirely different, because the effort finally accumulates instead of resetting. Doing Work That CompoundsThis is not about asking bigger. It is about building an organization that can hold a relationship long enough for the ask to make sense. Nonprofits can raise transformational money.They can pay their fundraisers well enough to keep them.They can stop rebuilding donor relationships from scratch every eighteen months. Not by pushing harder, by building systems that hold. About the GuestBill Crouch is the CEO of BrightDot Fundraising Advisors and has spent more than 40 years helping nonprofits transform fundraising into meaningful, lasting relationships with donors. A former college president, fundraising expert, author, and Honorary Fellow at Oxford University, Bill is the author of Mattership™: Making Donors Feel They Matter, where he shares practical strategies for building trust and inspiring generosity. Connect with Bill:
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 445: Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri | 10 Aug 2026 | 00:08:55 | |
Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri Strategic planning gets treated like a decision you make in a quiet room, then hand down to the team. So leaders sit down to "set direction," invent something new from scratch, and spend the next year trying to force it into existence. The resource burn is real. The traction usually isn't. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why strategy is mostly discovered rather than decided, and how to tell the difference before you commit the year to it. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors staring at a blank strategic plan template wondering where to start • CEOs who feel like every new direction is being pushed uphill • Leadership teams heading into a planning retreat and wanting to walk in with better questions • Anyone who has ever committed to a bold new strategy and watched it stall out by Q2 More on the subject• Before you decide a new direction, list what's already emerging inside your team, your programs, and your data • Run the Dan Sullivan question with your leadership team: if we were meeting in three years and everything had gone really well, what would need to have happened? • Ask the One Thing question: what's the one thing that, if solved, would make everything else easier or unnecessary? • Treat listening as a strategic activity, not a management courtesy — put time on the calendar for it About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 444: Top Five Episodes, Ranked with Sarah Olivieri | 06 Aug 2026 | 00:25:32 | |
Top 5 Episodes Countdown Five episodes rose to the top over the last two years of this show. Trauma. Cash flow. Starting a nonprofit from scratch. Health equity. Organizational design. On the surface they have nothing in common. Underneath, all five are making the same argument, and none of them tell you to work harder.
Sarah pulled the download data on the last hundred episodes and ranked them across thirty-day, ninety-day, and lifetime windows. The same five came out on top every time. In this solo episode she counts them down and reads the lines that made each one land. In This Episode, What you'll hear:
The through-line: your culture, your reporting, your funding model, and your experience of scarcity are all design choices. Design can be changed.
Every episode is linked below. Start anywhere. If you only have time for one, start with Pierre. If you're tired right now, start with Melanie. Linked Episodes
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey.
Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri [Episode 443] | 02 Aug 2026 | 00:11:05 | |
Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri Most programs are built middle-out. Someone has an idea for a workshop, a curriculum, a service, and the design starts with the activities. The end result is fuzzy, the beginning state is assumed, and the middle is a stack of sessions that made sense in the moment. Then clients start drifting between steps, going quiet, and finishing without really finishing. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to design a program on purpose so it actually delivers the change it promises. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors and program directors redesigning a service that is not landing the way it should • Nonprofit CEOs whose programs get good feedback but weak completion or weak results • Leaders launching a new offering who want to design it right the first time • Anyone who has ever handed a client off to a colleague and watched them disappear Practical takeaways• Write the client's end state in one clean sentence before you touch the middle • Add an emotional journey layer to your program map, and name the anxious and energized moments by name • Pick one handoff in your current program this week and add a warm handoff or a redundancy so nobody falls through • Move one small, satisfying win to the very front of your program, even if it is not the logical first step About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 442: Name Your Product, Fund Your Mission with Barb Clapp | 30 Jul 2026 | 00:36:35 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... "Run It Like A Business"There is a quiet belief inside a lot of nonprofits that running things like a business would somehow cheapen the mission. That budgets, product thinking, and direct asks belong to the for-profit world, and that the nonprofit world runs on something purer. Heart. Passion. Care. The care is real. The problem is that heart gets asked to do a job it was never built to do. When there is no clear product, no business-grade financial forecasting, and no habit of quantifying value in dollars, people compensate with effort. They work harder. They care louder. And the organization still stalls. Running a nonprofit like a business is not the thing that threatens your mission. Avoiding it is. A version of this tension shows up almost every time I talk with a founder who built something meaningful and then hit a ceiling they cannot explain. I had a conversation recently with Barb Clapp, who built a workforce development organization from nothing into one that has trained thousands of people, and it sharpened how I think about this. The idea was not new to me. What she did was name exactly why the business lens holds up, and why the absence of it quietly breaks things. Mission Is What You Do. Method Is How You Do It.One of the most expensive confusions in the nonprofit world is treating the mission and the method as the same thing. Your mission is fixed. It is the reason you exist. Your method is everything else. How you deliver, how you fund it, how you structure the team, how you ask. The method is allowed to change. In fact it has to, or the mission gets stuck inside an approach that stopped working. I am a sailor, so forgive me, my sailing references tend to pop up. An America's Cup boat can sail several times faster than the wind pushing it. The wind does not change. The boat design does. Your mission is the wind. Your method is the boat. When leaders feel stalled, they almost always reach to protect the mission by clinging harder to the method. That gets it backwards. You honor the mission by being willing to rebuild the boat. The business lens is a method decision. It changes nothing about who you serve. It changes how much of them you can actually reach. You Have a Product, Whether You Name It or NotHere is where most organizations lose the thread before they even start. Barb said something in our conversation that I have not stopped thinking about: "People do not understand what their product is. They don't have a clear picture of what it is they're doing, why it makes a difference, and how they're going to tell a story."
What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. Every organization has a product and a buyer, even when it refuses to use those words. Your product is the specific change you create. Your buyer is the funder or donor who pays for that change to happen. When you cannot say clearly what your product is, everything downstream gets harder. Your messaging blurs. Your fundraising softens. Your team cannot rally around a result they cannot name. More detail does not equal more clarity here. Organizations often try to fix a fuzzy product by adding more program descriptions, more impact language, more mission poetry. That adds volume, not clarity. The fix is narrower. What is the one thing you produce, why does it matter, and who benefits enough to pay for it. Answer that and the rest of the machine has something to organize around. If you have never separated your product from your good intentions, that is worth doing before you touch anything else. I wrote more about the marketing side of this in what marketing really is and where it fits into your nonprofit. Business Values Do Not Replace Heart. They Protect It.The fear is that a business lens will crowd out the reason people came to the work. It does the opposite when it is done well. Barb put it plainly. She brought real business-based values into her nonprofit in addition to the heart-based ones. Budgets that get made and then actually followed. A strategic plan. Clear annual goals that everyone in the organization understands. Real job descriptions. None of that dilutes the caring. It gives the caring somewhere to land. At the end of the day, an organization without a real strategy cannot protect its mission for very long. A strategy is what tells you which opportunities to say yes to and which to let pass, which programs to double down on and which to sunset, where the next dollar should go and where it should not. Without one, every decision gets made in the moment, and moments add up to drift. Mission and money are not in conflict. They are mutually dependent. The money is what lets the mission keep showing up next year, and the year after that. Leaders who run everything from a heart place alone often feel like they are being noble. What they are actually doing is putting the mission at risk, because a mission with no financial floor under it is one bad quarter away from disappearing. This is one of the six things nonprofits can learn from the for-profit world, and it is the one that changes the most when a leader finally lets it in. Growth With Heart Alone Has a CeilingYou can grow a nonprofit on heart alone. You just cannot scale it that way. Growth is doing more. Scale is doing more per dollar, per person, per hour. Scale is what happens when you apply efficiency and leverage to the work, so that each resource produces a larger result than it did before. Heart gets you off the ground. It does not get you altitude. At some point, the leader who is running on care alone hits a wall, and because they care so much, the wall is deeply frustrating. Barb's organization scaled because she thought in terms of leverage from the start. She repurposed existing structures instead of rebuilding from scratch. She built revenue that funds the mission instead of chasing every dollar cold. She hired people who could own outcomes. Every one of those is a leverage decision, and leverage is a business concept that nonprofits need more than almost anyone, because the work matters more than almost anything. If you are feeling stalled right now, working harder is rarely the way out. Working differently is. That difference usually lives in structure, and structure is fixable. I made the fuller case for that in structure holds vision, the leadership system CEOs need. What Changes When You Let the Business Lens InWhen a leader finally stops treating business thinking as the enemy of the mission, the whole organization gets lighter. The product gets clear, so the story tells itself. The budget holds, so the panic drains out of every funding cycle. The asks get sized correctly, so the money starts matching the need. The team fits the phase you are actually in, so the turnover stops. None of this makes the work smaller. It makes the work hold. The heart is still the whole point. It finally has a structure strong enough to carry it. This isn't about caring less. It's about building something that can carry how much you care. Nonprofits can name their product.
Not by trading away the mission, but by giving it a business strong enough to keep it alive. About the GuestBarb Clapp is not just a leader—she is a force of transformational change. A successful entrepreneur and nationally recognized business leader, Barb has always been committed to giving a voice to the voiceless. What makes her truly inspirational is how she draws on her own experience of overcoming adversity to empower others by providing the resources, support, and solutions they need to overcome their own challenges and achieve lasting success. As CEO of the nonprofit Dwyer Workforce Development (DWD), Barb is disrupting the traditional approach to solving the healthcare workforce crisis and creating a new paradigm for healthcare workforce training. DWD Bio: Dwyer Workforce Development (DWD) is an innovative, national nonprofit with a mission to provide comprehensive support to individuals who lack opportunity and aspire to build careers in healthcare, alleviate a critical healthcare workforce shortage and improve the lives of seniors and the community at large. DWD provides CNA and GNA training and job placement support to underserved individuals and need-based wraparound services — including financial support for housing, childcare, and transportation — to eliminate barriers to success. As Scholars achieve key milestones, they become eligible for continued training and educational opportunities, creating pathways to become Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), Registered Nurses (RNs), and advance into additional roles in healthcare. Connect with Barb: https://www.facebook.com/dwyerworkforcedevelopment https://www.instagram.com/dwyerworkforcedev/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/dwyer-workforce-development/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 441: The Budget Layout Trap with Sarah Olivieri | 27 Jul 2026 | 00:09:47 | |
The Budget Layout Trap with Sarah Olivieri Money gets tight. The bank balance looks thin, or the bottom line slips into the red, and the first move almost everyone reaches for is the same one: cut expenses. It feels responsible. It feels like control. And when your budget lumps every expense into one big pile, it is also the fastest way to cut the very spending that was bringing money in. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why the standard budget layout quietly sets nonprofits up to make the wrong cut, and how she structures a budget so the right money stays protected. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors staring at a red bottom line and reaching for the scissors • Pull your revenue-generating expenses out of the pile and label them clearly so they are the last thing anyone reaches to cut Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.
Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 440: Know Enough To Be Dangerous with Janelle Miller Moravek | 23 Jul 2026 | 00:49:34 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Trap of Being the Most Capable Person in the RoomThere is a particular kind of nonprofit leader who is very good at almost everything. They can build the budget. They can write the grant. They can run the intake, fix the database, cover the front desk, and close the books when the bookkeeper leaves. When something breaks, they already know how to fix it, so they do. This is where nonprofit CEO leadership capacity quietly becomes the ceiling on the entire organization. When the most capable person keeps doing the work, the organization can only grow as large as that one person's hours. Everything routes through them. Every decision waits for them. And because they are competent, nobody notices the bottleneck until the organization is straining against it. This looks like a time management problem or a delegation problem, when in fact it's a leadership design problem. Let's talk about how to fix it. A Leader Who Has Made the ShiftA version of this comes up almost every time I talk with a leader who is running a good organization and running themselves into the ground to do it. I had a conversation recently with Janelle Miller Moravek, who has led a growing mental health organization since 2009. She has been the fundraiser, the strategist, the operator, and the person who learned every function the hard way. And she has arrived somewhere most leaders need to go, but don't even realize yet. She knows how much to know, and she knows when to take her hands off. Know Enough to Be DangerousThere is a level of knowledge every CEO needs about every function of their organization. Not enough to run it. Enough to tell whether it is being run well. If you know nothing about your finances, you cannot tell a good accountant from a bad one. If you know nothing about your fundraising, you cannot tell whether your development director is stuck or coasting. You do not need to do the work. You need to know enough to provide real oversight. This is the balance that trips people up. Leaders tend to land at one of two extremes. Either they know a function so well that they cannot stop doing it, or they know it so poorly that they cannot supervise it. Neither one is oversight. Oversight lives in the middle, where you know enough to be dangerous and then let go of the doing. The truth is, most leaders overshoot toward doing because doing feels productive and supervising feels like nothing. Sitting in a meeting you do not strictly need to attend, reading a book, walking through the building, thinking about what is coming in eighteen months. None of that feels like work. All of it is the work. The Most Important Job Nobody SchedulesThe single most valuable thing a CEO can do is figure out what is around the corner that nobody else sees yet. When you plan for that, you are ahead of everyone. When you are ahead, your organization makes a bigger impact with less scramble. I call it brain time. The problem is that brain time never makes it onto the calendar, because everything else is louder. The payroll approval, the bank call that only the CEO is allowed to make, the fire that flared up this morning. Those tasks are real, and someone has to clear them so the rest of the team can move. But they are not the job. They are the price of admission to the job. When leaders let the loud, clearable tasks crowd out the quiet, high-value thinking, the organization loses its ability to see around corners. It becomes reactive. It handles what is in front of it and gets blindsided by what was predictable all along. Leadership You Can Buy Before You Can Afford ItHere is the move that changes the math for organizations in the one-to-five-million range. You can bring in leadership without adding it to your management structure. When you outsource a function to a strong fractional or contracted firm, whether that is finance, HR, IT, or billing, you are not just buying task execution. You are buying leadership. A good outsourced finance team does not wait for you to direct them. They lead you. They tell you what you are missing. They bring a level of expertise you could never afford to hire full-time and could never provide yourself. This is what lets a leadership team stay lean. Janelle runs a nearly three-million-dollar organization with a management structure of two people, herself and a deputy director, because the CFO brain, the HR strategy, the billing compliance, and the fundraising all live with expert partners outside the building. The leadership is baked in. The payroll taxes, the turnover, the recruiting, the risk of getting a specialized compliance task wrong, all of that belongs to someone whose actual job it is. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "It really hampered our growth before we outsourced." What I appreciate about this framing is that it names the mechanism. When a leader hoards functions they are not expert in, the organization does not just carry the cost of their learning curve. It carries the cost of everything that leader could have been doing instead. The growth that never happens is the most expensive line item, and it never shows up on any budget. Delegating Outcomes, Not Just TasksThere is a difference between handing someone a task and handing someone a result. Task delegation is "process this batch of invoices." Outcome delegation is "own our financial health and tell me when something is off." Most leaders get comfortable with the first and never make it to the second. So they stay busy checking work instead of free to lead. This is the shift from managing tasks to distributing outcomes and decisions across the organization. The shift usually becomes possible when the right person is in the right seat. And the right person is almost never the one with the most polished resume. It is the one with learning agility and curiosity, the one who can grow into responsibility you have not even defined yet. Hire for that, and you can eventually hand over not just the doing but the deciding. That is what frees a visionary leader to actually be one. I say this to clients constantly, and I had to learn it on myself first. For years my rule was that just because I can do something does not mean I should. I am a highly capable person. If I keep doing everything I am capable of, I will hold my own organization back, and I will not be a very happy human either. The capability is not the question. The choice about where to point it is. What Changes When You Stop Being the DoerWhen a leader stops being the doer, the whole organization stops waiting on one person. Decisions get made closer to the work. The team develops instead of stalling. And the leader finally has room for the thinking that only they can do. The heaviness that comes from being the answer to every question starts to lift. The work has not disappeared. It is finally sitting where it belongs. The organization stops being an extension of one person's stamina and starts being a system that can carry its own weight. That is what staying power actually looks like. It is not a heroic leader holding everything together. It is a structure built so that no single person has to. The MarathonThis is not about doing less work. It is about doing the work that only you can do. Nonprofits can grow past the founder's capacity. They can build leadership they could not otherwise afford. They can run without one person anchoring every decision. Not by that person working harder. By building an organization that no longer needs them to. About the GuestJanelle Miller Moravek is a nonprofit leader & mental health advocate. She has led Youth & Family Counseling as Executive Director since 2009, driving its growth and impact across Lake County, Illinois. With a deep commitment to increasing access to mental health services, she oversees strategy, programming, and operations while fostering strong partnerships throughout the community. Janelle also plays a key leadership role in the region, serving on the board of the Lake County Alliance for Human Services and co-chairing the Lake County Behavioral Health Action Team. Her prior experience includes development roles at Carmel Catholic High School and Barat College. She holds a BA in French Studies from Wesleyan University and lives in Libertyville with her husband and three children. Connect with Janelle: Website: CounselingForAll.org/ LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/janelle-miller-moravek-903a815b/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 439: Structure Holds the Vision with Sarah Olivieri | 20 Jul 2026 | 00:16:08 | |
Episode Description Most leadership books focus on the individual, their style, their skills, their presence. What rarely gets named is the leadership structure itself, the actual model your organization runs on. Sarah would argue that structure is at least half of good leadership, and without it, even a strong visionary creates whiplash instead of momentum. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why leadership structure matters, why the org chart tends to make things worse, and what a distributed, outcomes-based model looks like inside a nonprofit. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Founders and executive directors who feel like decisions are bottlenecking around them • Name the outcomes your organization needs to run well, then assign accountability for each one Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.
Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 438: The Power Of Shared Infrastructure with Bob Burbridge | 16 Jul 2026 | 00:27:07 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Power Of Shared InfrastructureThere is a quiet assumption baked into how most nonprofits operate. If you need something, you build it yourself. Need a fundraising event, plan one. Need HR, handle it in-house. Need systems, cobble them together. The nonprofit shared infrastructure that could carry all of this rarely enters the conversation, because the default is to go it alone. I understand where the instinct comes from. Nonprofits are scrappy by necessity. Budgets are tight, and doing it yourself feels like the responsible, frugal choice. But there is a hidden cost to building everything from scratch, and it shows up in the same place every time. Your team's time. Your leadership's attention. The liability nobody was watching. The event that ate six months of staff capacity to net twelve thousand dollars. When an organization tries to be its own event company, its own HR department, and its own back office all at once, it is running several businesses it never meant to start. And none of them get the focus they need to be excellent. I've been thinking about this latelyI recently had a conversation about exactly this with Bob Burbridge, founder of the Battle Green Run Foundation and a longtime leader in the HR world. He built something that lets small nonprofits plug into infrastructure they could never build on their own, and that changes what is possible for them. Running An event is a business, not a fundraiserHere is the thing most nonprofits underestimate. A run, a walk, a gala, a conference. These are not fundraisers you tack onto your year. Each one is a whole business, with its own logistics, systems, vendors, permits, marketing, and expertise. Bob's foundation exists to run one road race well. Twelve board members. A website that handles all the fees. Relationships with sixty local restaurants. Decades of accumulated knowledge about how to actually pull it off. That is what it takes to do an event at a level where the numbers work. Now picture a small nonprofit deciding to launch its own 5K to raise money. Same permits. Same logistics. Same insurance. Same marketing. Except now it is being done by two staff members who already have full-time jobs, learning it all for the first time, for an event that might clear ten thousand dollars if everything goes right. The math rarely favors building your own event from zero. The work is enormous and the expertise is real, and both are invisible until you are standing in the middle of them. Before any organization takes on an event, it helps to ask a hard question. Are we prepared to run this like the business it actually is? If the honest answer is no, that is worth knowing before you commit a year of your team's life to it. Shared infrastructure changes the mathThis is where Bob's model gets interesting, because it solves the problem from a completely different direction. Instead of each nonprofit building its own event, one organization builds the event infrastructure once, and many nonprofits plug into it. A small nonprofit brings a team of runners. They raise money through a website that already exists, run by people who already know what they are doing, with fees already covered. When the race is over, the proceeds come to them. They got the full benefit of a professionally run event without having to become an event company to get it. He built the same thing in his professional life through the professional employer model, where small businesses pool together so they can access group health plans, HR expertise, and compliance support that no single small employer could afford alone. The logic is identical. Specialized infrastructure is expensive to build and cheap to share. When you pool it, small organizations get access to a level of capability that would otherwise be completely out of reach. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "We become a platform for these nonprofits to raise money on their own. We pay all the fees, and then when the race is over and our bills are paid, we take all that's left and share it with all the teams." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The value is not that Bob's group is generous, though they are. The value is structural. One entity absorbs the fixed cost and the expertise, and many organizations draw on it. That is leverage, and it is available far more often than nonprofits assume, if they stop defaulting to building alone. Some things should never be built in-houseThe same principle applies to the least glamorous part of running an organization. Human resources. Bob spent decades in the HR world, and his advice was direct. For most small nonprofits with paid staff, HR is not something to handle yourself. The regulations span fifty states and the federal government. The liability is real. And the power imbalance, when something goes wrong, is enormous. I know this one personally. Years ago I had an employee in another state and I had done everything correctly. New York State decided otherwise and started sending me fines that climbed toward thirty thousand dollars. I had to hire a lawyer. I spent many hours on paperwork. In the end I was right, I had done nothing wrong, and it still cost me thousands of dollars and a mountain of time. The lawyers on the other side had resources my small organization simply did not. Being in the right was not enough to make it painless. That is the kind of risk that lives quietly inside "we'll just handle it ourselves." HR compliance is specialized work, and specialized work is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from shared infrastructure. When it starts eating too much of your time, or when the liability is more than you can responsibly carry, that is the signal to bring in people who do it for a living. Community is the return most events forget to countThere is one more piece of Bob's model worth naming, because it reframes what an event is even for. When you make an event a real community experience, the money is not the only return. The nonprofits at Bob's race network with each other. Startups learn from organizations that have been around for decades. Runners come back year after year because it feels like something, not just a transaction. The Minutemen fire a volley. A buffet from sixty restaurants. Families showing up to help. That community is an asset, and it compounds in a way a check never will. The fortune in fundraising is in the follow up, and an event that builds real relationships gives you something to follow up about. I had such a good time with you. Would you like to come tour our facility. Those conversations are where major gifts and lasting support actually come from, and they only exist if the event was built to create connection, not just to collect donations. Giving days and one-click donations have their place. But an experience people participate in creates relationships, and relationships are the quiet engine underneath every organization that fundraises well. What this makes possibleWhen a leader sees this clearly, the pressure to build everything shifts. The question stops being how do we pull off our own event, our own HR, our own everything, and becomes what infrastructure already exists that we could plug into instead. That question opens doors. It means a small organization can access a professionally run event without becoming an event company. It means HR risk can be shared instead of shouldered alone. It means leadership attention goes to the mission, not to running four accidental businesses at once. The work does not disappear. It gets focused. And focus, applied to the few things only your organization can do, is what separates the nonprofits that thrive from the ones that stay stuck doing everything themselves. The bottom lineThis is not about doing less. It is about not building alone what someone has already built. Nonprofits can run excellent events. They can protect themselves from risk they cannot afford. They can grow without becoming experts at everything. Not by shouldering every function themselves, but by plugging into the infrastructure that is already there. About the GuestBob Burbridge is a lifelong Lexington resident, community leader, and accomplished business executive with decades of service in both the nonprofit and human resources sectors. He is the founder and former CEO of Genesis HR Solutions, which he led from 1991 to 2023, growing it into one of New England's largest accredited professional employer organizations. Deeply committed to his community, Bob has held numerous leadership roles, including Chair of the Lexington Housing Assistance Board, Director of the Battlegreen Run Foundation, and founder of the Genesis Community Fund. His extensive civic involvement spans local government, youth athletics, and charitable initiatives, earning him honors such as Lexington's White Tricorne Hat Award. Throughout his career, Bob has also been a prominent figure in the HR industry, serving as President of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations and helping shape key legislation across New England. Connect with Bob: Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093515606579 Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/battlegreenrunfoundation/?hl=en Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 437: Stop Using To-Do Lists with Sarah Olivieri | 13 Jul 2026 | 00:10:25 | |
Stop Using To-Do Lists Every time you look at your to-do list and ask "what should I do next," your brain drops into a small version of strategic planning. That mode burns real energy, and you do it over and over all day long. Add in the secret to-do list, the tasks you never even write down but still have to do, and the list stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a weight. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the to-do list trap and the calendar-based system she uses instead, the same one she teaches inside the Impact Method and runs her own business on. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 435: You Get One Priority with Sarah Olivieri | 06 Jul 2026 | 00:14:59 | |
Episode Description Imagine a burning building with three people trapped in three rooms. You run to the first and free them halfway, then the second, then the third, then back to the first. You spend all your time running and never fully free anyone. That image is what split focus actually costs an organization, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, drawing on her years as an executive director and her work coaching organizations through it. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 436: Mentorship Rebrands Who You Are with Dr. Stanley Andrisse | 05 Jul 2026 | 00:36:43 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... $20 Million in Grants, Suddenly Gone: How One Nonprofit SurvivedA year ago, a single nonprofit had $20 million in federal grants on the books. Three awards from three different agencies. By every conventional measure, the funding base looked strong. Then federal priorities shifted. All three grants were eliminated. The organization went from 30 staff to 18 in a matter of months, but they are still standing. That nonprofit is From Prison Cells to PhD, and its founder, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, is the guest on this week's episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership. The story has stayed with me, and this article is where I want to go deeper on the part of it that most fundraising conversations skip. The part most people focus on is the funding loss itself. That is the dramatic surface. The part that actually explains why this organization is still standing, and rebuilding faster than most would, sits one layer underneath. Their grant portfolio was huge, but every single dollar of it was aligned to their core mission. There was no program built to chase money that drifted from what they exist to do. When the grants disappeared, what was left was a smaller version of the same organization, not the wreckage of a stretched and confused one. That is the lesson I want to draw out here. Diversified funding gets the headlines in nonprofit strategy conversations. Mission alignment gets less airtime. The truth is, neither one works without the other. An organization with five revenue streams and a sprawl of mission-drifted programs is just as fragile as an organization with one revenue stream and a tight mission. The combination matters, and the combination is what makes a nonprofit shock-resistant. Mission Creep Is The Hidden Cost Of GrantsMost leaders I work with know about mission creep in the abstract. They have heard the warning. Where it actually shows up is in the language of a grant application. A funder wants outcomes the organization does not currently produce. A funder wants a population the organization does not currently serve. A funder wants a program design the organization does not currently run. The grant is large. The deadline is short. The board is anxious. The cash flow is tight. The leader makes a small adjustment to fit the application. The grant lands. A program gets built around the requirements. Six months in, the staff is running a workstream that no one in the organization is particularly proud of, but the money is keeping the lights on, so it stays. Multiply that pattern by three or four grants over five years, and the organization no longer looks like itself. The mission statement on the website has not changed, but the actual portfolio of work has drifted significantly. From the inside, leaders rarely notice. They are too close to it. The drift only becomes visible when something forces them to subtract. This is the trap. Grants do not just bring in money. They bring in shape. Every restricted grant is a small set of constraints applied to the organization. A few of those constraints, aligned to the mission, sharpen the work. A lot of them, applied without discipline, distort the work into something else. What Mission Alignment Actually ProtectsWhen From Prison Cells to PhD lost $20 million in a single year, the organization did not face the second crisis that usually follows a funding crisis. The second crisis is the realization that half of what you have been doing was never really the work you wanted to do, and now you have to dismantle programs that staff and stakeholders are emotionally attached to in addition to surviving the revenue gap. Because every grant had been mission-aligned, the response was straightforward. Smaller staff. Same work. Same scholars. Same outcomes at a smaller scale. The organization could be honest about what it was paring back without having to defend choices made to chase prior funders. There were no orphaned programs to wind down. There was no donor narrative to untangle. The proportional scale-back was clean. This is what mission alignment actually protects. It protects the speed of your response in a crisis. It protects the morale of your team. It protects your credibility with the funders you still have, because the work that survives is recognizable as the work you have always done. And it protects your ability to rebuild, because the case for support stays consistent. You are not selling a new version of yourself to new donors. You are inviting them into the version that has always been there. Diversification Is The Other Half Of The EquationA mission-aligned organization that has built only one funding pipeline is still fragile. When that pipeline cuts off, the response is still hard. The work stays clear, but the resources to do it disappear. This is where the funding cake framework comes in. I use this language with clients all the time. Major donors are the base layer of the cake. They give unrestricted. They stay for life. They refer their friends. They are insulated from political swings because their decision is personal, not policy-driven. Individual donors at lower giving levels are the next layer. Corporate sponsorships, where they fit, are another layer. Planned giving sits with the major donor layer. Grants are the icing. Icing is wonderful in the right proportion. It is also the most exposed layer of the cake. It melts under the wrong heat. Organizations that treat grants as the foundation are running a cake made of icing, and the first political shift becomes an existential event. Organizations that treat grants as one accelerant among several can lose a major grant and stay upright. From Prison Cells to PhD did not have only grants. They had foundation relationships. They had city and state partnerships. They had philanthropic supporters who had given before and gave again. The grants were significant, but they were one layer in a stack. When that layer disappeared, the stack got shorter, not flat. Why The Two Pieces Have To Move TogetherThis is the part I want every nonprofit leader reading this to take away. Mission alignment without diversified funding is admirable but exposed. Diversified funding without mission alignment is broad but distorted. The combination is what produces an organization that can take a hit and keep going. Picture the inverse of From Prison Cells to PhD's experience. Imagine an organization that took the same $20 million in grants, but each grant required a slight pivot, a new population, a new methodology, a new geography. When the grants disappear, that organization does not just lose revenue. It loses the programs the grants were funding, programs that were never quite the work the organization exists to do, programs that other funders will not back because they do not fit the brand of the organization either. The rebuild from that position takes years. The rebuild from From Prison Cells to PhD's position takes months, because the foundation underneath was always intact. Mentorship was another thread that came up in the conversation, and it deserves a mention here. Dr. Andrisse's own story turns on a mentor who saw a capacity in him that nothing in his environment was reinforcing. That same posture, applied at the program level, is part of what makes the organization's work effective. It is not separate from the funding story. The organizations that hold their mission tight enough to attract long-term funders tend to be the same organizations that hold their participants tight enough to produce real outcomes. Identity discipline at the leader level shows up as program discipline at the participant level and as funding discipline at the development level. It is the same muscle. What This Means For Your Next Grant DecisionThe practical implication is uncomfortable, because it asks leaders to leave money on the table sometimes. When a grant application asks you to describe work you do not actually do, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires a population shift or a methodology shift that pulls you off your core, the right answer is usually no. When a grant requires you to invent a program to fit the funder's interests, the right answer is almost always no. The leaders who get this right tend to share a habit. Before applying for any significant grant, they ask one question. If this funder disappeared tomorrow, would this program still belong inside our organization? If the answer is yes, the grant is aligned. The work compounds. The grant lands and strengthens the organization. If the answer is no, the grant is a trap dressed up as a windfall. The work distorts. The grant lands and weakens the organization's center. This discipline is hard in the moment. The deadline is short. The cash flow is tight. The board wants the win. The discipline is also what produces the From Prison Cells to PhD outcome instead of the cautionary tale outcome. What Becomes PossibleWhen mission is the filter and funding is the stack, the leader stops running the organization in reactive mode. There is room to say no to grants that distort the program. There is room to build the slower, deeper donor relationships that produce unrestricted gifts. There is room to develop staff into leadership rather than burning them out chasing the next application. There is room to take a $20 million loss and still be standing, smaller, but recognizable, and ready to rebuild on the same foundation that has always been there. The work is still hard. The mission is still complex. The world is still unpredictable. What changes is that the organization is no longer fragile. It can take a hit. It can take three hits. It can keep going. This isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that compounds. Nonprofits can survive losses that would close other organizations. They can rebuild faster than seems possible. They can stay recognizable to themselves through hard seasons. Not by pushing harder, but by holding the mission steady and building the stack underneath it. About the GuestDr. Stanley Andrisse is an endocrinologist, scientist and assistant professor at Howard University College of Medicine is researching type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. Dr. Andrisse is a visiting faculty at Georgetown University Medical Center, held a visiting faculty position at Imperial College London, and held an adjunct professorship at Johns Hopkins Medicine after completing his postdoctoral training. Dr. Andrisse completed his PhD at Saint Louis University and his MBA and bachelor's degree at Lindenwood University, where he played three years of collegiate football. Dr. Andrisse's service commitments include: Executive Director and Founder of From Prison Cells to PhD, Vice President of the board for the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, board member on The Endocrine Society, past president of the Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Association, founder of the Diversity Postdoctoral Alliance, member of several local and national committees, motivational speaker, and community activist. Connect with Stanley:
From Prison Cells to PhD (P2P)
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 433: Four Tips for Better Hiring with Sarah Olivieri | 29 Jun 2026 | 00:17:26 | |
Episode Description The right team is the thing nearly every organization comes back to, whatever else they're working on. Funding, scale, board questions, they all run through the people in the seats. And the way to get the right people is to hire well. In this episode, Sarah shares four tips for better hiring, drawn from her own process and the work she does with the organizations she coaches. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Leaders who want a stronger, more intentional hiring process Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 434: It Was Never The Money with Andrea Ortega | 24 Jun 2026 | 00:32:52 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Resource Problem Most Nonprofits Mistake for a Funding ProblemAsk any nonprofit leader what their organization needs most, and you will hear the same answer almost every time. More money. We need more funding. We need to hire. The whole nonprofit resource problem, in their telling, comes down to a number that is too small. I have worked with hundreds of organizations, and I have stopped taking that answer at face value. Not because leaders are wrong about feeling stretched. They are absolutely stretched. But when you peel back the layers, the constraint is rarely the money itself. It is the system nobody built. The process nobody owns. The skill gap nobody named. The tool the team already has and does not use. When those things are missing, leaders do the most natural thing in the world. They compensate with effort. And then they reach for funding to buy their way out of a problem that money was never going to solve. I've been thinking about this latelyI recently had a conversation about exactly this with Andrea Ortega, the founder of Palante Nonprofits, and it sharpened how I think about what actually holds organizations back. Not because the idea was new to me, but because she named the mechanism so cleanly. When an organization says it needs more funds, what it usually needs is to look underneath that statement and find out what is really going on. The funding answer is a symptom, not a diagnosisHere is what happens inside most organizations. A program is overwhelmed. The work is piling up. Someone says we need to hire. To hire, we need more money. So the leader goes looking for grants. But hiring is a solution to a specific problem, and that problem is usually not the one in front of you. The pile of work might exist because the process has no owner. It might exist because a system that should take thirty seconds is taking five hours by hand. It might exist because two people are doing the same task and neither knows it. Throw money at that and you get a bigger version of the same mess. You have simply hired someone to keep doing the thing the system should be doing. The clearest example I see is fundraising itself. An organization comes to me and says we have a fundraising problem. We do not bring in enough money. So I ask one question. Who is in charge of fundraising? And often the answer is no one. Nobody owns it. There is no fundraising system, no plan, no person accountable for making sure the money comes in. That is the core of the funding problem, and no grant is going to fix it. When systems are unclear, people compensate with effortThis is the pattern underneath almost every "we need more money" conversation. When the system is clear, people follow it and the work flows. When the system is unclear, people fill the gap with their own time, energy, and heroics. That works for a while. It is also the fastest route to burnout, because the organization is running on individual effort instead of designed structure. The more unclear the system, the harder everyone has to work just to stay in place. Leaders read that exhaustion as a sign they need more hands. Sometimes they do. More often they need the work to be designed so it does not eat people alive in the first place. The reframe is simple to say and harder to live. Before you hire, look at your systems. Before you buy, look at your processes. Before you assume you need more, find out what you already have and whether it is working. You already own more capacity than you thinkOne of the most useful things Andrea named is how much capacity organizations already have sitting unused. Most nonprofits qualify for free or deeply discounted versions of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Inside those tools are project management features, internal sites, shared calendars, document collaboration, and automation that organizations pay other vendors hundreds of dollars a month to replicate. The tool is already there. The license is already paid. What is missing is the knowledge of how to use it and the discipline to actually adopt it. This is where the real cost of a tool hides. The sticker price is the smallest part. The expensive part is the time and energy it takes your team to adopt it. A platform that costs three hundred dollars a month and makes everyone's life harder is not a deal. A free tool nobody learns to use is not a deal either. The return on a tool is not in buying it. It is in adopting it well. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "We tend to fix a lot of problems with people. And then it's always, we need more funds because we need to hire. But if you peel back the layers, it's your systems, it's your process, it's a skill gap with the people you currently have." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The funding request is real, but it is pointing at the wrong target. When you trace the overwhelm back to its source, you almost always land on a design problem, and design is something you can fix without waiting for a single new dollar to arrive. Adoption is the real work, not the purchaseHere is the part most organizations skip. Buying the tool feels like progress. Adopting the tool is the actual work, and it takes far longer than anyone budgets for. Real adoption can take months. It means deciding the tool is essential for every person who touches it. It means training, and training again. It means watching where people get stuck and smoothing those spots. It means building the onboarding so the next hire learns the system instead of inventing their own workaround. Without that, you spend the money, see no return, and conclude the tool does not work. The tool was fine. The adoption never happened. This is why the smart move with anything new is to pilot it. Pick one thing. Roll it out to a small group. Watch how people respond. See where the friction is. Offer the support that gets them over it. Once it clicks for one team, you have proof, and proof beats convincing every time. Then you can take on something harder. Build the plumbing before you scale the billThe thread running through all of this is sequencing. Organizations reach for the expensive, visible solution before they have built the quiet infrastructure that makes it work. They buy the platform before they have the process. They hire before they have the system. They chase the grant before anyone owns the function the grant is supposed to fund. Build the plumbing first. Get the process clear. Make sure someone owns it. Use what you already have, fully, before you assume you need more. Then, when you do add money or tools or people, you are adding them to a structure that can actually hold them. What this makes possibleWhen a leader sees this clearly, the panic around money settles. The question stops being how do we get more and becomes what do we already have that we are not using well. That is a question an organization can answer this week, without a single new dollar. The work does not get smaller. It gets lighter, because effort stops leaking out of unclear systems and starts flowing through designed ones. People stop compensating with heroics. The organization stops running on exhaustion. And the money conversation, when it comes, lands on a foundation strong enough to make the money matter. The bottom lineThis is not about doing less. It is about doing work that compounds. Nonprofits can have enough. Not by chasing more before the foundation is built, but by making what they have work first. About the GuestAndrea Ortega, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Palante Nonprofits, LLC, a consulting practice that strengthens systems, strategies, and leadership capacity for mission-driven organizations. She guides nonprofits through strategic planning, compliance, and sustainable growth, bringing both academic expertise and real-world experience to her work. With a PhD in Public Affairs specializing in Nonprofit Management and Compliance. Dr. Ortega offers deep knowledge in nonprofit finance, governance, and capacity building. A Colombian-American and proud #Gator and #Knight, she is committed to making compliance and technology accessible so nonprofits of all sizes can thrive. Connect with Dr. Andrea
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 430: Own The Tech, Scale Impact with Chris Conlee | 18 Jun 2026 | 00:36:19 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Why Your Nonprofit Can't Afford to Outsource Its Own CapacityThere is a moment that arrives in almost every mission-driven organization. You build something that works. A program, a platform, a process. It depends on one person, one vendor, one funder, one system that only one set of hands understands. And for a while, that works just fine. Then that one thing disappears. The developer leaves. The funder pulls out. The grant ends. The person who knew how everything fit together walks out the door. And suddenly the thing you built is not just struggling. It is locked. You cannot get in. You cannot fix it. You cannot move. This is not a story about bad luck. When an organization's capacity lives entirely outside its own walls, a single disruption becomes an existential threat. That is a question of nonprofit technology capacity, and it is structural. When the systems your mission depends on are owned by someone else, you are not running an organization. You are renting one. The Source of This ThinkingI've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Chris Conlee, and it sharpened how I think about what actually creates staying power in nonprofits. Not because the ideas were new, but because they explained why certain approaches hold up over time. Outsourced Capacity Is a Structural VulnerabilityHere is the pattern I keep seeing. A heart-first leader has a real idea. They do not have the technical skill to build it, so they hire it out. They find a vendor, sign a contract, and hand over the keys. The thing gets built. It even works. What they have actually done is create a dependency they cannot see. The code, the logins, the design files, the institutional knowledge of how it all connects, all of it lives somewhere else. As long as the relationship holds, nobody notices the risk. The risk is invisible right up until the moment it is the only thing that matters. This framing adds risk because it hides the cost. You feel like you saved money by not building in-house. What you actually did was move the most fragile part of your organization outside your own control and hope nothing ever happened to it. When the disruption comes, and it always comes eventually, the bill arrives all at once. You are locked out of your own work. You have already spent more than you raised. And you are facing a choice between starting over and shutting down. Heart-First Is Not the ProblemLet me say something clearly, because heart-first leaders carry too much shame about this already. The nonprofit sector is full of people who led with their hearts and figured out the systems later. Very few of them woke up one day and decided to become a nonprofit CEO and then went to school for it. They saw a need. They moved toward it. The leadership skills and the systems came second. There is nothing wrong with that order. The mission should come first. The trouble is what happens when the heart builds something real and then never circles back to build the foundation underneath it. You cannot run a complex business model on heart alone forever. At some point the moving parts multiply, the dependencies stack up, and the gap between what you care about and what you can actually control becomes the thing that breaks you. The answer is not to care less. It is to build the plumbing first, so the thing you care about has something solid to stand on. The Single Point of Failure Is Always a Design ChoiceWhen you rely on one developer, one platform, one funder, you have made a design choice, whether you meant to or not. You have decided that the survival of your organization rests on something you do not control. Most leaders never decide this consciously. It happens by default. You build the fastest way you can with the resources you have, and the fastest way almost always means leaning hard on a single source. Speed feels like progress. The hidden cost is concentration. The same logic shows up in budgets, which is why I think of underfunding as a design choice rather than an accident. The work of leadership is to look around the corner before the corner arrives. Where is your organization dangerously concentrated right now? One major donor who covers half your budget. One staff member who is the only one who knows how payroll runs. One vendor who holds the keys to the system your whole program depends on. These are the questions that separate organizations that last from organizations that get one bad season and disappear. The Mechanism, Named PlainlyOne line from that conversation has stayed with me: "It's not that you need to use AI to stay ahead, because it's now sort of expected. If you're not using AI, you're just by default behind." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The ground has shifted. The tools that used to require a hired specialist and a five-figure budget are now within reach of a determined leader with the right guardrails. The barrier that justified outsourcing your capacity is mostly gone. When you keep outsourcing anyway, you are paying the old price for a problem that no longer requires it. Owning Your Capacity Changes What You Can SurviveWhen Chris rebuilt his organization's app himself, the thing that changed was not the app. It was the relationship between the organization and its own infrastructure. A user reports a bug. He opens the logs. He fixes it in minutes, in-house, without waiting on anyone twelve time zones away. That is what owning your capacity buys you. Not perfection. Things still break. Owning your capacity means that when something breaks, you can fix it. The difference between an organization that survives disruption and one that does not is rarely the size of the disruption. It is whether the organization can respond without being locked out of its own work. This is true far beyond app development. The same logic applies to your donor data, your financial systems, your program delivery, your knowledge of how the whole thing runs. Wherever a single external dependency holds your mission hostage, you have found the place that will break you first. What This Makes PossibleWhen a leader sees this clearly, the relationship to technology stops being a source of dread. The fear of the system breaking, of the vendor disappearing, of being locked out, that fear comes from not owning the thing your mission depends on. Build the capacity inside the organization and that weight lifts. What you are left with is an organization that can absorb a bad season without collapsing. One that fixes its own problems instead of waiting on someone else to find the time. One that can take the expertise it already holds and put it in front of the people who need it, at a scale that actually moves the needle. That is what staying power looks like. It is built, not hoped for. ClosingThis isn't about doing more. It's about owning what your mission depends on. Nonprofits can control their own systems. Not by hiring it all out and hoping it holds, but by building the capacity to stand on their own. About the GuestChris Conlee is my guest for this episode. Chris is an Army veteran and a long-time Hollywood film editor who traded the red carpet for the server room to build something that matters. After a series of "perfect storm" disasters—including a total industry shutdown and losing our lead developer—I spent six months teaching myself to code with AI to rebuild PIFster from the ground up. My wife Shashana and I now run this community of micro-donors, where we prove every day that a bunch of people giving just $1 a month can collectively change the life of an "underdog" charity. When I'm not in the code, I'm likely at our home in East LA, which we've turned into a bit of a sanctuary for local street rescues. Connect with Chris:
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 429: 3 Fundraising Mistakes to Avoid in 2026 with Sarah Olivieri | 15 Jun 2026 | 00:10:48 | |
Most nonprofits are walking into 2026 making the same three fundraising mistakes that quietly sank them in 2025. None of the three look like mistakes from the inside. They look like prudence. They look like stewardship. They look like the responsible thing to do when reserves feel thin and the board is anxious. They are actually the most expensive habits in the sector. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down the three patterns that drain nonprofit fundraising power, why scarcity mindset masquerades as good financial management, the difference between spending money and investing it, and the three leadership moves that shift a whole organization into a culture of abundance. She uses the dam metaphor a client gave her, walks through what return on investment really means at the line-item level, and lands on what it takes from a leader to hold the line while the board and staff catch up. In This Episode, You'll Learn
• Executive directors sitting on reserves and wondering why the organization feels stuck • Before saying no to an expense, ask what the return on this investment would be, not what it costs Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…
Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 428: Strategic Planning as a Rhythm with Sophia Shaw | 11 Jun 2026 | 00:37:18 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Strategic Planning as a RhythmMost nonprofits I talk to are not avoiding strategic planning because they don't believe in it. They're avoiding it because the process is heavy, the resulting document is long and hard to act on, and six months later it feels out of date. So they wait. They wait until something forces the conversation. A new executive director. A board crisis. A funder asking for it. By the time planning starts, the stakes feel enormous, the calendar feels short, and the team feels exhausted before the first meeting. They waited so long, planning is an extra activity that requires planning to plan. The plan that comes out of that environment is almost always too rigid, too future-locked, and too disconnected from the work people are actually doing. This is the structural pattern. Strategic planning for nonprofits gets framed as an event. A rare event. Rare things carry pressure. Pressure makes the process worse, which confirms everyone's belief that planning is painful, which makes the next planning cycle even longer to start. The whole loop is fixable. The fix is not a better planning process but a better planning rhythm. A recent podcast interview with Sophia Shaw left me thinking not just about how to do strategic planning well, but what actually creates staying power in a strategic plan. A Plan as a Compass, Not a RoadmapThe mental model most nonprofits inherited for strategic planning is the roadmap. You start here. You end there. You draw the route. You follow it. A roadmap is built for a destination that is completely knowable and a route that is predictable. But most nonprofits are can't follow a predictable route to well known destination. Most nonprofits are pioneering, forging a path to an imagined, but not fully knowable destination. When pioneering, a compass is much more useful. A compass is different. A compass tells you the direction. It does not tell you the exact route. When the terrain changes, you keep the direction and find or create a new path. The plan still works, because the plan was never about the path. It was about where you're trying to go. In short:
When the plan is a compass, leaders stop being afraid of being "wrong." They stop avoiding planning out of fear that they'll commit to something they regret. The plan becomes a tool, not a verdict. Cadence Determines Whether the Plan Is RealHere's the part most planning processes get wrong. They treat the plan as the product. The truth is, the cadence of revisiting the plan is the product. A beautiful 40-page plan that gets opened once a year does less work than a one-page plan that gets revisited every two months. In my own work with organizations, I built a system where staff lead strategic planning every two months. Once a team has done it three or four times, "planning to plan" stops being a thing. The stakes are low. The plan is alive. Course corrections happen in real time, not in a year-end crisis. Planning becomes a rhythm of re-orienting and re-confirming or refining the path and the destination. This is what separates a plan that aligns the organization from a plan that sits on a shelf.
The organizations that get value from strategic planning are not the ones with the best document. They're the ones with the shortest distance between "something changed" and "we updated the plan." Short-Term Plans Are Healing for Teams in CrisisThere's a specific moment when a six-month or one-year plan does more work than a three-year one. That moment is when an organization is operating without sufficient resources. When people are working in an underresourced environment, asking them to make a long term plan just adds load to an already-overloaded nervous system. A short-term plan does the opposite. It says: here is what we are doing in the next six months, here is what we are not doing, here is how we'll know we did it. That clarity stabilizes the team. The longer-horizon planning can come later, after the stabilization holds. I think of it like getting off a tiki raft. If you're on a small raft in the open ocean, the first goal is not the destination. The first goal is getting on a bigger boat. Everything about reaching a destination feels different once you're on the bigger boat. A short-term plan focused on capacity building, is the plan to get on a bigger boat. This is not a compromise. It is the right tool for the moment. The Plan Is Also the Fundraising StoryA lot of nonprofits separate the planning conversation from the fundraising conversation. The planning team meets. The development team meets. The two outputs get stitched together later. This is backwards. The plan is the fundraising story. Donors are not funding programs in the abstract. They're funding a direction. They're funding the answer to "where is this organization going and how will I know if you got there?" If the board chair on one end of the table and the executive director on the other end whisper different answers to that question, no amount of donor stewardship will close the gap. I have watched organizations get major unrestricted gifts almost casually, after the leader simply got clear on the direction and started saying it out loud. One conversation about the vision, one week later, a letter for $100,000 a year for three years. That was not a fundraising win. That was an alignment win, with a check attached.
When the plan is clear and the team is aligned, fundraising stops feeling like persuasion. It feels like an invitation. Gathering the Data Should Not Be A Part of the Planning ProcessOne thing that makes frequent planning hard to imagine for many folks is that they have been told that in order to generate a great plan, they need to gather data from stakeholders: the community, the team, the board, etc. This makes the process of planning very laborious, but there's something even more important going on here, and this should have your alarms going off like crazy. The fact that this data collection needs to happen for strategic planning means that data collection is not happening as a regular part of identifying whether or not programs are running as well as they can. It means that conversations and other forms of data collection to understand what the community needs and what donors want to support and what makes them feel invested are not a routine part of operating. This is a problem in how many non-profits operate:
These should be part of daily operations, just like bookkeeping. Yes, strategic planning is a time to review data and analyze trends to inform decision making, but if you don't already have this data being collected as a regular part of operating, then your plan should include increasing your capacity so that you begin doing that. What Shifts When You Treat Planning as a RhythmWhen leaders stop seeing planning as an event and start running it as a rhythm, several things change at once. What shifts:
None of this requires a heavier process. It requires a lighter, more frequent one. About the GuestSophia Shaw is my guest for this episode. Sophia is the co-founder of PlanPerfect, an expert-powered, AI-assisted software tool helping small- and mid-sized nonprofits create, review, implement, track, and report on strategic plans. With decades of experience as a successful nonprofit CEO, trustee, board president, donor, volunteer, consultant, and professor of social impact. Sophia has a deep understanding of how to maximize the power of a nonprofit. Connect with Sophia: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/planperfect/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/PlanPerfect/61571149295408/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/planperfect_strategy/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 427: Build a Schedule You Want with Sarah Olivieri | 07 Jun 2026 | 00:09:45 | |
Episode Description Most nonprofit leaders are running a calendar built out of obligations they accepted on autopilot. The board asks. The donor meeting. The standing call that has been on the schedule for so long nobody can remember why. The week fills up, and the week after that, and the work that actually energizes the leader gets squeezed into whatever is left. Which is usually nothing. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through how to design a schedule around energy and alignment, drawing on the way she has run her own organization on roughly sixteen hours a week for a decade. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is especially helpful for:
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life.
Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 426: Underfunding Is A Design Choice with Charity Fain | 04 Jun 2026 | 00:30:44 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Underfunding You Accept Is a Design Choice, Not a DestinyThere is a belief running quietly through most of the nonprofit sector. It says that being underfunded is just part of the deal. That if you chose this work, you also chose to do it with too little money, too few people, and salaries that would never fly in the for-profit world. That belief feels like realism. It is actually a design choice. When the rules that govern your funding are unclear, unfair, or built by people who have never done your work, the organizations living inside those rules compensate. They compensate with effort. They compensate with unpaid hours. They compensate by paying staff so little that the staff themselves would qualify for the services the organization provides. Nonprofit financial sustainability does not fail because leaders aren't trying hard enough. It fails because the systems shaping the money were built badly, and most leaders treat those systems as fixed. They are not fixed. They were designed. And anything that was designed can be redesigned. The Conversation That Sharpened ThisI've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Charity Fain, and it sharpened how I think about what actually creates staying power in nonprofits. Not because the ideas were new, but because they explained why certain approaches hold up over time while others quietly collapse. Underfunding Is Downstream of Rules Someone Else WroteHere is the part most leaders miss. The reporting requirements, the admin caps, the grant structures that make no sense on the ground, none of those are facts of nature. They are decisions. Someone sat in a room and decided that 10% of a grant could go to admin, and then defined admin so broadly that it swallowed the actual cost of the work. That decision becomes your reality. You receive the grant, you read the rules, and you think, whoever designed this has no clue what it takes to do this work. You're right. They usually don't. The mistake is stopping at frustration. The structural move is recognizing that the people writing those rules are reachable. They are sitting in committees, rulemaking processes, and advisory groups, and most of those rooms are starving for the exact knowledge your organization holds. They need what you know, even when they don't know it yet. When you treat funding rules as weather, you adapt to them. When you treat them as decisions, you start influencing them. Get In The Room Before The Rule Is WrittenThe leaders who change their funding landscape do one thing differently. They stop waiting for the grant to show up and start shaping the grant before it exists. That means putting yourself and your staff on every committee you can find. It means sitting in rooms where you are not the technical expert, saying plainly, I don't know this part yet, and I will learn it, and you don't know what low-income households actually need, so we are going to teach each other. It means being willing to be a beginner in someone else's domain in order to be the expert in your own. This is slower than writing another grant application. It is also the only thing that changes what the applications ask for in the first place. Influence happens before the rule is written, not after the grant is awarded, and the payoff is structural. You change what future funding looks like, not just what you receive this cycle. Charity put it more bluntly than I would have. As she described getting her staff onto policy committees, she said: "I just really wanted us to be sitting in those groups that were making decisions so that people had to listen to us." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. Visibility inside decision-making rooms is not networking. It is infrastructure. When your organization is consistently present where the rules get made, your reality becomes part of the design input, and the rules start to fit the work instead of fighting it. Your Staff Are Part Of The Community You ServeThere is a second belief that quietly drains nonprofits, and it is even more damaging than the first. It says that because you are a nonprofit, you shouldn't make money, and neither should the people who work for you. The truth is, you cannot uplift a community while keeping the people who serve it in poverty. Your staff are not separate from your mission. They are inside it. When a leader decides to pay well, the usual fear is that expenses are now permanently higher with nothing to show for it. That fear is loud, and it is wrong. Paying people properly reduces turnover. It attracts more qualified people. It keeps the talented person who would otherwise do the math and leave for a sector that pays. Over time, it pays for itself, and then some. This is not a soft, feel-good position. It is an operational one. A well-paid, stable team is a more resilient organization. Resilience is what you draw on when the hard times come, and they come for everyone eventually. Nonprofits Are Businesses, And Harder OnesSSomewhere along the way, the sector absorbed the idea that nonprofits are not real businesses. That if you worry about making payroll, you're doing something wrong. That you should never have to manage cash flow month to month. Anyone who has run a nonprofit knows this is fantasy. You do worry about payroll. You do manage cash flow. And you do it inside a model that is more complex than the for-profit version, not simpler. I've written before about the things nonprofits can learn from for-profits, and the core point is this. A nonprofit is two businesses in one, a fundraising business and an impact business, each with its own audience and its own demands. That complexity creates a specific danger. In a for-profit, if you deliver something nobody wants, the bank account drops fast and the signal is unmistakable. In a nonprofit, the signals are weak. You can run excellent programs and still struggle to raise money. You can raise plenty of money and still fail to make an impact. The feedback that tells a business something is wrong arrives late and muddy. The problems have to be hunted proactively, because they will not announce themselves. So you have to go looking. You cannot wait for the system to tell you something is broken, because by the time it does, the damage is already done. Proactive leaders build the habit of checking their own plumbing before anything floods. Build The Team That Outlasts The CrisisWhen I ask seasoned executive directors what makes everything else easier, the answers vary. But underneath the good ones is almost always the same move. They stopped trying to be the expert in everything. You cannot do it all yourself. You were never supposed to. The job is to build a team good enough that you can trust the finance person to know more than you about finance, and the program staff to know more than you about the program. That is the point of hiring them. New leaders often get caught believing they have to know everything and do everything. That belief is a fast track to burnout, and burnout at the top harms the entire organization, not just the person carrying it. I've talked about this at length in why one person should never carry it all. A real team is what gives an organization resilience. When the hard season arrives, and it always does, the organizations that hold are the ones where the load was already shared. What Becomes PossibleWhen you see underfunding as a design problem instead of a fixed condition, something shifts. The frustration stops being a dead end and becomes a starting point. You stop adapting to bad rules and start influencing the rooms where they are made. Paying your people well stops feeling like a risk and starts looking like the obvious operational choice. The weight of carrying everything alone lifts, because the team is built to carry it together. None of this makes the work easy. It makes the work hold. The Work That HoldsThis isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that holds up. Nonprofits can have enough money. Not by suffering more quietly, but by getting into the rooms, building the team, and designing the systems that make it possible. About the GuestCharity Fain has over 25 years of experience building stronger, more resilient communities in the US and around the world. As the Executive Director, she is responsible for overall leadership and management, ensuring financial stability and growth, setting policy positions, and advancing strategic direction with the Board. Prior to CEP, Charity worked as Executive Director at the City Club of Portland, keeping Oregonians informed about pressing public issues. Before moving to Portland, Charity also served as the Country Director for Internews Network in Kyrgyzstan, directing a program to build stronger journalists, radio stations and public interest television. Charity has a BA in International Relations from The American University in Washington, DC and also speaks Russian. Connect with Charity: Website: https://www.communityenergyproject.org/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 425: Scaling Without Overworking with Sarah Olivieri | 01 Jun 2026 | 00:12:55 | |
Most leaders trying to scale their organization start by doing more. Longer days. More meetings. One more push to get the next milestone over the line. The ceiling shows up anyway, because a founder cannot scale herself. Growth is more in, more out. Scale is more out per unit of effort, and that math only changes when the structure underneath the work changes. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the role redesign that makes scaling possible, drawing on the Impact Method framework and a decade of running her own organization on it. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 424: One Clear Outcome Can Change Everything with Dr. Tracy Baynes | 28 May 2026 | 00:37:31 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The One Decision That Quiets All The OthersThere is a moment most executive directors know. A funder is hinting at money for a new initiative. A long-time staff member is pushing for an expansion. A community partner is asking whether you can serve a new population. Your inbox holds three more open questions just like these. Everyone is well-intentioned. Every option has a case. You close your laptop on a Friday and feel the weight of having to decide. This is the kind of tired most nonprofit leaders carry. It is not the tired of doing too much work. It is the tired of having too many decisions with nothing underneath them to settle the question. The truth is, you are not overwhelmed because there are too many options. You are overwhelmed because nothing in your organization is sharp enough to make the right option obvious. The Conversation That Sharpened This For MeI've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Dr. Tracy Baynes, the founder of STEP, a college access and leadership program in Arizona that has been running for 21 years. It sharpened how I think about what actually creates calm in a nonprofit leader's day. The ideas weren't new to me. What was new was hearing them explained as the source of clarity that lets a 21-year-old organization keep running without drama. What Tracy Has That Most Leaders Don'tTracy can tell you in one sentence what STEP exists to produce. She can tell you who STEP is for. She can tell you how she would know, years from now, whether STEP worked for any given student. (I've written more on the "how would you know" piece in 3 Tips For Measuring Your Impact.) She is not carrying every decision alone. She is holding every decision up against one clear outcome and letting the outcome answer. That is the difference. Most nonprofit leaders are running organizations that have a mission and a set of programs and a vague sense of impact. Tracy is running an organization that has a specific outcome.
This is the upstream decision. Make this one well, and the next dozen get easier. Program Decisions Stop Being AgonizingRight now, when someone proposes a new program, you weigh it on instinct, politics, funder interest, and gut feeling. You hold it up against nothing in particular. Which is why the decision is hard. When you have a specific outcome, you hold the proposed program up against it and ask one question: does this move us closer to producing that outcome, or does it not? Most ideas don't survive that question. The ones that do, you can move on quickly. The ones that don't, you can decline without guilt, without long deliberation, and without losing sleep. The "should we add this?" noise quiets because there is finally something underneath the question that knows the answer. (For more on why this discipline is harder than it sounds, see Focus Is Not Optional.)
Funders are not avoiding your organization because they don't care. They are avoiding it because they cannot tell exactly what they would be funding. A mission statement is not a thing they can invest in. A list of programs is not a thing they can invest in. "Impact" is not a thing they can invest in. A specific outcome is. When you can sit across from a funder and say, "We exist to produce this specific change in the lives of these specific people, and here is how we know whether we are," the conversation changes. They can finally see what their money would do. They can finally compare what you do to what other organizations do. They can finally say yes for real reasons instead of soft ones.
The leaders I know who have made this shift tell me the same thing. Funding conversations went from exhausting to almost mechanical. The fundraising skill didn't change. What changed was that there was finally something concrete on the table. Donors Recognize Themselves In Your Work And StayThere is a kind of donor relationship that runs on charm. You build rapport. You send beautiful appeals. You hope. They give once, sometimes twice, then drift. There is another kind that runs on recognition. The donor reads what you do, sees their own values in the specifics, and knows immediately that they want to be part of it. Those donors stay for decades. The recognition only works if there is something specific to recognize. A mission is too broad to land. A list of programs is too generic to mean anything to one person. A specific outcome is sharp enough that the right people see themselves in it instantly, and the wrong people quietly self-select out.
This is what Tracy means when she talks about finding people whose lives are enhanced by getting to give. She is not selling STEP. She is making STEP visible enough that the right people walk toward it. (More on this in Building Strong Donor Relationships.) What Shifts When The Anchor Is In PlaceHere is what changes for the leader who actually does this work. The decisions stop piling up in your head. The staff conversations get more productive. The funder pitches get easier to write. The donors get easier to find and keep. The programs that don't belong stop demanding attention because they no longer have a way to make the case.
This isn't more discipline. It is less, because you only need discipline in one place: protecting the clarity of the outcome itself. A Closing NoteThis isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that knows where it's going. A specific outcome is not a planning exercise. It is the upstream decision that quiets every downstream one. Make it well, and the next year stops feeling like a series of impossible choices. It starts feeling like a series of obvious ones. That is what Tracy has at 21 years. That is what you can have too. About the GuestTracy Baynes is the Founder and CEO of STEP: Student Expedition Program (STEP College-Prep) –a college access and leadership program for low-income Arizona high-school students. She received her doctorate in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1993. After several years as a coral reef researcher at the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Tracy turned her full focus to teaching in 1996. She joined Columbia University's Biosphere 2 Center to teach in their undergraduate program. She later taught and developed college-level field courses for Sea Education Association, University of Pittsburgh, Long Island University, University of Montana, and Prescott College. From 2001 to 2004, Tracy developed an international ship-based ocean semester on the West Coast for Long Island University. In 2004, Tracy founded STEP's College-Prep and Leadership Program with the focused mission of educating and empowering low-income Arizona high-school students to enroll in and graduate from college. Connect with Tracy https://www.instagram.com/stepcollegeprep https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracybaynesstep/: National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Also ... check out this video compilation of seniors opening their acceptance emails - it is 3 minutes of pure joy! Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 423: Why Aren't They Owning It!? with Sarah Olivieri | 25 May 2026 | 00:08:47 | |
Episode Description Most leaders think of delegation as a way to get time back. That framing is half the story, and it's the half that keeps leaders stuck in the weeds. When the conversation around delegation only centers on the CEO's calendar, the team ends up filled with people who do tasks well and own almost nothing. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through why delegating outcomes, not tasks, is what builds a team capable of running the organization forward. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 422: Compassionate Nonprofit Leadership Is Operational Lubricant with Yerachmiel Stern | 21 May 2026 | 00:28:32 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Hidden Cost of "Efficient" LeadershipMost nonprofit leaders I work with want to move faster, decide cleaner, and hold the standard. From the outside, that looks responsible. From the inside, something else is usually happening. When a leader skips the relational work because it feels slow, the cost doesn't disappear. It moves. It shows up later as rework, attrition, board friction, and team members who go quiet in meetings because they have stopped expecting to be heard. The bill comes due downstream, where it is harder to trace. The truth is, the time you spend being human with your team is not extra. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else faster. Source of InsightI've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Yerachmiel Stern, the executive director of Pesach Tikvah, and it was an important reminder to me that there are still many leaders out there who think compassion is "soft" and a "waste of time". Those leaders are missing out on the important role compassion plays in a well run, highly effective organization. The Tone You Set Is the System You GetThe single most underrated piece of organizational design is the emotional state of the leader walking into the room. Not the agenda. Not the org chart. The leader's tone. When a leader walks in, regulated, warm, and present, the team's nervous system gets a signal: it's safe to think out loud here. Hard things can be named here. Mistakes can surface here without triggering self-protection. That signal is doing real operational work. It is shortening the time between a problem appearing and a problem getting solved. When a leader walks in tight, transactional, or performatively calm, the team picks that up too. People stop volunteering information. Decisions move underground. The same problems take three meetings to surface that should have taken one. In short:
This is why "read the room" is not a soft skill. It is a leadership requirement. Before you open your mouth in a meeting, you are already leading. The Goalposts QuestionOne of the cleaner ways to diagnose whether a leader is operating from infrastructure or from extraction is to watch what happens when a team member brings a request that doesn't fit the existing rule. The old reflex is to point at the rule. Policy says no. Budget says no. We don't do that here. The infrastructure-minded leader asks a different question: "Is this rule still serving the outcome we actually want, or is it serving the convenience of saying no?" Sometimes the answer is genuinely no, and the leader holds the line. Often the rule was set in a different context, the request is reasonable, and the cost of saying yes is much smaller than the goodwill you lose by reflexively saying no. In short:
This isn't about being a pushover. It is about staying connected to why the rule existed in the first place. Hiring for the Heart, Not the ResumeConventional hiring asks: Have you done this exact job before? It optimizes for risk reduction. It also reliably under-selects for the people who would have been excellent in the role with a slightly different background. Relational hiring asks a different question: what does this person actually want to do, and is that aligned with what we need done? The shift sounds soft. It is not. It is one of the highest-leverage operational moves a CEO or executive director can make. People who are doing work that matches what they actually want to do produce more, stay longer, and require less management. People who are doing work they took because it was available produce less, leave sooner, and require constant supervision. In short:
You will not get this right every time. Nobody does. But shifting the question from "have you done this" to "do you want to do this" changes your hiring math permanently. (For more on the underlying skill of leading with this kind of attunement, see) The Power of Soft Skills for Nonprofit Leaders. Compassionate ReleaseThe harder version of this same principle shows up in firing. Most leaders avoid letting someone go for too long. They tell themselves they are being compassionate. The person needs the job. The team is already stretched. The performance gap isn't catastrophic. We'll give it another quarter. What is actually happening, in most of these situations, is that the person being kept in the wrong role already knows. Their nervous system knows. Their family knows. The team knows. Everyone is in a quiet, low-grade limbo that costs energy from every direction at once. When the leader finally has the conversation, the most common response isn't anger. It's relief. Sometimes spoken, sometimes not. The person was waiting to be released from a fit that was never going to work, and they were too loyal, too scared, or too tired to release themselves. I call this a compassionate release. The compassion is in the clarity, not in the delay. In short:
Holding someone in a misfit role isn't generosity. It's a tax everyone is paying, and the longest-paying account is the person you think you're protecting. The Ford and the CadillacThere is a version of nonprofit leadership that aims for "good enough." The reasoning sounds responsible. We don't have unlimited resources. We can't deliver gold-standard service to every client. We have to triage. We have to be realistic. This framing adds risk. The math isn't wrong. The framing is. It confuses two different things: what you can deliver structurally, and how you deliver what you have. Two organizations can offer the exact same baseline service, and one will feel like an extraordinary experience and the other will feel like a transaction. The difference isn't the budget. The difference is the personal touch wrapped around the delivery. One line from my conversation with Yerachmiel stayed with me: "If you give the clients that personal touch, the Ford could be better than the Cadillac." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The personal touch is what converts a service into a relationship. The relationship is what produces retention, referrals, advocacy, and the willingness to come back when things get hard. None of that requires more money. All of it requires presence. I had this experience recently in an emergency room. The equipment was advanced. The diagnostics were thorough. The most meaningful 30 seconds of the entire visit was a staff member taking a breath, asking how I was doing, and telling me my chair could recline. He delivered the most excellent service of the visit, and it cost him nothing. That is the Ford becoming the Cadillac. The structure didn't change. The presence did. When Going Slow Is Going FastThe hardest piece of this for high-performing leaders to internalize is that the relational work, which feels slow, is what creates the speed. I learned this with my own son, who is on the autism spectrum and has ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and anxiety. The clinicians who took an extra five minutes to let him regulate consistently finished on time. The clinicians who tried to muscle through and just hold him still consistently turned a 30-minute appointment into a two-hour event. Sometimes the visit had to be rescheduled at a different office entirely. The "fast" approach was the slowest approach. The "slow" approach was actually the fastest one. The math is unambiguous once you start counting all the hours, not just the visible ones. In short:
This same pattern shows up everywhere a nonprofit leader operates. With board members. With staff. With donors. With clients. The minutes you invest in being a person before you are a transaction are the minutes that compound. Humility Is a Confidence MoveThere is an older model of leadership that equates confidence with never apologizing, never being wrong, and never being visibly uncertain. It's still around, and it's slowly being retired for a good reason. Confidence in a leadership role isn't the absence of mistakes. It is the willingness to absorb the final responsibility for the outcome, mistakes included. When the team trusts that the leader will carry the weight at the macro level, the leader is then free to be humble and openly learn at the everyday level. That doesn't subtract from authority. It deepens it. People follow humans, not personas. (For more on this, see The Power of Vulnerability with Becca Pearce.) What This Makes PossibleWhen compassion is treated as infrastructure rather than personality, a few things shift. What shifts:
None of this is about being softer. It is about understanding what creates throughput in a human system, and building for it on purpose. It's Work That Compounds… and we like thatThis isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that compounds. Nonprofits can run on compassion and run on time. Not by pushing harder, but by building systems that treat human connection as the structural asset it actually is. About the GuestYerachmiel Stern is the Executive Director of Pesach Tikvah, where he has dedicated his career to expanding access to quality mental health care. Before stepping into this role, he spent a decade as Borough Park Clinics Director, bringing affordable, sophisticated services to underserved neighborhoods. A Touro University graduate, he began at Pesach Tikvah as an intern and counselor, later becoming known for his work with children and his expertise across multiple therapeutic modalities. Today, Mr. Stern is leading the organization into its 40th year, advancing excellence in mental health and developmental disability services. Connect with Yerachmiel: Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 421: CEO or Operator Mode with Sarah Olivieri | 18 May 2026 | 00:18:02 | |
Episode Description Most founders are running their organization from operator mode and calling it leadership. The doing feels productive. The decisions feel necessary. And the strategic work, the part that actually points the organization in the right direction, keeps getting pushed to "when things calm down." … And things never calm down. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the difference between CEO mode and operator mode, why staying stuck in the doing creates a bottleneck that stalls growth, and how to start protecting visionary time even when you are wearing every hat. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Nonprofit Executive Directors and CEOs wearing every hat and quietly suspicious that visionary work doesn't count as real work
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 420: Design Thinking Without The Jargon with Ashley Jablow | 14 May 2026 | 00:36:56 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Problem Isn't Change. It's the Size of the Decision.Most nonprofit leaders I talk to are not actually afraid of change. They are stuck between two sizes of it. On one side, a monster decision. Restructure the program. Leave the role. Overhaul the funding model. A move so big it feels reckless to say out loud. On the other side, no change at all. Keep going. Ride it out another quarter. Wait for more information. Wait for the board. Wait for a better moment. What nobody offers is the middle option. The small, cheap, fast, reversible move whose only job is to teach you something. That option is almost always the right one, and it is almost always missing from the conversation. Where This Thinking Came FromI've been turning this over for a while. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Ashley Jablow, who works with leaders and teams in transition and has deep training in design thinking. It sharpened how I think about why change gets stuck inside nonprofits and what actually unsticks it. The short version: the problem isn't that leaders lack courage. The problem is that the only option on the table is too expensive to say yes to. Change Is Neutral. The Story You Wrap Around It Isn't.Change is constantly happening. Seasons turn. Budgets shift. Staff come and go. A funder's priorities drift. A board member rolls off. None of that is catastrophic on its own. What makes change feel charged is the story we attach to it. In the nonprofit sector, that story is usually some version of: change is dangerous, so we should avoid it. That story hardens into a posture. The posture becomes the culture. The culture becomes the reason your organization cannot move. In short:
If you want an organization that can respond to what the world is actually doing, you have to separate the event from the story. The Hidden Cost of "Staying Put"Here is the belief I keep running into inside nonprofits: doing nothing is the safe option. Especially with money. Especially with programs that "have always worked." Especially when funders are watching. The truth is, staying put is not neutral. It has a cost, and that cost is usually larger than the one people are trying to avoid. If a program is slowly losing relevance and you do not adjust, the cost shows up later as a funding cliff. If a leader is quietly burning out and the system does not adapt, the cost shows up as a crisis hire. If a revenue model depends on one big grant and you do not diversify, the cost shows up when that grant does not renew. In short:
When leaders only weigh the risk of moving, they miss half the math. Why Nonprofits Over-Index on the Risk of MovingTwo structural things push nonprofits toward inaction. The first is the donor stewardship story. Somewhere along the way, "be a good steward of donor money" got translated into "never take risks with money." That is not what stewardship means. Stewardship means using resources wisely in service of the mission. Sometimes that means holding the line. Sometimes it means making a bet. The second is harder to see, and it matters more. In most nonprofits, the people with the biggest formal role in risky decisions, the board, do not experience the consequences of those decisions. The staff does. The community does. The executive director does. The board votes and goes home. So when a decision comes with risk, the board defaults to "let's not do that." To them, sitting still feels responsible. To the people running the organization every day, sitting still might be the thing burning the building down. In short:
Decisions belong, as much as possible, with the people who will live inside their outcomes. That is not a revolutionary idea. It is just rarely the way nonprofit governance actually operates. The Move That Makes Change ManageableThis is where the size of the decision matters. When every change is framed as a cannon shot, people freeze. The stakes are too high, the ambiguity too wide, the board too uncomfortable. So nothing moves. But there is another option. Jim Collins calls it firing bullets before cannons. Ashley Jablow frames it as a design thinking question. It is the same idea in different clothes. Ask what is the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing I could do right now to learn the most? That is a different size of decision. It does not require a board vote. It does not require a three year strategic plan. It does not require certainty. It only requires that you be willing to run a small experiment and read the results. In short:
One line from that conversation with Ashley has stayed with me: "What is the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing that you could do or try right now in order to learn the most?" What I appreciate about this framing is that it does not ask the leader to be brave. It asks them to be curious. It shrinks the change until it fits inside the capacity the organization actually has, and then it uses the result of that small move to decide the next one. That is how sustainable change actually works. Not through heroic leaps. Through a chain of small moves that each teach you something. Self-Trust Is the Quiet Currency of ChangeThere is a second thing small experiments do that nobody talks about, and it may be more important than the learning itself. They build self-trust. Every small move you make and see through teaches you that you are a person who follows through. Every small experiment that works teaches you that your instincts are worth listening to. Every small experiment that fails teaches you that failure is survivable and useful. You cannot lead a big change if you do not trust yourself to make a small one. And most leaders who feel stuck are not missing strategy. They are missing the lived experience of their own follow-through. In short:
This is why the "do one small thing" advice is not soft advice. It is structural. It is how capacity gets built. Another moment from the conversation sat with me here. Ashley named a question she said often hides under any change effort, whether leaders realize it or not: "Can I trust myself to actually accomplish this and follow through?" Most leaders never say that question out loud. So the answer never gets built. Small experiments are how you build the answer. What This Makes PossibleWhen leaders stop sizing every change as either "do nothing" or "blow it up," the whole posture of the organization changes. What shifts:
The work is not lighter. It is just better aimed. ClosingThis isn't about being braver. It's about picking a smaller move. Nonprofits can adapt without crisis. They can change without drama. They can build self-trust through evidence instead of hoping for it. Not by betting the whole organization on one cannon shot, but by firing a lot of cheap, honest bullets and paying attention to where they land. 🎧 Listen to the full episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership to hear the conversation that informed this thinking. 📬 Subscribe to the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly insights designed to help nonprofit leaders build clarity, capacity, and results, without burning themselves or their teams out. Related reading: Reclaim Your Capacity, The Energy Factor, and A Lesson on Delegation. About the GuestAshley Jablow (Jab-lo, pronouns: she/her) is the founder of Wayfinders Collective and creator of Life Design School, a creative studio for people in career and life transition. Connect with Ashley: The Innovative Leadership Salon Series Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 419: Stop Designing Programs Backwards with Sarah Olivieri | 11 May 2026 | 00:12:32 | |
Episode Description Most nonprofit leaders sit down to design a program and start by mapping the steps. The modules. The services. The flow. That work is real, and it belongs at step four, not step one. The three steps that should come before it are usually missing entirely, which is why so many programs are hard to run, hard to improve, and hard to explain to funders. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through a four-part program design framework that flips the order most organizations are using. In This Episode, You'll Learn
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 418: Boundaries Are a System Problem with TaShun Bowden-Lewis | 07 May 2026 | 00:23:59 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... How Nonprofit Leaders Can Set Boundaries, Protect Their Mission, and Lead Without Burning OutHere's what nobody tells you when you step into a leadership role at a mission-driven organization: the mission can become the reason you never stop working. Because the need is real. Because your team is watching. Because the funder is waiting. Because someone always needs something — and you got into this work because you care. The truth is, that's not sustainable leadership. That's a slow leak. In a recent episode of the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership podcast, I sat down with TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Esquire — CEO and Founder of The Bowden-Lewis Consulting Group, and the first Black Chief Public Defender in Connecticut's history. TaShun has led under some of the most demanding, high-stakes conditions a public-sector leader can face. What she's built — both in herself and in the organizations she's run — is a repeatable system for leading with boundaries intact. What follows is the framework she shared, broken into the three areas where most nonprofit leaders lose the most ground: time, self-care, and money. The "Warm No" — How to Hold a Boundary Without Abandoning AnyoneMost leaders avoid saying no because they think it means abandoning the person asking. TaShun reframes it entirely. A warm no isn't a refusal. It's a redirect. "A warm no is: I can't do it right now, but I can get to that tomorrow morning." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis Even better: "I can't help with that, but Jane Doe can — let's connect you right now." The need still gets addressed. The relationship stays intact. And your time and energy stay where they belong. This matters more than it sounds. When leaders say yes to everything, they're not being generous — they're being unclear. Unclear about priorities. Unclear about capacity. And that unclarity spreads. Every person on your team is watching how you respond to demands on your time. They are calibrating their own behavior accordingly. As I've said on the show: "If you aren't setting time boundaries, you're leading everybody else not to do it." The practical version of this looks like task-batching your email (TaShun checks it in designated windows only), setting a hard cutoff time at the end of your workday, removing work email from your phone, and putting your availability expectations in your auto-responder and your email signature. Not as a preference. As a policy. "I only respond to emails between 10 and 11. If it's an emergency, here's another way to reach me." That's not a wall. That's a system. Self-Care as Infrastructure, Not a ClichéThere's a version of the self-care conversation that's become background noise — bubble baths, journaling prompts, take a walk. TaShun isn't interested in that version. She talks about self-care the way she talks about organizational systems: it has to run on autopilot. It has to be structural. It can't be something you get to when things calm down, because things never calm down. "Self-care has to be a non-negotiable." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis Her practice is grounded in the margins of the day — morning silence and gratitude before the work begins, evening reflection on a single daily win before the day ends. Not a two-hour morning routine. Not a perfect system. Just two consistent anchors that keep the nervous system from running hot all day long. This isn't a lifestyle preference. It's a leadership strategy. When you're dysregulated, your team feels it. When you're burned out, your decision-making degrades — quietly, gradually, in ways that are hard to see until you're already in trouble. "Everything trickles down from the head," TaShun said. The energy you bring into every room is the energy your team marries up to. Peer support networks and executive coaching fall into the same category. TaShun is direct about the loneliness of leadership — especially for leaders who are "firsts" in their field. "Being a leader sometimes is isolating." The antidote isn't performing wellness. It's building the actual structures — the coach, the peer group, the reflection practice — that give you somewhere to process what you're carrying. Mission Clarity as a Financial BoundaryMost discussions about nonprofit boundaries stop at time and energy. TaShun takes it one step further: your mission has to be the filter for your money relationships. Specifically, for your donor relationships. When a funder comes with money attached to conditions that would redirect your organization's energy — conditions that aren't actually aligned with your North Star goal — the warm no applies there, too. The mission protects you. But only if it's operational. "The mission has to be operational, not just inspirational." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis An inspirational mission statement is on your wall. An operational mission is the specific, concrete goal that every program, hire, partnership, and resource decision flows through. It's what you look at when a donor says "I'd love to fund this, if you'd just add that." Icing before cake is the problem. Most organizations chase funding before they've built the foundation that makes that funding worth having. When your mission is vague, you're vulnerable — to scope creep, donor capture, and mission drift that happens one "yes" at a time. When your mission is a real North Star, the warm no becomes obvious. You're not rejecting a donor. You're being clear about where you're going. What This Looks Like When It's WorkingA leader who has these disciplines in place looks different from the outside. Her team knows when she's available — and when she's not. They hold their own time boundaries because she modeled them first. The organization's programs, partnerships, and donor relationships all trace back to the same operational mission. There's a peer who gets a call on the hard days. There's a morning that's hers before the work takes over. She isn't working less. She's working with more intention — and the difference shows up in results, retention, and the long-term sustainability of everything she's built. None of this is complicated. All of it takes discipline. The good news is that these are structural decisions, not motivational ones. You don't have to feel like setting boundaries in order to set them. You just have to build the system and hold the line. TaShun has. You can too. About the GuestTaShun Bowden-Lewis, Esq., is my guest for this episode. consultant, personal and executive coach, and the CEO/Founder of The Bowden-Lewis Consulting Group. With almost 30 years in the CT Division of Public Defender Services, culminating in her historic 2022 appointment as the first Black Chief Public Defender, she is an experienced, transformative leader with the business acumen and community-focused mindset to deliver results through discipline, integrity, and perseverance. She has been an Associate Professor at Post University, in Waterbury, CT, for almost twenty years. TaShun has been recognized and lauded for her leadership, community outreach, and dedication to her craft. In 2023, she became a CT Bar Foundation, James W. Cooper Fellow and in 2024, she received the Edwin Archer Diversity Award from the Lawyers Collaborative for Diversity. She is also a mentor, workshop facilitator, and trainer. Connect with TaShun Bowden-Lewis: Booking: https://thebowdenlewisconsultinggroup.zohobookings.com/#/4698007000000043010 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/The-Bowden-Lewis-Consulting-Group-61573189334209/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashun-bowden-lewis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2MBtPkmcN/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 417: Budgets Aren't Crystal Balls with Sarah Olivieri | 04 May 2026 | 00:12:14 | |
Your budget is not a financial strategy. It's a forecast — a guess about the future made with the information you had at the time. And the problem isn't that you made a guess. The problem is what most organizations do next: they lock that guess in place and measure everything against it for the next twelve months, even as new information comes in. In this solo episode, Sarah unpacks one of the most common and costly mistakes nonprofit leaders make around money: confusing a budget with a plan. A budget tells you what you thought would happen. Financial strategy tells you how to use what you actually have to move your organization forward. These are not the same thing — and conflating them creates a cycle that keeps leaders reactive instead of strategic. Sarah also makes the case for why having a board approve an annual budget may be doing more harm than good. When executive directors are spending their energy figuring out what the board will approve rather than what will actually work, the organization loses. She shares what board oversight of finances can look like instead — and why the leaders who've made this shift consistently report that both the board and the executive director end up more engaged, not less. If you've ever felt constrained by your own budget mid-year, or frustrated that the numbers no longer reflect reality, this episode gives you a framework for thinking about money that actually moves with you. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is for nonprofit executive directors who feel stuck managing a budget that no longer reflects reality, and for board members who want to provide genuine financial oversight rather than rubber-stamp a twelve-month guess. It's also for any leader who suspects their budgeting process is generating more friction than clarity. About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.
Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com | |||
| 416: Run It Like A Legacy with Diane Strand | 30 Apr 2026 | 00:33:16 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... There is a quiet assumption running through most conversations about nonprofits and for-profit businesses. It goes like this:
The fix, the assumption goes, is to bring more business thinking into the nonprofit world. I think that assumption is backwards! Stick with me… The nonprofit business model is more complex than the for-profit one. Not harder in spirit. More complex in structure. For-profit often start with one revenue engine, one customer, and one bottom line. A nonprofit has:
That is a more complex business model on every measurable dimension. When systems are unclear, people compensate with effort. And when the system is structurally more complex than the leader is treating it, the compensation never catches up. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Diane Strand, who runs both a seven-figure for-profit production company and a multi-million-dollar nonprofit creative academy, and it sharpened how I think about what actually creates staying power in mission-driven organizations. The ideas weren't new to me. What was new was hearing them from someone who has lived both sides at scale, long enough to see which lessons travel in which direction. The Mental Model Most Leaders Inherit Is WrongThe default mental model for nonprofit leadership treats it as a softer, less rigorous version of business. Less spreadsheets. More heart. The unspoken assumption is that if a nonprofit just learned to act more like a business, it would run better. But running a nonprofit "like a business" doesn't mean importing for-profit playbooks wholesale. It means building the infrastructure that a more complex business model requires. In short:
A two-employee for-profit and a fourteen-employee nonprofit are not at the same stage of business. The nonprofit has already moved past mom-and-pop. It needs documented processes, clear roles, financial tracking by funding source, governance separation between the board and the staff, and a distinction between operations and strategy. None of that is optional. It's what the structure requires. Restricted Money (Something For-Profits Would Never Accept and Neither Should You)One of the cleanest examples of nonprofit complexity is restricted funding. A $50,000 grant is not worth $50,000. It is worth $50,000 minus the administrative cost of tracking it separately, reporting on it specifically, and managing the constraints attached to how it can be spent. That math is rarely visible on the balance sheet, but it is real. Most nonprofit leaders I work with have never had this said out loud to them. They treat restricted dollars and unrestricted dollars as equivalent in their planning, because the bookkeeping treats them as equivalent in total revenue. The cost shows up later as overload, missed deadlines, and the slow grinding feeling that the organization is somehow always behind, and having financial admin costs they don't have funding for. In short:
Build the plumbing first. That means knowing what each revenue source actually costs you to receive and steward, before you accept it. Fundraising Is A Business Unit, Not An Overhead LineHere is the lesson nonprofits most often fail to apply to themselves. Fundraising is, on the numbers, one of the most profitable business activities anywhere. A well-run fundraising operation turns one dollar into three, four, sometimes fifty. There are not many for-profit businesses that produce that kind of return. And yet most nonprofits underfund their fundraising department, hesitate to ask donors for what they actually need, and route restricted donations into programming because that's what donors say they want. The result is a profitable business unit being starved by the rest of the organization. In short:
If a for-profit CEO discovered they had a business line returning three to four times the dollars invested, they would pour resources into it without hesitation. Nonprofits routinely do the opposite, then wonder why the organization can't grow. Building A Nonprofit Like A Legacy BusinessDiane said something during our conversation that I want to highlight, because it captures the structural shift most clearly: "Building the nonprofit as a business that has a legacy side to it that's going to go on, it needs to be able to have structure and process and procedure. It's even more of a business than probably my for-profit is a business." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. A two-person for-profit can run on the founders' personal expertise and stay simple. A fourteen-person nonprofit cannot. The nonprofit must be built so that it survives any individual leader leaving, because that is what the mission requires. The structure is the legacy. The processes are the legacy. The documented decision rights are the legacy. This is the inverse of how most early-stage for-profits operate. And it is exactly why the lessons about systems, sequencing, and operational design that get learned inside a growing nonprofit are often more transferable than the other direction. If you've built a fourteen-person organization that can survive without you, you've already done harder operational work than most small business owners ever attempt. (For more on building leadership capacity beyond a single founder, this conversation on shared leadership goes deeper.) The Ecosystem MoveThe other pattern worth naming is what happens when leaders stop running their nonprofit as a closed system and start running it as one node inside a larger ecosystem. Sponsorships from the city. Corporate partners hiring graduates. Board members opening doors that took twelve years to earn. None of that is accidental. It is the result of a leader who built the organization with deliberate connection points to the surrounding economy. In short:
Year one, you cannot make the phone call. Year twelve, you can. The difference is not effort. The difference is what the leader spent the first eleven years building underneath. The Service Loop Goes Both WaysOne more thing Diane named that has stayed with me: "I don't get to save the profits and it's not mine, allowed me to realize how to build wealth for the organization, not necessarily how... and stop worrying about the cash flow. And then when I started putting that into my business and I started learning to focus more about building wealth for my family and my business and not worrying about the cash flow, my business grew as well." This makes sense given the setup. When a leader is forced to think in terms of organizational wealth instead of personal cash flow (which is what running a nonprofit requires), they develop a longer planning horizon. That longer horizon, brought back into the for-profit, produces better decisions in both places. The nonprofit makes the for-profit leader better. The for-profit makes the nonprofit leader better. The loop runs in both directions, but it only runs if the leader is willing to learn the harder model first. For more on this, my piece on why nonprofits are businesses with a more complex business model goes deeper into how that complexity translates into transferable leadership skill. When leaders see this clearly, the conversation about nonprofit operations stops being defensive. What shifts:
This isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that compounds. ClosingNonprofits are not underdeveloped businesses. They are over-complex ones. The leaders who internalize that stop importing the wrong playbook. Working harder will not get you there. Building systems that match the complexity the work actually requires will. 🎧 Listen to the full episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership to hear the conversation that informed this thinking. 📬 Subscribe to the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly insights designed to help nonprofit leaders build clarity, capacity, and results, without burning themselves or their teams out. About the GuestDiane Strand is an award-winning entrepreneur, marketer, and speaker who helps creatives turn their passions into profitable businesses. She is the founder of JDS Productions, a seven-figure media company, and co-founder of JDS Creative Academy, a nonprofit creating career pathways in the arts for youth and special needs adults. Connect with Diane: Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 415: Focus Isn't a One-Time Thing with Sarah Olivieri | 27 Apr 2026 | 00:11:02 | |
Focus Isn't a Personality Trait. It's a System. Most leaders think about focus the wrong way. They treat it like a switch — either you have it or you don't — and then blame themselves when it slips. But focus doesn't work like that. It drifts. That's not a flaw; it's just how attention works. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down what focus actually is, why treating it as an on/off state sets you up to fail, and what it looks like to build real, sustainable focus — for yourself and for your team. The key isn't staying focused. It's learning to recognize when you've drifted, and having a practical way to return. Sarah also connects individual focus to something nonprofit leaders often underestimate: team alignment. When your team isn't focused, it's rarely a motivation problem. It's usually a system's problem. Meetings, rhythms, and shared rituals aren't overhead — they're the mechanism that keeps everyone pointed in the same direction between strategy conversations. This episode is short, practical, and built around a concept that shows up constantly in The Impact Method®: what you focus on matters as much as how you focus. Chasing perfection, for example, is a form of focus — just not a useful one. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is for nonprofit executive directors and team leaders who feel like they're constantly busy but can't quite get traction — and for anyone who's wondered why focus feels harder some days than others. It's also for leaders who want their team meetings to do more than check boxes. About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 414:Show Up, Stand Out with Bofta M Yimam | 23 Apr 2026 | 00:46:47 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Visibility Isn't Vanity—It's How Trust Gets BuiltThere's a quiet belief I hear from nonprofit leaders all the time: "If I focus too much on visibility, it will feel like it's about me." But here's the truth: If people don't see you, they can't trust you. That's why this conversation with Bofta Yimam stuck with me. She didn't just talk about LinkedIn as a marketing tool. She reframed it as something much more important: 👉 A trust-building engine. The Real Reason Visibility MattersMost nonprofits don't struggle because their work isn't meaningful. They struggle because not enough people understand it. And in today's world, understanding doesn't come from one meeting or one email. It comes from repeated exposure. From seeing you show up. That's what visibility does. It shortens the distance between "I've heard of you" and "I trust you." Why Personal Branding Feels So UncomfortableA lot of leaders hesitate here. They understand the value—but it still feels uncomfortable. There's a fear that being visible will come across as self-promotion. Or that it somehow takes attention away from the mission. But in reality, the opposite is true. People connect with people first. Then they connect with organizations. When you share why you care, how you think, and what you're seeing… You make the mission more accessible. Visibility Shortens the Fundraising CycleOne of the most practical takeaways from this conversation is this: 👉 Visibility builds trust before the conversation even starts. Instead of starting from zero every time you meet a donor, They've seen your perspective. So when you finally talk, you're not introducing yourself. You're continuing a conversation that's already been happening. Consistency Beats IntensityYou don't need to post every day. You don't need a full marketing team. What you need is consistency. A few thoughtful posts each week. Because this is not about quick wins. It's about building momentum over time. Think of It Like a Room You Want to Be InOne of my favorite ways to think about LinkedIn is this: It's a room full of people who care about impact, ideas, and connection. Your job isn't to impress the room. Your job is to show up, be part of the conversation, If you're not sure where to begin:
That's enough to get started. Final ThoughtVisibility isn't about being louder. It's about being clearer, more consistent, and more human. Because when people understand you, And when they trust you, Bofta Yimam is an Emmy® and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning journalist, international speaker, and Founder of StoryLede. As the first Ethiopian-American newscaster to receive an Emmy, she helps leaders and business owners amplify their stories and boost visibility. With more than a decade of reporting for outlets like CBS News and The Black News Channel, Bofta has covered historic moments from the White House to the 2020 election. As a former Capitol Hill Correspondent, she's known for her powerful storytelling and trusted voice on issues impacting communities of color. Today, Bofta is a sought-after speaker and corporate trainer who empowers entrepreneurs, nonprofit founders, and thought leaders to elevate their presence online, on stage, and in their industries—driving greater visibility, impact, and revenue.
Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 413: When "Success" Still Feels Off with Sarah Olivieri | 20 Apr 2026 | 00:09:42 | |
In this solo episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership, Sarah Olivieri addresses something many executive directors and nonprofit CEOs experience but rarely name: the organization is growing, the mission is moving forward—and yet something still feels off. Heavy. Like it all depends on you. Most leaders in this position try to push through. They optimize their calendars, delegate more tasks, and look for ways to do more faster. And for a while, that works. But at a certain scale, doing more of the same thing stops solving the problem—because the problem isn't effort. It's structure. When you are the engine of your organization, no level of success will ever feel spacious. Sarah explains why this feeling isn't a motivation problem or a time management problem. It's a leadership structure problem. When the organization's capacity to execute still runs through one person—even a highly capable one—every new initiative, every growth milestone, adds weight instead of momentum. The cost is real, even when it's invisible: opportunities not pursued, decisions delayed, and a team that can't move without you. Drawing from her own experience leading and scaling organizations, Sarah shares what it felt like when her own internal signal said, this isn't right—and what she did to recalibrate. She uses that turning point to illustrate a broader truth: the shift from founder-mode to CEO-mode isn't about working less. It's about leading differently. She introduces three specific patterns that keep successful nonprofit leaders stuck: still operating as the primary decision-maker, delegating tasks instead of leadership, and building a strategy that outpaces what the team can actually execute. Each one is common. Each one is fixable. But none of them respond to working harder. What they require is a recalibration of how you lead, how you delegate, and how you set strategy in proportion to your team's real capacity. If your nonprofit looks successful from the outside but feels unsustainable from the inside, this episode will help you name what's actually happening—and point you toward what to change. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is especially helpful for: • Executive directors whose organizations have grown but who still feel like the primary driver of everything • Nonprofit CEOs who are delegating tasks but still making most of the decisions • Leaders whose strategic plans consistently outpace what their teams can execute • Anyone who has wondered why success still feels this exhausting About Your Host, Sarah OlivieriBold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 412 The Power of Vulnerability with Becca Pearce | 16 Apr 2026 | 00:33:05 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... What Vulnerability Actually Has to Do With ChangeI had a conversation with Becca Pearce recently — executive coach, former nonprofit CEO, brain tumor survivor, author of You Don't Have to Achieve to Be Loved — and one thing she said has been sitting with me since. She was walking through the ten realizations in her book, and she said this: vulnerability is the key to making change because if you're not vulnerable, there will be no change. That's not a soft observation. It's a description of a mechanism. And the more I think about it in the context of nonprofit leadership specifically, the more I think most leaders are trying to create change without doing the thing that actually makes change possible. The Real Reason Change StallsWhen nonprofit leaders tell me they're stuck, the conversation usually starts with the usual suspects:
And yes, those are real. But they're rarely the root of the problem. What I see more often is this: leaders are operating inside a set of assumptions they've never questioned. About what success looks like. About what their role requires of them. About what good leadership is supposed to feel like. And those assumptions — most of them inherited, not chosen — are doing a lot of quiet damage. When your actions are out of alignment with what you actually value, everything gets harder. Not because you're doing things wrong, but because you're measuring yourself against a standard that was never yours to begin with. Becca put it plainly: "You're probably living somebody else's definition of success." That's true for individuals. It's also true for organizations. The Nonprofit Version of This ProblemHere's what I see happen in nonprofits specifically. Most organizations start out on a clear path — usually tied directly to the founder's vision, their proximity to the problem, their lived understanding of what needs to change. That clarity is one of the great assets of early-stage nonprofits. Then things shift. Funders come in with their own definitions of impact. Industry norms start to accumulate. Boards begin setting direction — and boards, while essential for oversight, are watching the journey from the outside. They aren't walking it. And when the people setting the path aren't the ones who have to walk it, the path usually isn't as good as the one the organization would have found for itself. So the mission stays intact. But the how — how to pursue it, what it looks like in practice, what success actually means day-to-day — gets progressively shaped by other people's expectations. And the leader is left trying to execute someone else's vision with their own energy. No wonder they're exhausted. This isn't because people are bad. It's because the system makes it very easy to inherit a direction without noticing you've done it. What Vulnerability Has to Do With ItHere's the part that tends to make high-achieving leaders uncomfortable: to question those inherited assumptions, you have to be willing to not know. You have to be willing to look at what you've built and ask honestly whether it's what you actually want to build — and whether the way you're measuring success is actually measuring the right thing. That's what vulnerability means in practice. Not oversharing. Not performing openness. It means being willing to ask:
Those questions are uncomfortable precisely because the answers might require you to change something. Time Doesn't Care About Your AssumptionsOne of the other things Becca said that I keep thinking about: "Time is your only non-renewable resource." This matters more than it sounds. Leaders often try to solve misalignment problems with efficiency — better time management, tighter systems, more focus. And those things help. But if the underlying direction is off, being more efficient just means executing the wrong things faster. You will get very, very good at building something you didn't actually want to build. If the system is running on inherited values you haven't examined, the results are predictable: leaders who are constantly busy and persistently unfulfilled. Organizations that are technically functional and quietly stuck. What This Actually RequiresBecca works with leaders who have, in her words, done everything they were supposed to do and are waking up to the fact that it still doesn't feel right. That's a specific and uncomfortable place to be. And it takes real vulnerability to stay in that discomfort long enough to figure out what's actually going on instead of just working harder. For nonprofit leaders, I'd add one layer: this work isn't optional. The clarity you have about your own values, the degree to which your daily decisions actually reflect those values, the willingness to question whether the direction you're heading is the one you'd choose — that's not just personal development. It shapes everything downstream. It shapes your culture, your team, your relationship with your board, your ability to make good decisions under pressure. Values misalignment is actually a structural problem. And you can't fix it by adding more capacity or tightening your operations. You have to look at it directly. That's the vulnerable part. That's also the necessary part. About the GuestBecca Pearce, author of You Don't Have to Achieve to Be Loved, has spent much of her career as a corporate warrior, leading teams at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and Kaiser Permanente before being appointed CEO of Maryland's Health Benefit Exchange. After a very public separation from the Exchange, Becca was diagnosed with a brain tumor, triggering a life-altering health battle that forced her to redefine success. Today, as an inspirational speaker, growth strategist and executive coach, she sparks transformation in organizations and empowers professionals to lead with authenticity and purpose. She shares her journey as living proof that no matter how many times you've been "chewed up and spit out" by life, you can rise stronger and live fully. When she's not on stage, she can be found on her boat, surrounded by family, friends, and her beloved pit bull mix, Nia. Connect with Becca: Personal Website: www.morebeccapearce.com Book Website: www.youdonthavetoachievetobeloved.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccapearce/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 411: A Lesson From My Mom with Sarah Olivieri | 13 Apr 2026 | 00:08:14 | |
In this solo episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership, Sarah Olivieri shares a personal story that shaped how she thinks about leadership, delegation, and scaling. Early in her career, Sarah witnessed something that didn't look like traditional leadership at all. Her mom, who had no formal business training, stepped into running a small independent school and, over time, built it into a thriving, sustainable organization. What stood out wasn't how hard she worked. It was how little she needed to be in the middle of everything once the organization was running well. When Sarah asked what she did all day, her mom's answer was surprisingly simple: she made herself available, but she wasn't constantly busy. The work had been distributed. The team knew what to do. The organization could function without her being in every decision. That moment revealed a powerful truth. Scaling isn't about doing more. It's about letting go. Sarah connects this story to a key leadership principle: delegating outcomes, not just tasks. Instead of holding onto control or micromanaging, effective leaders create systems and environments where teams can take ownership and succeed together. She also shares an early example of how this looked in practice, bringing staff together regularly to collaborate, think, and solve problems as a group, not through rigid control, but through shared ownership and trust If you've ever felt like your organization depends too heavily on you, this episode will help you rethink what leadership can look like and what's possible when you step back. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is especially helpful for:
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com | |||
| 410: Better Imagination = Better Strategy with Rebecca Sutherns | 09 Apr 2026 | 00:40:55 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Imagination: The Missing Ingredient for Better StrategyHave you ever experienced a strategic planning process where you get a room full of smart, committed people? They agree on the words. They nod at the plan. And then six months later, everyone is pulling in slightly different directions. In my experience, this happens when the plan was created without real clarity and alignment around where exactly we are trying to go. Clarity and alignment come from shared understanding. And shared understanding starts with how clearly people can picture what "done" looks like. And in order to "see" what "done" looks like, we need … IMAGINATION! I recently had a conversation about this with imagination expert and strategist Rebecca Sutherns. Imagination skills are critical for great strategy planning and execution. Are You Planning Backwards?Most planning processes are built around looking in the rearview mirror. We review last year's data. We evaluate what worked. We talk about what didn't. None of that is wrong. But it's incomplete. Because strategy is not about explaining the past. It's about building the future. Rebecca said something that stuck with me: "Our strategies ought to be forward-facing, not backward-facing." That sounds obvious. But it's not how most organizations actually operate. What happens instead is this: We take what we've already done. We make incremental adjustments. We call it strategy. That's not a strategy. That's iteration without intention. And when you build a plan this way, you end up with a partially built system. It functions—but it doesn't move you meaningfully forward… Because you haven't clearly imagined, as a collective, what the future looks like, tastes like, feels like. Why Alignment Breaks DownEven when teams do talk about the future, they often still don't align. Because they're using the same words… but imagining different things. Rebecca put it this way: "If people are not watching the same movie in their heads, there's a good chance you're using the same language but moving in different directions." I see this often. We assume other people are thinking what we are thinking when we talk to them, but actually getting them to think what we are thinking is a much harder feat. When we talk, we usually communicate only a tiny fraction of what we intend to. Ask a leadership team what success looks like, and you'll get five versions of the answer. None of them are wrong. But they're not the same. And when that happens, execution becomes messy. What Actually Creates AlignmentIf you only take one thing away, it's this: Alignment is not about agreement. You need people to be able to picture the same outcome. Not just intellectually—but concretely. That means moving beyond vague language like:
Those sound good. But they don't mean anything operationally. Instead, you need to ask:
This is where imagination becomes a leadership skill—not a nice-to-have. Why Imagination Feels So HardMost nonprofit leaders struggle with this. And it makes sense. They're operating at capacity. They're dealing with real constraints. They're trying to make payroll. So when you ask them to imagine a bold future, you often get: "I just want enough money to pay my staff." That's not a lack of ambition. It's a reflection of the state of being under-resourced. But constraints can actually enhance our ability to be creative. Rebecca shared a simple but powerful idea: Instead of removing constraints entirely, define them clearly. For example: "We have $50,000 and six months. Now what could we build?" This changes the conversation. It gives the brain edges to work within—without shutting down possibilities. How to Actually Build the SkillImagination is not a personality trait. It's a muscle. And like any muscle, it gets stronger with use. One of the most useful insights Rebecca shared is that imagination is built from memory. We don't create from nothing. We recombine what we've already seen, experienced, or learned. That means the fastest way to improve your strategic thinking is not another framework. It's more inputs.
This expands your "pantry" of ideas. And the bigger the pantry, the better your ability to combine ingredients and imagine something new. Imagination Changes How Leaders Show Up.There's one more piece here that I don't want to skip. Imagination changes how leaders show up. Because when you can imagine better, you start asking better questions, and better questions lead to better answers. Also, we can't be great at imagining if we don't get great at being curious. When leaders come in with curiosity, people open up. And when people open up, you get better thinking. Better thinking leads to better decisions. And better decisions lead to better results. About the GuestRebecca Sutherns, Ph.D., is the CEO and Founder of Sage Solutions, empowering purpose-driven leaders to align what's important to them with what they actually do. With 27+ years of global experience as a bestselling author, master facilitator, and coach, she uniquely helps clients leverage imagination as a strategic superpower, bringing analytical rigor, warm energy, and adaptability to strategy and governance. Her journey began by observing leaders across sectors staying stuck in past patterns, missing future possibilities. The turning point was realizing that a "failure of imagination" is often at the root of misalignment on teams and even of global-level mishaps. Now, she helps Boards and senior managers identify what's fixed and what's flexible as they shape their future amidst accelerating change. Through her ELASTIC framework, Rebecca helps non-profit leaders collectively reimagine their next chapter. She champions imagination as a learnable skill via strategic planning facilitation and her conversation-starting Possibility Packs, fostering vivid, shared mental pictures to proactively "dent the world". Connect with Rebecca: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccasutherns/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 409:Reclaim Your Capacity! with Sarah Olivieri | 06 Apr 2026 | 00:12:53 | |
In this solo episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership, Sarah Olivieri tackles a common frustration: feeling like you're always at capacity no matter how much you optimize your time. Many leaders assume the problem is simply that there aren't enough hours in the day. So they look for better scheduling systems, delegate tasks, or try to get more efficient. But even after all that, the feeling of being maxed out often remains. Sarah explains why that happens. The real constraint isn't time—it's energy. Time is fixed. Energy is not. In this episode, Sarah walks through how energy—not just time—determines your true capacity. She shares practical ways to increase your energy by aligning your work with what energizes you, understanding your natural energy rhythms throughout the day, and reducing energy drains like constant context switching. She also introduces a deeper layer beneath both time and energy management: intentionality. When you operate in a reactive mode—constantly responding to incoming demands—you will always feel at capacity. But when you shift into a proactive, intentional way of working, you regain control over both your time and your energy. The result is not just getting more done—but feeling better while doing it. If you've been stuck in a cycle of optimizing your schedule but still feeling overwhelmed, this episode will help you rethink how you approach capacity entirely. In This Episode, You'll Learn
This episode is especially helpful for:
Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human…
Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||
| 408: The Smart Gala Playbook with Justin Goodhew | 02 Apr 2026 | 00:34:28 | |
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Are Galas Actually Worth It?Let's be honest. Most nonprofit leaders have a love-hate relationship with galas. They take a ton of time. So it's a fair question: Are galas actually worth it? After my recent conversation with Justin Goodhew, I think the better question is: When and how can galas be worth it? The Problem Isn't the GalaGalas get blamed for poor results. But the real issue is how they're used. Many organizations treat their gala like a one-night fundraiser. Sell tickets. That's where things fall apart. Because a gala is not a standalone strategy. It's a tool. Many organizations hold galas as an early stage fundraising strategy, but the reality is galas are an advanced tactic or tool to be used as part of a fundraising strategy focused on relationship based fundraising. What a Gala Is Actually ForA gala is an opportunity to: • Get your certain supporters in a room That can be incredibly valuable. But only if you use it that way. Justin put it simply: Events aren't the alternative to relationship-building. One of the most practical takeaways: Your event should be paid for before it starts. That means focusing on: • Sponsorships • Table buyers • A small group of committed supporters Instead of trying to sell hundreds of individual tickets, you focus on a smaller number of people who can bring others. That does two things: • It removes financial risk • It gets the right people in the room And the second one matters more. The Second Shift: Pay Attention to BehaviorThis was one of my favorite ideas. During the event, people are constantly telling you who they are. Not with words. With actions. Who bids high? That's your data. And it's far more reliable than anything someone says in a conversation. If you pay attention, your gala becomes one of the best donor research tools you have. The Third Shift: The Real Money Comes After a.k.a tThe Fortune is in the Follow-upHere's where most organizations miss the opportunity. They run the event… They're exhausted… And then they move on. But the real value of a gala isn't what happens that night. It's what happens after. This is where you: • Follow up with the right people • Build real relationships • Turn attendees into long-term donors If you skip this step, you lose most of the ROI!!! A Better Way to Think About ItA well-run gala shouldn't be a burden. It should: • Cover its costs upfront • Bring in the right people • Generate valuable donor data • Feed your long-term fundraising strategy That's a completely different experience. If You Only Take One Thing AwayA gala is not about the night. It's about what the night makes possible. If you treat it like a one-time fundraiser, it will disappoint you. If you treat it like a relationship-building engine, there can be a pot of gold at the end of the gala rainbow. About the GuestMy guest for this episode is Justin Goodhew.
Justin Goodhew is the Co-Founder and CEO of Trellis.org, the leading integrated gala and auction software for Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge. After attending fundraising conferences and interviewing nonprofit professionals, he discovered that events - especially galas - were one of the biggest untapped opportunities to drive meaningful donation growth. Today, Trellis has helped raise over $100 million through auctions and paddle raises, powering more than 500 galas across North America. Justin is passionate about helping charities unlock real ROI from events and is excited to share his insights today. Connect with Justin: Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn. | |||