What I’ve watched happen to good people
A long-time donor stops giving. Nobody can say exactly why, so the question becomes who: who let it slip, who should have called, who wasn’t warm enough. The development director takes it home. Sometimes the development director leaves, and the next one inherits the same gap.
An executive director gets a board that wants more revenue and a staff too small to hold every thread. The data still carries a donor’s name wrong. A handoff fails when someone goes on leave. The board asks for a better fundraiser.
None of that is a character flaw. It is what happens when a profession explains its losses by looking at people instead of at the work between them. We have all been taught to do it. I did it too.
What being on your side means
- I look past you to the handoff. When something breaks, I want to know what let it break, not who to hold responsible. That question protects you, and it is also the one that fixes next year.
- I won’t help you find someone else to blame. Not your executive director, not your development director, not your board, and not yourself. Blame moves the problem; it never closes it.
- I will tell you the truth. An advocate who only agrees with you is not much use. If the record shows a promise of yours slipping, you will hear it from me first, privately, with a way to repair it.
- I make your case in the rooms you’re not in. At chapter meetings and conferences I argue that the people who carry the promises deserve systems that let them keep them.
I’ve sat in your chair
I have worked in nonprofit leadership since 1985. I was Director of Development at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre and am now Director of Philanthropy at the Allan Hancock College Foundation. For most of that time I watched development departments lose donors for reasons nobody could name, while everyone repeated that fundraising is about relationships. Show Me the Receipts came out of trying to name what was actually going wrong, so the next person would not have to carry it alone.
My promises to you
If this site argues that trust is a record of kept promises, it should keep some of its own. Here are mine, and you can hold me to them.
- Claims labelled by evidence. What the research shows, what I infer, and what is still a hypothesis, said plainly.
- A day-thirty check-in. If you hear the keynote and opt in, I follow up on day thirty to ask whether your repair held.
- Your record is yours. Coaching clients keep a private ledger. I can read it; I never change it.
- No promises I can’t keep. Coaching won’t promise you a promotion or your organization’s results. It promises the evidence of what you did.
- Corrections in public. If part of this argument turns out to be wrong, I will say so here.
Three ways to start
Advocate, not guru
One more thing, because it bears on how you should read a page like this. You shouldn’t trust this framework because I’m the one making the case. You should trust it because it holds up. My job is to stand with you and to stay accountable for the argument: to defend what is defensible and correct what isn’t.
Background
- Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE)
- AFP Certified Facilitator; board member, AFP San Luis Obispo County chapter
- Director of Philanthropy, Allan Hancock College Foundation
- Former Director of Development, Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA)
- Principal, Clearview Philanthropy
- Master’s thesis: “An Ecology of Mutuality: A Proposed Metaphor for Communities of Faith,” Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, 2003
Where Show Me the Receipts sits in the field
None of this replaces good fundraising practice. It adds a layer underneath it. The argument stands on established shoulders: Adrian Sargeant on trust, commitment, and satisfaction as the drivers of donor loyalty; Ken Burnett on relationship fundraising; Chris Argyris on how organizations learn, or fail to, when something breaks. It asks a question the field never quite operationalized: when a donor leaves, can you trace the broken promise that lost them?
Grounding in the field’s foundational curriculum
- Modules 4 and 7, AFP Fundamentals of Fundraising Course. Module 4, Building & Sustaining Relationships, teaches that relationships are the foundation of fundraising and begin with knowing the donor. Module 7, Management & Accountability, covers records management, gift processing, program evaluation, and accountability. This framework locates the trust the field places in Module 4 within the machinery of Module 7. It relocates the source of that trust; it does not reject the relationship.
- Module 5, Securing the Gift. The curriculum’s solicitation module covers the ask for annual and major gifts. The warmth-versus-trust distinction is a claim about what secures the next gift and the one after: not the solicitation moment, but the record of promises kept between asks.
- Module 1, Overview of Fundraising. The opening module introduces why people give and the foundations of the field, including the donor-retention research the profession now teaches. This framework draws its retention premise from that same ground; the named scholars are its intellectual lineage.
- Modules 4 and 7, extended. Module 4 addresses sustaining relationships and Module 7 addresses program evaluation, but neither the introductory curriculum nor its advanced counterparts teach causal tracing: following a lapse back to the specific process failure that produced it. This is the capacity the framework proposes to add above the existing competencies, not a correction to them.
- The seven modules, as a whole. Modules 1 through 7 describe the field’s foundational competencies. Show Me the Receipts adds a capacity beneath them rather than substituting for any. Locating the argument against this curriculum situates it relative to the field’s own teaching; it does not imply endorsement by AFP.