It's Been While

It has been quite awhile since I posted an update here on my page – I apologize. It wasn’t due to Covid or anything like that – it’s because I went back into the corporate world. In January of 2022, I was contacted by an executive of Frontier Communications about joining their team full-time to help them with their community relations work. I was intrigued by the challenge and the money was a nice bonus as well.

Since then, it’s been pretty fast and furious with a great deal of business travel. I’ve had to set aside my philanthropy consulting work for the most part. I was able to help one or two local nonprofits with some coaching for their board of directors – but that’s been all.

This return to the regular work world has helped me realize I need to carve-out the time to write down all of my knowledge about corporate philanthropy into some type of handbook I can make available to nonprofits to help them understand the “dos and don’ts” of seeking corporate support.

This way, the things I’ve learned over more than 25 years as a corporate funder can help nonprofits for many years to come. So that’s my next big task. But until I get that completed, I hope to be able to continue to help companies or nonprofits with their philanthropy. My travel schedule is more manageable now. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to remain in corporate life, but it’s been nice to be sought-out for my knowledge and expertise.

Also, thanks to my income from my corporate work I am able to rework my fee structure to make it easier for non-profits to afford my services. I still need to update my website, but I plan to change it to offer a flat $50-an-hour fee rate for non-profits. Now, even smaller non-profits should be able to afford to bring me in to coach their board or development staff in how to approach corporates for significant funding. Just recently I worked with a non-profit here in Texas in this way. First, they brought me in for a half-day meeting with their development staff and then they brought me back to give a shorter version of my training to their board of directors. Using some of the techniques I explained to them – they just landed a corporate grant for $15,000! This more than justified the few hundred dollars they spent to get my coaching.

This is exactly the type of success I hope to provide to as many non-profits as possible. With today’s technology, I can offer my training to non-profits anywhere via a Zoom call. So please contact me and see if we can create a plan that will work for you.