On working at the intersection.

I built this firm to work with the causes most consultants overlook. Every consultant I trained under told me, gently, that I was making a strategic mistake.

The largest gifts come from donors who write the largest checks, the logic went, and most of those donors are not particularly interested in queer kids in Eastern Kentucky or Black-led arts in Louisville. So if you want a sustainable consulting business, the advice was, build a roster of art museums and university foundations and land trusts that flatter their existing trustees. Don’t go looking for the work where the money is hard.

The math isn’t wrong. There are fewer multi-million-dollar donors who are predisposed to fund LGBTQIA+ movements. There are fewer foundations whose programmatic priorities align with Appalachian cultural infrastructure. The standard playbook — start with your top 25 prospects, work the screen, build the pyramid — assumes you’re starting with a screen that has your prospects on it. A lot of intersectional causes don’t.

What I learned, over twenty years of doing this kind of work, is that the standard playbook isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

The donors are there. The infrastructure isn’t.

The donors who fund movement work, BIPOC initiatives, queer-serving organizations, conservation in places nobody’s branded yet — they exist. They’re often newer to philanthropy than the legacy art-museum giver. They’re often giving outside their geography. They’re often skeptical of the gala-and-board-tour pageant that fundraising shops have been running on their cousins for decades.

Reaching them takes a different muscle. The infrastructure for finding and stewarding them — research vendors, prospect screens, peer events, the trade associations that legitimize you to program officers — is thinner. So you build it. Or you partner with the people who already have.

What actually works at the intersection.

Three things, more than anything else.

Be specific about who is and isn’t your donor. Movement-driven causes attract a lot of well-meaning curiosity gifts. Curiosity isn’t a strategy. Decide who your real top 25 are, and stop spending board time on people who’ll never give a major gift no matter how many lunches you fund.

Treat your community as both donor and case. The standard playbook segments your audience into “fundraising” and “advocacy.” For most of the orgs I work with, those are the same people. Stop separating the development list from the organizing list. Start writing fundraising materials that an organizer would put their name on.

Hire from inside the cause first. I’ve seen too many search committees pass over an obvious internal candidate because the candidate didn’t have “fundraising experience.” If they raised $50,000 in t-shirt sales for a vigil, they have fundraising experience. Train them on the technical pieces. The relationships are the harder thing to teach.

Why I won’t pretend I’m neutral.

A lot of consultants market themselves as cause-agnostic — “we work with anyone whose mission we believe in.” I don’t do that. I’m a gay man who grew up in Kentucky, and I’ve spent a career being the only queer person in some rooms and the only Kentuckian in others. Both turned out to be advantages, but only because I stopped pretending neutrality.

This firm exists because the causes I came up in deserved better than the playbook the rest of the field was running. I don’t think it’s possible to be a great fundraiser for a cause you wouldn’t write a check to yourself. So we’re picky about what we work on, and honest with the boards we work for. The mission has to be one we’d defend at a dinner party. The rest is technique.