Next in Nonprofits

Dr. Lindsay Whorton is the President of The Holdsworth Center, whose "mission is to impact, over time, the quality of PreK-12 public education for all Texas students by supporting and developing educational leaders."

Dr. Whorton discusses her work building long-term talent and support in the education world across many school districts in Texas. This involves patience and a process of dealing with creating change over time in larger-scale systems. She talks about the importance of understanding the output and work of the day, Government stakeholders have a different response Different funders have different time horizons. Some challenges also arrives when focus creeps too broadly to keep a mission moving over time.

Host Steve Boland asks Dr. Whorton about systems change issues that are both about program and policy changes which may be needed over the longer term, and she talked about challenging the notion that there is a zero-sum choice in these arenas. The question is about bringing your supporters forward without accepting the idea that others must need to be shut down in order to move forward.

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Maria Bryan is the Partnership Marketing Manager at Donorbox, which offers "Robust online and on-location fundraising with meaningful donor relationship management, so your mission thrives."

Maria joins host Steve Boland to talk about her work with trauma-informed storytelling. She begins with the idea to first, protect and support people we work with in telling stories. The lines can get fuzzy with the big video at the donor gala, and it is important to practice a "Hippocratic oath" of ensuring we do no further harm when talking about trauma. We can share impact stories without harming either the people who's story your telling or the person who may be listening for the first time.

Maria cautions us to slow down and take time to tell those stories. Consent forms (with expiration dates!) are good and important, but conversations about the impact of sharing is important. Trauma responses can include fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. A slow consent process includes asking what is the goal of the person telling their story. Each person has their own agency (listen for the conversation about agency versus "empowered""). Trauma comes in many different forms, including vicarious trauma. Simple content warnings, and scaling content warnings are helpful ways to move forward.

Maria is the host of the When Bearing Witness podcast, where listeners can hear more about her work. Get more details on how to subscribe on our podcast page. Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or your platform of choice. Thanks!

Allison Wyatt is the Founder and CEO of Edgility Talent Partners, which "helps mission driven organizations bring practice and structure in alignment with values. Through our compensation and talent management consulting services we partner with clients to achieve great outcomes."

Allison joins host Steve Boland to talk about succession planning for nonprofit organizations, and all the steps that precede that work. Alison talks about the challenge of organizational founders and the first leadership transition, using deputies as a transition step to the permanent transition and much more. Allison discusses building capacity in the board of directors to fill things the lead staff can't do when it turns out there is no unicorn person out there who has all the qualities in a single person.

Allison has several recommendations, including examining the current leader taking a sabbatical to stress test a period for the organization. She uses a metaphor about tissue rejection in a transplant metaphor, and how that can reverberate past a first hire, as well as new models like co-leadership.

Steven Shattuck is the Director of Engagement and Technology at Capital Campaign Pro, a consultancy that specializes in supporting nonprofits in capital campaigns. Steven has been part of a new report, 2026 State of Capital Campaigns.

Steven joins host Steve Boland to talk about the finds in this report, including the role of a volunteer campaign chairs perhaps being less important, the fact that most campaigns are successful and don't harm annual fund giving, that capital funds can be raised for physical assets or program growth or stability and so much more. Steven shares about the staffing the work of the campaign and the role of lead staff in raising dollars, the importance of lead gifts and where those gifts may come from, and additional findings. Click the link above to get the full report and read still more!

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Kendra Garagan is the Founder and CEO of Givly.ai, "a specialized agentic AI system built for the nonprofit sector. Givly helps small to mid-sized nonprofit organizations automate funding workflows, manage grant processes, and coordinate their teams — without the clunky, disconnected software tools that most nonprofits have cobbled together over the years."

Kendra joins host Steve Boland to discuss the difference between an AI tool and an AI agent, how Givly's central "Brain" component maintains an organization's institutional context across its entire technology stack, and why generic AI models like ChatGPT often fall short for nonprofits doing complex work like grant writing. Kendra also explains how Givly's partnership and research agents help organizations identify in-kind opportunities, map their networks, and stay on top of policy changes — all without replacing the human staff who carry that knowledge today.

Givly.ai is transitioning out of beta and opening for public access in mid-June 2026. Interested nonprofits can sign up for priority access at givly.ai and will be guided through a short onboarding process to get their organization's account initialized.

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Ben Gose is Senior Editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, "an independent organization that provides nonprofits and foundations with trustworthy information, actionable insights, analysis, and training, all with the goal of helping sector professionals advance their critical missions."

Ben reported "Lessons from the Flipcause Collapse" describing the failing and eventual bankruptcy of Flipcause, a donation and website solution that advertised to nonprofit organizations as a low-cost solution to needs. The article details the impact on nonprofits as well as helpful tips to investigate nonprofit tools to ensure your organization is getting reliable, as-described services. Ben talks about the impact of this collapse on some specific organizations and the ongoing bankruptcy struggle for nonprofits seeking access to their own funds.

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Fredrick Riley is the Executive Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute. Weave "tackles the problem of broken social trust that has left Americans divided, lonely, and in social gridlock. Weave connects, supports, and invests in local leaders stepping up to weave a new, inclusive social fabric where they live. "

Fredrick talks about the nature of an ongoing crisis is relationships, and an overall erosion of trust. These are concerns the Aspen Institute has seen for some time, and has started a concerted effort to encourage people to use tools to build more trust and connection across social "threads" weaving together. One of the tools available from Weave includes trustmap.org, which allows users to see strengths for their social fabric, but also opportunities for improvement.

Fredrick goes on to share some examples from his own history as well as the work of Weave in encouraging nonprofits to connect people in community across mission and goals. Fred urges individuals to find opportunities to connect to people in their community, as well as urging nonprofits to provide volunteer opportunities not only for their own work but to provide connection for new people. Weave encourages charities to think about connected services as a model to strengthen the social fabric.

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Steven Aguiar is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ad Grants Pilot, which is "Ad Grants on easy mode.
Turn Google's $10,000/month in free ads into real donors and impact — without hiring an agency." Steven is also the Founder of BlueWing Digital, a media company with a focus on community missions.

Google for Nonprofits offers a free grant for Google search ads up to $10,000 of total value for a month. Approximately 300,000 nonprofits have a Google for Nonprofits account, but nearly 10 million could be using it. A recent M+R benchmark reported the average nonprofit may be getting $1300-1400 in value against the $10,000 offered.

Ad Grants Pilot is designed to help nonprofit organizations actually leverage the grant using AI tools to help manage the process. Steven talks about the Ads Grants process requiring things like conversion tracking, the need to use keywords correctly, quality scores on ads and website for conversion goals. Steven further describes how the tool helps avoid common problems that have occurred in the past and prevented many nonprofits from using the grants. He also describes how maximizing search ads can improve GEO, Generative Engine Optimization (AI summaries inserted into search) as well.

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Carly Berna is the Fundraiser in Residence at Virtuous, a "modern fundraising platform that creates inspiring moments for donors and grows giving."

The State of AI Adoption Report is a free download that details the findings from a study of hundreds of nonprofits regarding their use of Artificial Intelligence tools. The big finding: "92% of nonprofits have adopted AI. Only 7% say it’s actually expanded what their team can accomplish. The rest are stuck on the efficiency plateau: faster drafts, quicker emails, same results." There are some commonalities of organizations which are seeing meaningful impact that are detailed in the report.

Carly urges some basics of these success metrics. Elements such as creating and documenting policies, having a cross-functional AI team, and more. The report expresses some urgency to get on board as the tools are changing and becoming more capable. Carly and Steve talk about when and how to use data, such as taking great care to not put identifiable donor data into public versions of LLM (Large Language Model) tools.

Dr. Beth DaPonte is the author of the new edition of Essential Evaluations and a consulting serving nonprofit organizations from Social Science Consultants. Dr. DaPonte has served with the Office of Internal Oversight Services of the United Nations and been a Lecturer, Yale School of Management amongst many other roles.

Beth joins host Steve Boland to talk about the new edition of her Evaluations Essentials book, and why and how nonprofit organizations can develop and use program evaluation in their work. She discusses the basics of a theory of change, logic models, and more. The book covers ideas including early literature reviews, the use of a program evaluation reference group to provide a broad array of stakeholders to prioritize questions and access in evaluation. Beth talks about how unexpected challenges over time in evaluation (COVID shut downs for example) can become part of the evaluation story. (Also, thanks to XKCD for the causation v. correlation cartoon!).

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