A new home for Thoughtful Insights and a fundraising practice built around it.
After more than three decades leading development and communications for New York nonprofits, I have opened my own consulting practice. – H. Aldervan Daly & Associates.
This is the first post on the new site, so let me be clear about what the practice does, who it is for, and what I hope this space becomes.
What the practice does
Fundraising works when strategy, storytelling, and shared purpose are pulling in the same direction. Most of the organizations I meet have at least one of those. Very few have all three at once, and the gap usually shows up in the same place: a development plan that reads well but does not survive contact with a board meeting, a staffing change, or a difficult year.
My work is closing that gap. In practice, it takes four forms.
Annual fundraising plans. Building an individual giving program that holds up over a full cycle. That means messaging that sounds like your organization, not every other organization; technology that supports the work rather than absorbing it; and a donor pipeline you can see, staff, and measure.
Working with boards and senior executives. Contributed income goals are rarely missed for lack of effort. They are missed because the board, the chief executive, and the development team are quietly working from three different interpretations of the same plan. I facilitate the conversation that puts them back on one page and keeps them there year over year.
Creating a resilient, trauma-informed workplace. Fundraisers are not simply generators of contributed income. They are helping professionals. They sit with grief, illness, legacy, and family conflict as a routine part of the job, usually without the training or support that other helping professions take for granted. Building a workplace that recognizes this is not a wellness perk. It is a retention strategy and a fundraising strategy.
Keynotes and conference addresses. For organizations and gatherings that want the case made out loud: fundraising can be a meaningful expression of purpose rather than a race to a number on a wall.
Alongside all of it, I offer one-on-one sessions. A planned difficult conversation with your CEO. An annual appeal that needs more than a second set of eyes. A communications plan that no longer works as planned. The work can be ongoing or sometimes an hour is the whole engagement, and that is a perfectly good outcome too.
Who this is for
Any nonprofit that needs help in one of those four areas, or in all of them.
In practice, that includes organizations of every size. A development office of one, doing the work of five. A national institution with a full department and a board that has quietly drifted out of alignment. An executive director who inherited a fundraising program and a set of assumptions. A development leader who is good at this and is tired.
Budget size is not the deciding factor. The question is whether something in your fundraising, your board relationship, or your team’s capacity to sustain the work has stopped functioning as it should.
And if you already have a strong program and want it stress-tested rather than rebuilt, I am glad to do that work too.
What I bring to it
Thirty years of building and running development and marketing programs for New York nonprofits. A CFRE. An MFA in development and marketing from Virginia Tech and a BA from Rhodes College. A seat on the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Global Board. Time in McKinsey’s Black Leadership Executive Program.
The credential that matters most, though, is the number of annual appeals I have written, the board retreats I have sat through, and the gift conversations I have had that did not go as anyone planned. Nothing replaces doing it.
What Thoughtful Insights is
My Thoughtful Approach writing moves here and continues doing what it has been doing: practical writing for working fundraisers on donor-centric practice, trauma-informed approaches, honest use of data, and building programs that people can sustain as Thoughtful Insights.
Expect regular, useful posts. I’ll continue to be direct about what is not working in the sector, including the parts I have participated in.
Where to start
Have a look around the new site. The Services page provides more detail on the engagements, and the Contact page is a single form with no gatekeeping.
If something in your fundraising program does not sit right and you want a second opinion before committing to anything, say so. That conversation is free and often the most useful thing I do all week.
Thank you for reading. I am glad you are here. I look forward to seeing you often.