Inspired Nonprofit Leadership

12:45

Episode 460: Use Details to Communicate Clearly with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/10/05

Show Notes When you explain an idea to your team, the big picture may be clear in your head, but it's probably not as clear in your team's head as you think it is. Specific examples help other people understand what you mean and what the work actually involves. Sarah Olivieri walks through how to add useful detail to everyday communication so you can get what's in your head into the minds of your team. She shares practical examples from leadership meetings, planning, and the

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41:13

459: What to Ask Before AI Touches Your Data with Sam...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/10/01

Show Notes Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations. Sarah shares this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps her stay connected,

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13:38

458: A Simple Follow-Up Process for Major Gifts with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/28

Episode Description Reaching out to potential major donors can feel premature when you haven't figured out how you will follow up. A written contact list and a plan for the next interaction give you a simple place to start, without mapping out a year of conversations. Sarah walks through this approach using questions from nonprofit leaders starting major gifts programs in the Inspired Philanthropy Circle. She shares her own struggle with following up, the scheduling habit that helps

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45:00

457: Why Ethical Storytelling Raises More Money with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/24

A fundraising story asks people to care and act. How you gather and share that story matters to the person who lived it, the audience hearing it, and the donor relationships you hope to build. Sarah invited Maria A Bryan, a trauma-informed storytelling trainer who helps nonprofits tell difficult stories while protecting the people involved, to unpack how consent, safety, and choice belong in fundraising. They discuss asking for stories without pressure, preparing audiences for difficult content, and

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11:17

456: When Preparing for a Meeting is NOT Helpful with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/21

Show Notes Arriving at a team meeting with a solution already worked out can feel like you're helping everyone get ahead. When the work needs several people's perspectives, leaving the solution open gives the team a chance to develop something together that none of them could have created alone. Sarah discusses when preparing a solution before a meeting can get in the way of collaboration, drawing on her experience helping teams create something new together. In This Episode,

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11:17

456: When Preparing for a Meeting is NOT Helpful with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/20

Show Notes Arriving at a team meeting with a solution already worked out can feel like you're helping everyone get ahead. When the work needs several people's perspectives, leaving the solution open gives the team a chance to develop something together that none of them could have created alone. Sarah discusses when preparing a solution before a meeting can get in the way of collaboration, drawing on her experience helping teams create something new together. In This Episode,

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38:44

455: Make Trust Tangible with Kim Bohr

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/17

Episode Description Trust can be measured. It grows through honest communication and fair treatment, and it can break when leaders mishandle change. Sarah invited Kim Bohr, President and CEO of SparkEffect, whose annual research tracks organizational trust across the US, to discuss what builds trust, what breaks it, and how leaders can protect it through disruption. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why 85 percent of people faced major disruption in two

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33:50

454: Planned Giving Made Simple with Tony Martignetti

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/09

Show Notes Planned giving often lands on the someday list right beside the wealth screen a nonprofit can't yet afford. Tony Martignetti says you can launch it this week with one honest conversation about a gift in a will. No campaign, no brochure, no page. Sarah sat with Tony Martignetti, a front-line planned giving fundraiser since 1997 and author of the new book Planned Giving Accelerated, to discuss how a small or mid-size nonprofit launches planned giving in a single week,

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21:12

453: Are You Playing Leadership Whack-A-Mole with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/07

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat strategy, operations, and team as three separate pillars in their organization, but in fact, they are part of one integrated system. In this episode, Sarah goes into strategy, operations, and team as the who, what, where, when, and how of running a great nonprofit. She shares how these are built into her Impact Method®, which she developed back in 2017. In This

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37:33

452: Why Your Former Employees Still Matter with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/09/03

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders treat turnover as a problem to solve after someone resigns. The organizations that handle it well plan for it before the hire, in how the job itself is designed. Sarah invited Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer and the person who grew the company from 400 people to 4,000 while the median tenure on his own staff was nine months, to talk about how to build an organization that works when people come and

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18:14

451: How to Build a Simple Nonprofit Marketing...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/31

Episode Description Many nonprofit leaders pick a marketing tactic first- a gala, a Facebook fundraiser, a social media takeover, and then hope it works. The organizations that get a real return pick the goal first and let the goal decide the tactic. Sarah goes solo to work through how to build a marketing strategy simple enough to fit on one page, drawing on the years she spent running a marketing agency for nonprofits. In This Episode, You'll Learn

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31:24

450: Hiring Is Your Culture with Crystal FitzSimons

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/27

Show Notes: Most nonprofit leaders treat retention as a problem to fix after the hire. The organizations that keep people for decades treat it as something they build into the hire itself. Sarah invited Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center and someone who has been at FRAC for twenty-four years leading a team where staff routinely stay ten, twenty, and even forty years, to unpack what actually holds people in a nonprofit for the long term.

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14:25

449: Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/24

Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri The thought shows up quietly and then keeps coming back. Maybe this person is not right for us. Then it sits there for months while you look for more evidence and rehearse a conversation you never have. Meanwhile the person you are worried about is stuck in a job that is grinding on them too. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to know when it is time to let someone go, and how to do it in a way that leaves everyone intact.

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32:03

448: Distributed Leadership That Actually Works with...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/20

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Why Distributed Leadership Fails (And What Actually Makes It Work) Most nonprofit leaders I talk to already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've read the books. They've heard the term "distributed leadership." They've said out loud, in strategy meetings and board retreats, that they want more decisions happening closer to the people doing the work. And then, a year later, they're still the bottleneck. The

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07:12

447: Take The Full Hour with Sarah Olivieri

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/17

Lunch Is Leadership with Sarah Olivieri Lunch is the first thing to go. The calendar fills up, something has to give, and the hour in the middle of the day is the one that looks optional. Skip it enough times and you start making your biggest decisions of the week on an empty tank. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why lunch is a leadership decision, and exactly how to get it back on your calendar and keep it there. In This Episode, You'll Learn

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41:22

446: Build Fundraising That Compounds with Bill Crouch

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/13

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Is Your Budget Killing Your Major Gifts Program? Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall. They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves. So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask. Here's what I

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08:55

445: Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/10

Ride the Wave Already Moving with Sarah Olivieri Strategic planning gets treated like a decision you make in a quiet room, then hand down to the team. So leaders sit down to "set direction," invent something new from scratch, and spend the next year trying to force it into existence. The resource burn is real. The traction usually isn't. In this solo episode, Sarah breaks down why strategy is mostly discovered rather than decided, and how to tell the difference before

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25:32

444: Top Five Episodes, Ranked with Sarah Olivieri

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/06

Top 5 Episodes Countdown Five episodes rose to the top over the last two years of this show. Trauma. Cash flow. Starting a nonprofit from scratch. Health equity. Organizational design. On the surface they have nothing in common. Underneath, all five are making the same argument, and none of them tell you to work harder. Sarah pulled the download data on the last hundred episodes and ranked them across thirty-day, ninety-day, and lifetime windows. The same five came out

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11:05

Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/08/02

Build Programs That Stick with Sarah Olivieri Most programs are built middle-out. Someone has an idea for a workshop, a curriculum, a service, and the design starts with the activities. The end result is fuzzy, the beginning state is assumed, and the middle is a stack of sessions that made sense in the moment. Then clients start drifting between steps, going quiet, and finishing without really finishing. In this solo episode, Sarah walks through how to design a program

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36:35

442: Name Your Product, Fund Your Mission with Barb...

Inspired Nonprofit Leadership ·

2026/07/30

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... "Run It Like A Business" There is a quiet belief inside a lot of nonprofits that running things like a business would somehow cheapen the mission. That budgets, product thinking, and direct asks belong to the for-profit world, and that the nonprofit world runs on something purer. Heart. Passion. Care. The care is real. The problem is that heart gets asked to do a job it was never built to do. When there is no clear product,

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