Kari's Confessions

Hosted by Kari Anderson

Business Education

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Serving the nonprofit sector is a privilege. Leading a nonprofit organization is, (in my opinion), one of life's greatest joys. And one of life's greatest sources of heartburn. Where else can you both provide a critical service to your community and fill a key need in your market? While, simultaneously, be asked to work miracles on a shoestring budget and perform the roles of CEO and chief bottle washer. Leading a nonprofit is fulfilling, satisfying and more. It's also lonely and isolating. Many leaders come into the role with limited onboarding, marginal orientation, and no manual to refer to as to "how to do the work". You're charged with leading this important organization, and not sure whom you can talk to when you need a an "offline" ear, or where to turn to ask for help. Join me, Kari Anderson, as I share my take on the nonprofit sector. In my 20+ years serving as a nonprofit Executive Director, I saw just about everything, and didn't think I could be surprised. From bad board behavior to fundraising successes, well-meaning donors to entitled staff, no-show volunteers to successful community partnerships…I've got a story to tell! I love our sector – the "third" sector. I want to create a space where you feel welcome. Where you can breathe. A place where you can laugh and see yourself continuing this good work. Consider our time together a recipe comprised of the following ingredients: one part story, one part therapy, one part self-help and one part kick in the pants!

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60 recent

October 25, 202618 min

Innovative Fundraising That Actually Fits Your Nonprofit

Ever looked at your fundraising calendar and thought, "We cannot possibly do one more thing"? You're not alone, and another gala won't fix it. In this episode of Kari's Confessions, Kari Anderson shares innovative fundraising tactics for nonprofits of all sizes. Not twelve new projects. Just a few small changes that make fundraising more human, more manageable, and more reliable. Kari starts with the foundation: a clear promise, a one-page revenue plan, and clear roles. Then she gets practical: Building a monthly giving community donors actually want to belong to Running short, focused campaigns around a real, costed outcome Starting major gift work with discovery conversations, not pitches Giving board members three fundraising lanes they can succeed in Trading the big gala for a tiny event with a clear follow-up plan Donor stewardship habits that keep the promise after the gift You'll walk away with one 30-day experiment you can actually run, and a reminder that a nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model. If this episode sparks one useful idea, put it on your calendar before the next meeting swallows it whole. Subscribe for more practical tools for nonprofit leaders, and visit Incite! Consulting for resources, coaching, and consulting support. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

October 18, 202619 min

Stewardship That Matters: Keep Donors Committed

What happens after a donor gives? For a lot of nonprofits, the honest answer is a receipt, and then silence. In this episode of Kari's Confessions: A Nonprofit Exec Tells All, Kari Anderson explains what donor stewardship really is, why it slips, and how to build a simple system that keeps donors connected without turning your team into a thank-you note factory. A gift isn't the finish line. It's the beginning of a promise. Kari walks through what first-time donors should experience in the 12 months after their gift, starting with a real thank-you from a real person within 48 hours. She also covers the "donors in the middle," the loyal supporters already sitting in your spreadsheet, and a clear division of labor for donor relationships: staff owns the system, board members support relationships, and leadership makes sure it happens. You'll also get two plain tools for stronger donor retention: a stewardship calendar and a short scorecard. Plus, how to send honest donor updates even when results don't match the plan. Your one step this week: pick one group of donors, look at what they actually heard from you after their last gift, and put the next three meaningful touches on the calendar with a name beside each one. Subscribe for practical tools on nonprofit fundraising, board engagement, and leadership that lasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

October 11, 202620 min

The Year End Campaign Checklist

Year-end fundraising doesn't have to feel like a relay race where someone keeps moving the finish line. In this episode of Kari's Confessions: A Nonprofit Exec Tells All, Kari Anderson walks through how to build a year-end campaign your team can actually run. You don't need a giant staff or a perfect database to do it. Instead of a 23-item checklist, Kari breaks the work into five decisions: What you're raising money for Who you're talking to How gifts will come in What each person will do How you'll keep the relationship going after December 31 You'll hear why a beautiful appeal can't rescue an unclear campaign. Kari explains how to segment donors so loyal supporters never get a generic "we need you now more than ever." She also shows how to give board members specific fundraising jobs in place of a vague "please share the appeal." Kari also covers testing your giving page on a phone and planning Giving Tuesday and direct mail backward from the date donors actually see them. She closes with how to build your thank-you and donor stewardship plan before the first gift arrives. The big idea: a campaign is a bridge. Your offer gives people a reason to cross. Your giving page makes crossing easy. Your follow-up meets them on the other side. Subscribe for practical nonprofit leadership tools. Then share this episode with your board chair or development lead before year-end planning gets away from you. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

October 4, 202619 min

Annual Giving Calendar

It's December 12. The appeal letter still needs a signature, the donation form asks for a mailing address twice, and nobody is sure who thanked last year's donors. Sound familiar? In this episode of Kari's Confessions, I walk through a realistic, month-by-month annual giving calendar for nonprofit leaders who are ready to stop confusing urgency with strategy. We start with three questions every staff and board should answer together: what counts toward your annual giving goal, what happens to a donor after they give, and who owns the work. From there, we move through the year: closing the loop with thank-you calls in January, focusing on donor retention in February, making thoughtful spring asks, checking progress at mid-year, building your year-end fundraising pipeline in late summer, and protecting your people in December. I also tackle the objections I hear most often, including "our board won't fundraise" and "we don't have time," and share a simple quarterly version for teams with limited capacity. Your calendar is a tool, not a test. The goal is a nonprofit fundraising rhythm your team can actually sustain, so donors feel connected and your mission has what it needs. If this episode helped, subscribe for more practical nonprofit leadership tools, and share it with a colleague who is planning for year-end. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

September 27, 202618 min

Succession Planning: Mission-Critical, Not Optional

If your nonprofit doesn't have a succession plan, you still have a succession plan. It's called scrambling. In this episode of Kari's Confessions: A Nonprofit Exec Tells All, Kari Anderson unpacks why nonprofit succession planning gets avoided, and what it actually takes to protect your mission when leadership changes. Kari walks through the difference between an emergency succession plan (the tomorrow morning plan) and a planned leadership transition (the next chapter plan), and why most organizations need both. She shares the story of an executive director who quietly became the system, and the board that wrote a job description for a nonprofit unicorn. You'll also get a practical six-step framework: identify key roles rather than key people, map the relationships tied to revenue and influence, document how the work actually gets done, define interim authority and decision rights, build leadership development into the plan, and connect succession to strategy and revenue. Kari closes with five common mistakes boards make and a one-hour challenge you can put on the calendar this week. Succession planning is not a prediction that someone will leave. It's a promise that the mission can continue whenever change comes. Subscribe for practical tools built for nonprofit executive directors, board members, and founders. Visit inciteconsultinggroup.com to learn more, and follow along on LinkedIn. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts.. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

September 20, 202618 min

Build a Leadership Bench for Every Critical Role

Your Development Director Just Resigned. Two Weeks Before the Gala. She knew the donors, the sponsor promises, the auction software, and why Table 12 could never sit next to Table 14. Now everyone is looking at the executive director, and someone finally asks the question that should have come months ago: does anyone else know how this works? In this episode of Kari's Confessions, Kari Anderson makes nonprofit succession planning practical. No 70-page binder. No secret coronation of the next executive director. Just people, systems, and shared knowledge. You'll learn: Why a critical role is any role where a sudden vacancy creates immediate mission, revenue, compliance, or operational risk, and why that often is not the ED. How to build a "What Only I Know" map that surfaces your real exposure in an afternoon instead of six months. What makes a role playbook usable during an actual crisis, and why documentation you have never tested is just a guess. How to build a leadership bench at three levels: 30 to 90 day interim coverage, a near-term successor, and a long-term pipeline. Why one person holding every major donor relationship is not a sustainable fundraising system. Cross-training does not mean giving anyone a second job. Pick three to five coverage tasks, train one backup, and practice quarterly. Your homework this month: name your top three critical roles, write one "What Only I Know" list for each, and train one backup on one essential task. Now go build your bench. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

September 13, 202620 min

CEO Transition

A CEO transition is never just a staffing change. It is an organizational stress test. When the person at the center of your nonprofit leaves, everything gets revealed. Whether your board understands its job. Whether your fundraising lives in a system or in one person's head. Whether anyone besides the departing leader knows the passwords. Whether your organization is sustainable or has quietly become dependent on one personality. In this episode, Kari Anderson walks through what a steady, thoughtful nonprofit CEO transition actually requires. She shares stories of organizations that got it right and organizations that let silence create a vacuum that donors and staff filled with their own theories. You will learn how to confirm the timeline and clarify who decides what, how to stabilize your internal and external messaging before the news travels, how to run a relationship risk scan and protect donor relationships that were tied to one leader, how to inventory access and authority before the final day, and how to define the real work before writing the job description. Kari also covers interim executive director leadership, staff stability planning, giving founders a graceful exit, and building the incoming leader's first 90 days before they arrive. If your organization is facing a transition, pick one action this week. One clear step creates momentum. Subscribe for more nonprofit leadership and board governance tools, and visit InciteConsultingGroup.com to talk through what your organization is navigating. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

September 6, 202620 min

Succession, Continuity & The People + Plan + Money Framework

If one key person disappeared tomorrow, would your organization have an inconvenience or a crisis? Most nonprofit leaders think succession planning means naming the next executive director someday. Someday, when there's plenty of notice, an engaged board, clean finances, and every password stored somewhere safe. That's a fairy tale. In this episode, Kari Anderson, Principal of Incite! Consulting, shares a practical framework for nonprofit succession planning that fits inside real organizations with real capacity limits: people, plan, money. People. Find the single points of failure, including the invisible job descriptions nobody wrote down. The glue person who quietly prevents twenty small things from becoming five large emergencies is often your biggest risk. Plan. Seventeen priorities are not priorities. Strong long term planning answers what you're committed to, what comes next, and what you will stop, pause, or decline. Money. Fundraising is not a personal trait. It's a system of relationships and repeatable actions. If your top twenty donor relationships live in one inbox, you have donor records but not organizational donor relationships. Kari also walks through a three month starting sequence, decision rights that reduce board and staff friction, and why hero culture takes out a loan against your organization's future. The goal is not an organization where no one matters. It's one where many people matter, knowledge is shared, and the mission keeps moving. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

August 30, 202628 min

Feedback That Works: Building a Learning Culture in Nonprofits

Feedback Isn't Criticism. It's Data. Most nonprofits don't have a feedback problem. They have a learning problem. In this episode, Kari Anderson unpacks why nonprofit leaders avoid the conversations that matter most, and what it costs organizations when kindness gets confused with silence. You'll learn: Why passion for the mission makes feedback feel personal, and how to separate the two The three patterns nonprofits fall into: avoidance, overfunctioning, and the eventual blowup A practical framework (Observation, Impact, Request) for giving feedback without causing defensiveness Three rhythms to build feedback into your culture: weekly check-ins, after-action reviews, and quarterly role clarity conversations Why healthy board governance and clear roles reduce conflict and improve accountability How feedback loops directly strengthen fundraising and donor relationships Nonprofit leadership is demanding enough without teams quietly protecting each other into burnout. This episode offers concrete tools to build a culture where learning is normal, not a moment to dread. If you're ready to move from avoidance to clarity, this conversation will give you language and structure to start this week. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

August 23, 202621 min

From Burnout to Ownership

Your team isn't burned out from working too hard. They're burned out from working without clarity. In this episode of Kari's Confessions, Kari Anderson unpacks why burnout in the nonprofit sector is rarely a people problem, it's a systems problem. Drawing on 25+ years and work with over a thousand nonprofits, Kari explains what actually drives teams from exhaustion to ownership. You'll learn: Why nonprofit organizations need business systems, not just mission-driven passion How unclear priorities quietly exhaust even your most talented staff Why avoiding hard conversations spreads discomfort instead of resolving it How healthy board governance protects staff from well-intentioned overload Why building "replaceable" leadership, not indispensable heroes, creates lasting organizational stability Kari shares real client stories that show how three clear organizational priorities, one honest conversation, and a living development plan can transform team culture, morale, and fundraising results. If your organization feels tangled right now, whether it's your board, your team, or your strategy, this episode offers a practical, no-fluff path forward. Three challenges to try this week: Write your top 3 organizational priorities for the next 30 days Give one team member a clear "success description" for their role Have the hard conversation you've been avoiding Subscribe for more conversations on nonprofit leadership, organizational health, and building teams that last. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with your team or board! For more nonprofit leadership strategies, hit the bell so you never miss an episode. 🎧 Available wherever you stream your favorite podcasts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Let's stay connected: 🌐 Website: https://inciteconsultinggroup.com 📬 Email: kari@inciteconsultinggroup.com 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kariraeanderson/ 📞 Book a Chat: http://bit.ly/workingwithkari ✉️ Subscribe To Incite! Consulting Newsletter: https://bit.ly/InciteNewsletter

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