Nonprofit Lowdown
This is Nonprofit Lowdown where I review and recommend the best ideas, resources, tools, tricks and tips to run your nonprofit like a pro!
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 7, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
#404 - The DAF Money You're Probably Missing (opens the original)
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Donor-advised funds are everywhere. But for a lot of nonprofit fundraisers, they’re still a little mysterious. So I invited Liza Carballeira onto the podcast to break them down. She brings a pretty unique perspective. Liza spent more than 10 years as a frontline fundraiser, then seven years working on the other side with a major DAF institution, advising philanthropists and helping distribute charitable funds. Now, she’s the founder of Epic Philanthropy , where she helps nonprofits understand an
#403 - DAF Donor Targeting Playbook (opens the original)
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Your year-end plan is actively insulting a segment of your donor file. It's September and that plan is nearly locked, so let's fix it before it goes out. When I was a baby ED, we'd get a $7,500 check from Schwab Charitable in December and I'd code it to Schwab. Not to Susan, who actually made the gift. In my file, Susan looked like she'd bought a gala ticket. She was a major donor and I never once treated her like one, because I didn't know what a DAF was and neither did the person doing my data
#402 - Your board isn't lazy. They're uninstructed. (opens the original)
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I had a board member, let's call her Lena, who told me she'd rather stick hot needles in her eye than ask her friends for money. So I asked if we could count on her for the $35,000 check instead. She said yes, done, no problem. Then she spent the next several years opening her home and hosting people for us. Lena wasn't refusing to fundraise. She had no idea what fundraising was. In 20 years I have never met a board that refuses to fundraise. I've met a lot of boards nobody bothered to instruct.
#401 - Why AI Cannot Replace Fundraising Strategy (opens the original)
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Why AI Cannot Replace Fundraising Strategy I use Claude every day, he's literally my side piece. And I'm telling you to stop buying AI tools. Here's what I'm seeing across nonprofit shops right now: everyone's buying wealth screening software, AI donor tools, personalization platforms. They think the tool will fix it. It won't. AI amplifies what you already have. If your strategy is broken, AI just accelerates the crash. The real problem isn't AI. It's that most nonprofits don't have a strategy.
#400 - 8 Years, 400 Episodes, and the One Thing I Got Wrong About Marketing (opens the original)
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When I started this podcast in 2018, I had no strategy. No content calendar. Just a cheap microphone and a genuine desire to connect with busy nonprofit friends who never had time to grab coffee. I didn't think I was doing marketing. I thought I was just... connecting. Turns out, that's exactly what I was doing. But here's what I resisted for years: I didn't want to believe that visibility mattered. I wanted good work to be enough. I wanted to believe that if I just got excellent results for my
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