When you’re ready to lead your organization through a change in how you work (perhaps because you’ve adopted new technology or approaches), it’s important to note that change happens over time, and not all at once. As Ovid put it, “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence”.

On today’s podcast, I am excited to have Aaron Sanderson, SVP, Advancement & Chief Development Officer at Kids Help Phone about professional development and learning. Tune in to learn about how we can create space for learning so that we can understand how we can invest in ourselves and our organizations so that we can do better work and work better.

On today’s podcast, I am excited to have Matt Barnet, the founder of Bonjoro, to introduce you to their amazing personalized, one-on-one video messaging service and share with you some really doable tips to spark connection and conversation with your donors, all virtually.

Bailey Greenspon, acting Co-CEO of G(irls)20 and Amal Elmi, a Young Director of the Girls on Board program talk to us about their insights and experience of advocating for young and diverse leaders in the sector.

What compel donors to say “yes”?

This is the million dollar question for us as fundraisers.

Understanding how people make decisions is key to our success in fundraising.

On today’s podcast, international fundraising and management consultant Dana Segal shares with us her deep insight in the psychology of decision-making.

This week's topic may be uncomfortable to some, but it's necessary. We connected with researcher Susanna Kislenko to talk about founders' syndrome and how that manifests in the nonprofit sector.

Theory of change is one of those things that everyone seems to have a vague sense of what it is but can’t quite come to the same definition.

How does our organization’s theory of change play a role in our work? How can we ground it in our practice?

On today’s episode, Lisa Watson, co-founder of Openly, shares with us how she and her team help nonprofits to develop clear and effective theory of change. Lisa integrates the principles of design and design thinking in the process.

Grant writing is one of those things that collectively give our sector a headache!

When we write a grant, we don’t know what to focus on and struggle to fit everything under word count limit. When we submit, we have no idea whether it will be successful, and we just hope for the best. And when we get a rejection letter, we never find out why.

But grant writing doesn’t have to be that painful or mysterious. On today’s episode, I connected with Stachen Federick to learn about her insights on how to build communities through the process of grant writing and maximize our rate of success.

We all wear many hats in our lives. And working in small nonprofits, we wear even more hats at work. All the time, our to-do-list is overwhelming, and we can’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of it.

How we do our work every day has such a great impact on our long term success.

On today’s episode, Rachel Bearbower, founder of Small Shop Strategies, shares her journey from starting a small nonprofit as a newbie to the sector to becoming a consultant that helps small nonprofits strategize and maximize their productivity.

For everything that we do at Camp Tech and in all the classes we teach, we are saying to the non-technical people: we're gonna teach you a bit about tech, which you might not know, but we don't think you're a dumb-dumb. We have mad respect for people that are subject matter experts in other areas. We ran these workshops across Canada

Evaluation is often a pain point for a lot of us working in small nonprofits, as it often seems to involve so much work with unclear purposes for why doing it. Jeff Couillard’s insights shed light on how we can measure what truly matters and how to use the data we collect to inform our work.

Jam Gamble is one of Toronto's gifted leaders who pushes the envelope and encourages everyone to cultivate their own inner light and abilities. The multi-passionate media personality and speaker is on a mission to help people build their confidence and amplify their voice from the boardroom to the stage to your event with 1000 plus people. This Brampton raised speaker will inspire everyone to go beyond their limitations and grab hold of the life that they want.

Let’s talk about fundraising and community building. Often in our line of work, we hear people are hesitant to get involved in fundraising. But they are much more likely to get involved in community building.

Resilience is not about being tough and holding in or burying one’s emotion.

Resilience is about bouncing back from things that happen in life. When you think of shocks in a car, the bumps are there on the road, right? What we're doing is we're cultivating strength in ourselves to be able to absorb these shocks. Great research has shown that resilience is not an innate trait, but rather something we can all develop. We develop resilience not by burying our emotion or plowing through it, but actually through wellness habits.

We're going to start this conversation talking a little bit about mental health and balance and how to navigate when you do wear many hats. Which usually comes with a huge workload and a lot of stress

Sometimes due to lack of resources, it can be hard for small organizations to refocus on impact. What have you found working with organizations that are some of the challenges that you help them overcome?

The first challenge that I think is absolutely pivotal is the challenge of mindset. Do you as a leader in a sector, a leader within your organization, a leader within a community, do you see yourself as a shaper? Or do you see yourself as a taker?

Let me start by saying today we're going to be talking about direct appeal fundraising and specifically design because design is a really important piece of what we're sending out so can you start by talking about why design is important and what impact it can have if done right versus not right?

Everyone always talks about needing a case for support. And sometimes they confuse it with a pitch deck. And oftentimes, they'll write one without really understanding how to do it well. So today, we're going to pull back the curtain and show people how to do well.

I think there's a lot of kind of inertia around these things. And I've been there myself, it just feels overwhelming. Is it really necessary? Is it really urgent? For small nonprofits, it can feel like it's just another thing to do.

HireNext is a tool that we've designed to help employers get to the best young talent Canada has to offer. As many as 30% of employers struggle to fill their entry level roles. And if they're not struggling to fill them, then they're working hard to keep great talent in the organization.

So today we're talking about introverts. Let's define what it means to be introverted.

Introverts are people who get their energy from time alone. Some people will equate introversion with shyness or social anxiety but those two things while they sometimes might overlap, are very distinct from one another.