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Inspired Nonprofit Leadership: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Sarah Olivieri
This podcast is a place for nonprofit leaders to gain insights, tips, inspiration, and encouragement to unleash their potential.
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- 4 days ago38 min
455: Make Trust Tangible with Kim Bohr
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 years What Kim's research says builds trust Why hard conversations should get to the point How job loss creates shame and blocks support How Sarah uses AI to reshape only her own words Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors leading teams exhausted by constant change • Leaders bringing in AI while staff fear for their jobs • Anyone avoiding a hard conversation with a wrong-fit staff or board member • CEOs hearing "we have a communication problem" without finding the cause About the Guest Kim Bohr is the President and Chief Executive Officer of SparkEffect, where she helps executive teams navigate change while building trust and strong organizational performance. With more than 25 years of leadership experience, she's a board advisor, speaker, podcast host, and author who specializes in helping leaders build resilient organizations during times of disruption. Join the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly tips and inspiration for leading your nonprofit: https://www.inspirednonprofitleadership.com/signup Connect with Kim: Website: https://sparkeffect.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbohr/ Email: kim.bohr@sparkeffect.com Text: (206) 552-4452 Blog: https://sparkeffect.com/blog Podcast: Courage t
- 1 weeks ago33 min
454: Planned Giving Made Simple with Tony Martignetti
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, without a wealth screen or a legal background. In This Episode, You'll Learn How Tony's three steps get planned giving, and launched inside a single week Why your best prospects are your most loyal donors, not your wealthiest ones What to say when you ask a donor to consider a gift in their will How to respond when a donor says no, yes, or let me think about it Why lifetime giving tells you almost nothing about the size of a planned gift Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors who have been told that planned giving belongs to hospitals and universities • Fundraisers who want major gifts but have no budget to build a whole program first • Anyone who keeps putting off the will conversation because it feels awkward to raise About the Guest Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving. In September, he publishes his book, Planned Giving Accelerated, to help small- and mid-size nonprofits launch by making Planned Giving fundraising easy, accessible and affordable. Pre-orders are at PlannedGivingAccelerated.com. He started as a front-line Planned Giving fundraiser in 1997 and kicked off his consulting in 2003. He's active on LinkedIn and would be honored to connect. Tony is a lawyer, but he doesn't talk like one. Instead, he weaves in his stand-up comedy and improv past to bring Planned Giving within reach for small- and mid-size nonprofits. About the book Tony's new book, Planned Giving Accelerated, is a practical guide for small- and mid-sized nonprofits that want to start a planned giving program without making it complicated. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience, Tony shows how organizations can launch in just one week, starting with bequests. The book covers how to identify your best prospects, build donor relationships, overcome common planned giving myths, and create a sustainable program without a huge budget or specialized legal expertise. Co
- 2 weeks ago21 min
453: Are You Playing Leadership Whack-A-Mole with Sarah Olivieri
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 Episode, You'll Learn Why strategy, operations, and the team have to work as one system How the who, what, where, when, and how fit together Why a team problem may actually start with strategy or operations How the Impact Method® keeps strategy current every two months Why distributed leadership removes decision bottlenecks Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors whose weeks feel like one long game of Whack-A-Mole • Leadership teams working on strategy, operations, and people separately • Leaders who fix one problem only to watch another one pop up • Anyone whose strategy looks good on paper but stalls in practice About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Join the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly tips and inspiration for leading your nonprofit: https://www.inspirednonprofitleadership.com/ Resources mentioned: Work with Sarah (short application, for teams of three or more lea
- 2 weeks ago37 min
452: Why Your Former Employees Still Matter with Steve Cadigan
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 go, and how to stay connected to the good ones after they leave. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why Steve says no job should take more than six months to learn How to design a role around a hire who will stay three years What to do with a good employee after they leave, and why it pays off Why Steve hires for how fast someone learns, not what they already know How to make a major donor relationship belong to the organization, not one person Who This Episode Is For • Executive directors who just lost someone they were counting on • Leaders whose roles take eighteen months to ramp when staff stay three years • Anyone about to have a hard conversation with an employee who has outgrown the job • CEOs who have decided the sector cannot attract talent, and built accordingly About the Guest Steve Cadigan is a globally recognized talent strategist, culture architect, and author with over 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth and transformation. As LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer, Steve helped scale the company from 400 to 4,000 employees, building a culture that set the standard for tech companies worldwide. Today, through his firm Cadigan Talent Ventures, he advises high-growth companies, venture firms, and global leaders on how to win the talent war, design future-ready workplaces, and use culture as a competitive edge. He's a sought-after keynote speaker and the author of Workquake, a #1 Amazon bestseller that reimagines how we work in a post-pandemic world. Steve's insights have been featured in outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg, and his work has been the focus of business school case studies Connect with Stev
- 3 weeks ago18 min
451: How to Build a Simple Nonprofit Marketing Strategy with Sarah Olivieri
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 Executive directors about to spend money on a tactic a board member suggested Leaders whose fundraising activity is busy but whose donor numbers are flat Small organizations wondering whether a website is the right first investment Anyone who has run a fundraising event that cost more than it brought in Who This Episode Is For • Why picking a tactic before a goal is where the money goes • What the three marketing goals are and how to spot yours • Why a website converts people who already found you, and does not create them • How Sarah defines a real donor, and why the second gift is the line • What to do about lifetime value when you have almost no donors yet About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth.She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedI
- 3 weeks ago31 min
450: Hiring Is Your Culture with Crystal FitzSimons
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. This episode is for: Executive directors and nonprofit CEOs who are watching good people leave and unsure why Founders and EDs about to make a key hire and wondering how much process is actually worth it CEOs who have stopped sitting on interviews because if feels like too much time What you'll hear: Why hiring is the single most important thing Crystal's forty-person team does, and how that belief changes the calendar The reason the CEO belongs in every final interview, even at forty people, even at five hundred What Crystal has kept, and what she has added, to sustain a culture where people stay through leadership transitions Why mission alignment is only the price of admission, and what actually keeps someone in the seat How Crystal is holding the team steady through a marathon-and-a-sprint policy season, and what that requires of a president How to think about a hiring process as a cultural transmission instead of a selection task Crystal has been at FRAC for twenty-four years and just stepped into the president role. Her chief government affairs officer recently celebrated forty years with the organization. This is what genuine longevity looks like, and it is not luck. Related Links: Sign up for the The Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter Connect with Crystal on LinkedIn Check out the good work FARC is doing ❤️ And a big thank you to our caring sponsor Donorbox
- 4 weeks ago14 min
449: Let Them Go Well with Sarah Olivieri
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. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why Sarah has never seen the instinct "I think I need to let this person go" turn out to be wrong, and what to do with that The two categories to check before you act, fit with the team and fit with the role, and why only one of them is fixable Why a bad hiring process is usually the thing that produced the conversation you are dreading How to turn a firing conversation into a quitting conversation, and when that serves both of you What nonprofit staff in particular need to hear before they can let themselves leave Who This Episode Is For • Leaders who have been carrying the same thought about the same person since spring • CEOs who keep reshuffling a role hoping it will fix a fit problem • Anyone who has avoided a hard conversation because they were afraid of how the person would react Practical takeaways • Run the two-category check. Is this about the team and your guiding principles, or is this about the role • Check your state's employment laws before you plan anything else • Have the clear conversation first. To be clear is to be kind, and simple, explicit, unjudgmental language is the whole skill • Decide your boundaries before you walk in. Last day, terms, severance, what is flexible and what is not • Do not surprise people with money. Be as generous as the timeline allows • Leave room to ask them what would make this transition feel best About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic
- Aug 20, 202632 min
448: Distributed Leadership That Actually Works with Jocelyn Wyatt
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 story I hear is almost always the same. "I told my team they had authority. I told them I trusted them. But nothing changed. Decisions still come to me." What looks like a resistance problem is actually a systems problem. Distributed leadership is being announced instead of built. The word gets used. The system underneath it does not exist. When the system doesn't exist, people keep doing what the old system taught them to do. They ask permission. They wait for the meeting. They send the email up the chain. Not because they don't want authority. Because nothing around them has been redesigned to make holding that authority a real, workable practice. The Difference Between Declaring And Building A pattern I see over and over: a CEO decides the organization is going to be less hierarchical. They restructure the org chart. They rename departments. They talk about it in the all-staff. And then, six months in, nothing has actually shifted. The org chart is new. The meeting agendas are the same, the decision paths are the same, and the CEO is still the person everyone routes to. The chart got redrawn on top of an unchanged system. This is the structural piece that gets missed. An org chart tells you who is in charge of who. It doesn't tell you what actually needs to get done in the organization or who is accountable for making sure it does. And it doesn't touch the two places where the old hierarchy actually lives, which are meetings and decisions. Until those change, you've made a values statement. You haven't built a system. Trade The Org Chart For A Functions Chart The first piece of the redesign is the one leaders skip most often, because it looks like a semantic move and it isn't. Stop leading with an org chart. Build a functions chart. An org chart is about who is in charge of who. It's a picture of hierarchy. And a hierarchical leadership system, by design, consolidates power by concentrating decision-making. Using an org chart is literally a system that moves you in the opposite direction of distributed decision-making. A functions chart, which is the shape of the Leadership Blueprint I've developed with clients, is about what actually needs to get done in the organization and who is accountable for making sure it does. Instead of boxes for roles under other roles, you have named functions, each tied to a specific outco
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