mike rusch.: welcome to the State of Good Report.
This podcast exists to help you fund the mission
of your nonprofit.
If you lead fundraising in a nonprofit or you're the
executive director, or you sit on the board, you carry
something that most people around you don't fully
understand the weight of knowing that the mission you
care about, it only moves forward if the funding is there.
And that pressure, as you know, it never goes away.
You close out a great year and the clock resets in January,
you land a major gift and you immediately start thinking about
what happens if that donor is not able to give the same amount
at the same time next year.
And underneath that pressure, there's a question that keeps
most of us awake at night.
Is what I'm doing actually going to work?
Am I building something sustainable or am I just
keeping the lights on for one more quarter?
Now, layer on top of that, a landscape that won't sit still.
Government funding is being disrupted, donor
behavior is shifting.
Foundations are changing their priorities, and every month
there's new research, new data, new policy changes and
somehow you're supposed to stay on top of all of that while
also running your organization to serve some of the most
vulnerable people in the world.
That's the problem that this podcast is built to solve.
My name is Mike Rusch and I'm part of the
team at Pure Charity.
We're a nonprofit technology organization that builds
fundraising and donor management tools for
the nonprofit community.
And I mentioned that because I want you to know
how we approach this work.
We're not backed by venture capital.
There's no pressure to extract more profit from the
organizations that we serve.
We exist to help nonprofits do what they do better.
That's it.
And this podcast exists for the same reason, to serve the
people who are out there every day trying to solve the most
difficult problems in the world.
So every week we help you think through three questions that
I believe are at the heart of sustainable nonprofit growth.
The first one is simply, "how do I fund this work?"
Where's the money gonna come from this year, next year,
and five years from now?
Every week we're reading the research reports, tracking
the giving data, and watching the economic indicators
so that you don't have to.
We do the work of paying attention to all of it,
sorting through what actually matters, and translating
it into what it means for nonprofit organizations and
how they can take action on it.
We've been doing this work for 15 years and served on nonprofit
boards, served as executive directors, founded nonprofits,
and been tasked to raise funds for the organizations that we've
served, including Pure Charity.
We've been there, we are there.
We've felt the weight and we've continued forward.
The second question is this, "how do I partner with
donors and invite them to be a part of this mission?"
Because the organizations that are thriving right now aren't
just asking people for money.
They're building relationships.
They're helping donors to see themselves as part of the story,
not just the funding source.
So every week we're asking why do donors give, what
is the donor psychology and the motivation, and what is
their research telling us about how that is changing?
And we want you to be able to use that to deepen the
relationships that you have with your supporters and
the people that you work with who support your work.
And the third question is one that honestly doesn't
get enough attention.
"How do I care for the supporters and donors
that we already have?"
Because here's the thing, we know from the data, that donor
retention across the nonprofit sector is still a major problem.
The average nonprofit loses over half its donors every
single year, and in most cases it's not because the
donor stopped caring, it's because we stopped showing
them that their gift mattered.
and That's a retention problem.
And it's fixable.
So that's what you'll get every week.
Funding, partnership, stewardship, retention, plus
the policy changes and sector news that affects all four.
Each episode is under about 10 minutes.
No fluff, no jargon, just actionable intelligence that
you can use immediately.
And the full written report with all the links and
all the sources is always available at purecharity.com.
Subscribe wherever you're listening right now.
New episodes will drop almost every Tuesday.
I wanna say thanks for following along and please
keep doing this good work.
We believe that this podcast series will help.