Publications

When a Donor Dies: 10 Things Nobody Tells Fundraisers – We offer a field guide for the grief of losing a donor; a grief that lives between the professional and the personal and for which the field has almost nothing to offer us when it arrives.

Ethical Consistency in Advancement: How to Stop Ethical Drift – We ask advancement leaders and practitioners to be explicit about and consistent in the ethical frameworks they use, and offer a simple tool to help them do so.

Bless Your Heart: A Secular Guide to Servant Leadership – We argue that servant leadership is a poor fit for secular organizations and increasingly misaligned with the structural, equity, and governance realities facing nonprofits today.

Let Donors Give and Go: The Decline of Civic Ritual and the Myth of Engagement in the Era of Crowdfunding – We point to crowdfunding as a clearer reflection of how many donors have always preferred to give, not a threat to philanthropy.

Grow Up / Glow Up: A Maturity Model for Advancement Data Governance – We contend that long-term success and scalability depend on moving deliberately toward input-oriented governance rather than the output-oriented model most organizations start out with.

Don’t Just Ask the Database Directly: Why Adding Generative and Agentic AI to a Fundraising CRM is a Dangerous Shortcut for the Nonprofit Sector – We make the case against Generative AI assistants embedded directly into fundraising CRMs as structurally harmful when applied to messy, incomplete, and highly contextual fundraising data. 

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) for Advancement Services – Best Practices for Today’s Success – Vered and the DEI in Advancement Services Task Force offer guidelines for the responsible acquisition, storage, and usage of constituents’ biographical data.