Kelly McLaughlin

Founder & Lead Consultant

That was nice and tidy, but here’s the full story…

I got my B.A. in International Studies (focus on Political Communications) and Spanish from Elon University and an M.A. in Social Justice & Human Rights from Arizona State University. In my academic studies, I sought to understand how individuals and organizations could translate complex political ideas into everyday language that everyone understands. I wanted to understand how you change hearts and minds. How do you get someone to be excited and passionate about something?

During this time, I also served as a community organizer, trained by the Obama for America campaign. This early training allowed me to connect the dots between the messaging work I was doing academically to the community organizing work of building relationships. (Remember that, it comes up later!)

After graduating from my M.A. program, I took a job as a fundraiser and was handed the standard playbook: a donor database with numbers (not relationships), content calendars, direct mail, and major donor societies.

I hated it.

It felt extractive. The program staff barely spoke to the fundraising staff. Donors screened my calls. The people we served felt exploited.

And on top of all that yuck, it wasn't even working. The organization was stuck at what felt like a ceiling, donor retention sucked, and leadership was convinced they’d “maxed out” the donor base and needed to find new donors.

Something was off. I realized nothing about fundraising best practice aligned with the relationship building work I’d done as a community organizer. None of the messaging strategies that I knew excited people lined up with the messaging advice I was getting in fundraising workshops. So I asked for my Executive Director’s trust, and threw out the traditional fundraising playbook.

I decided to fundraise like a community organizer: relationships over dollar signs, asking for help as much as for money, sharing stories with others and asking them to share theirs, and finding the joy in connecting to a cause you’re passionate about.

That’s when everything changed. My staff started asking to meet with donors. My donors showed up, even in hard times. The people we served felt valued and respected. Everyone felt like part of the same community working toward a common goal.

That organization began at a stagnant, hustle-to-raise $300,000 per year. Four years later, we were raising over $1.2 million from the same number of donors (for a niche foreign policy advocacy organization) while building a vibrantly passionate community around our organization.

I started to wonder, could this work elsewhere? Yes! I went on to build individual giving programs for missions across the board: immigration, climate justice, historic preservation, and more.

If any of this sounds familiar...
→ Fundraising feels gross or extractive
→ Your mission is too complex for an elevator pitch
→ You can't boil your impact into tidy metrics
→ You've tried the "best practices" and they just don't fit
→ Things worked until the algorithm changed

...you're not fundraising wrong. You're following the wrong playbook.

Here's how I work with organizations:
→ Review where you've been — what's worked, what hasn't
→ Build a strategy rooted in your mission and community, not a template
→ Develop messaging that makes complicated work land with donors
→ Put systems in place that support real relationship-based fundraising

At the end of the day, it’s about putting the fun in fundraising. It’s taking the mission you love, and finding others who care as much as you do. That’s joyful, mission-centered work that has nothing to do with best practice and strategic content creation. It’s community building with intentionality.

The one thing my clients all tell me at the end: I didn’t realize fundraising could be this easy!