Hi all,

I have an interview in a week with basically everyone on the Advancement team at a very large public university. I currently work in alumni relations at a very small private college, and the position I am interviewing for is for leadership annual giving.

I understand the gist of the giving side of things--I've been doing research on the school's giving societies and the general protocol for asking for gifts.

I am nervous that I will be asked something I don't know the answer to because I don't come from a giving background. Are there specific aspects about soliciting gifts and talking to donors that I should be aware of and research before I come face-to-face with the AVP and entire development team?

I do talk to stakeholders basically all day because I'm the first point of contact for basically all alumni and friends of the college. I do a lot of basic customer service for them, and I help plan a lot of alumni and student events.

Absolutely any help would be appreciated! I'm so nervous!

Hi everyone, I wanted to share about my new project, which I'm sure will be interesting to some of you! I´ve been writing grants more or less successfully for the last 15 years, mainly for large foundations, governments, and international organizations (especially consulting, research, and social projects. I really like the process of designing a new project for a specific call, but the process of actually writing it for 5, 6, 10 days is really taxing.

Then in the last couple of years, I started experimenting with AI but found the outputs to be either too superficial and generic, or hallucinations or stolen pieces. With the current models that's changing, as you might have noticed, and I´ve gotten better at it as well, developing little by little a multi-step method, so now the final outputs are actually pretty decent (for a first draft at least).
With the method in place I now spend 2 or 3 hours writing the whole thing with AI, and I've made sure it includes good guardrails so that the outputs are both ethical, effective, and the evidence behind it actually EXISTS... With it, I´ve been able to secure a couple 6 and 7 figure grants with it...

Anyway, eventually my colleagues started to ask me to walk them through the method, so I developed some briefs walking people through my method for internal use so that I didn't have to explain it over and over...

Long story short, I've now turned that into a small public course, and I'm really proud of it. I know self-promotion is generally frowned upon on Reddit, but this is just me sharing a personal project I'm really passionate about and which I think could help people in this trade...
So if anyone is interested and would like to check out what I did please drop a comment below. I'd love your feedback on it and I just want as many people as possible to have access to it
Thank you!

Paulius

I’m wondering how other fundraisers keep their giving calendars. My current method: on the first of every month I pull a report of all the donors that made gifts in that month the previous year. So on May 1st, I pulled a list of every donor that gave in May of 2025. And I make an ask to them to renew their gift. Of course we’re cultivating them throughout the year.

How do others do it?