PhoenixFire Strategic Consulting

Those executive directors leading huge Missions and seem to do the impossible? They're just ruthless about what their time goes toward. They have the same 24 hours as everyone else, and yet they make the most out of them. How? By knowing how to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. If it sounds like a herculean task to you, it’s time you give the Eisenhower Matrix a go. You start with four quadrants: -Urgent + important: do it now. -Important but not urgent: schedule it. Strategy, donor relationships, and team development... All should be here. The work that compounds. Also, the work that never feels urgent enough to actually get done. -Urgent but not important: delegate it. Someone else's fire. -Not urgent, not important: delete it. That simple. Almost all work that significantly impacts your Mission will fall in quadrant 2. What's in your box 2?

We have a question for you... Do you think training AI to sound like you is a waste of time? We've been seeing a lot of discourse like this online, and what we found out is that most people saying it are the same people whose AI content reads like AI content... Lee Domaszowec, our Founder and Chief Strategist, has been using LLMs for years. While his knowledge of AI runs really deep, he himself hates it when it's obvious something was 100% written by AI. That's because the goal was never to have AI write for you. What you should aim toward is to have AI to help you, not to substitute you: - Build a banned phrase list, solid rules. Ours includes no em dashes, no jargon, no empty words, no "however," "delve... We override the AI default to something that has the same speech pattern as we do. - Feed it your actual writing. Real examples, the more the better. Let it learn those patterns from the source. - Build a filter that runs before AI touches a first draft. We have a prompt system that catches tells before output is ever generated. - And also read everything out loud. If you wouldn't say it in a conversation, it doesn't go live. Our system is 21 pages long now. It started much shorter, and it improves every week. This way, we can focus more of our time on tasks that actually help change the world faster. What are your thoughts on training AI to sound more like you? Let's talk about it! #artificialintelligence #contentcreation #AI

Your volunteers are leaving, and you think it's them... It's not. We've watched this happen with a lot of nonprofits, and we've even had multiple leaders coming to us and asking why that is happening. If you don't know how to keep your volunteers from just dropping off when you need them most, make sure, before they start, you: - Write their role down. With hours, schedule, who they report to, and what they're doing. Some volunteers quit because they showed up confused. - Match the person to the work. Some people want the frontline action. Some want behind-the-scenes. Don't assume everyone wants what you want. - Train your supervisors to handle your volunteers. Your supervisors should answer their questions, not you. If every volunteer is running to find you during an event, nobody's working. - Rotate shifts during long events. Eight-hour stretches kill energy. Four hours? People show up differently. - Feed them and keep caffeine around. Don't forget, people need energy. Food and coffee will keep them happy. - Give them a quiet room to breathe. Your volunteers should have access to a place where they can wind down for a bit. And don't forget to debrief after. What questions came up most? What problems kept happening? Train around those next time. Volunteers can be the greatest thing that has ever happened to your Mission. Don't dismiss them as an extra pair of hands. They're just as important as your donors because that's exactly what they are! Want to learn more about Volunteer Strategy? Comment "Volunteer," and we'll get in touch!

The secret to good grant writing. Brigid Vance put it simply in on of our Training Sessions, with Lee Domaszowec Just read the grant instructions and follow them...That's it. Funders tell you exactly what they want. The page limit, font size, the questions they want answered the data... It's all there. Applicants who ignore that lose before the reviewer even reads a word of their proposal. Read the RFP like a contract. Answer what was asked. Stop there. The organizations winning grants might not always be the ones with the best programs, but they sure are the ones who took the instructions seriously. Do you read the grant instructions? Be honest and comment below!

What if your Fundraising almost missed on a $5,000 donor? That would feel terrible, right? Well, that almost happened to a client of ours! They were running a fundraising campaign when we screened their donor file, and something interesting was flagged. A married couple, and not because they were major donors or anything like that. It was actually because of their son. He was an investor with significant assets, but he had never donated to the organization before, so the parents reached out and asked if he would support the campaign. He ended up giving $5,000. That one donation covered more than the cost of the screening itself. Your donor database already contains opportunities people overlook every day: • Family connections • Business owners • Investors • Long-time supporters with far greater giving capacity than anyone realizes A lot of organizations are sitting on potential major donors without knowing it. If you want help reviewing your donor file, send us a message.

One sentence. Read it slowly. "They're safe. You're not." That's what the contract you signed when you bought that website from that vibe-coder says. That dude built you the website and moved on. He made sure he was covered. It's in the indemnification and the limitation of liability clauses, once you parse the legal language. But you're the one holding donor payment data, confidential client records, volunteer personal information, home addresses, the trust of a community... All of it. A breach doesn't come with a carve-out for "we didn't know the site had vulnerabilities", and a demand letter from a plaintiff's attorney doesn't care that your site was AI-generated and delivered in 48 hours. So, next time you want a website done, before you sign any contract, ask who is the actual human responsible for the security of this website. If there isn't one, walk away. Was your website vibe-coded? If you're not sure what you're working with, DM us.

So, here is a really good quick tip for time management that everybody can do. Ready? Here it goes: Only read your emails once. If you need to keep it for some reason, you read it and archive it in a subfolder. If you need to respond to it, obviously, you respond to it. Otherwise, delegate it. Whatever you do, take one of those four actions: - Respond - Delete - Archive - Delegate But never read that email twice. Just think about all the emails you get every day, every week, every month, all year long... How much time will you end up wasting on re-reading them? You can use that time to grow your business, pursue your mission, or even develop your team and yourself. Anything that you do with that saved time will be better than the waste of time reading one email twice. Save this tip and start managing your time better!

Culture isn't built by values statements or posters on the wall... You need to lead by example. Show people you embody the values you say you have. But... How do you achieve that? Dive into our article to learn more about how you can change the way your culture operates.

If you're not doing wealth screenings on your donor lists... you're missing out. On a LOT. Don't believe us? Ok... We had a donor giving $25 a month, and we're grateful for every dollar. But we decided to clean up our donor file and run it through our Wealth Screening system, which showed us who could give more and the data that proved they could. What came out? You'll never guess... That same $25/month donor turned out to be the head of a family Foundation. Because they had a different name from the Foundation, we never would've connected the dots on our own. So, we reached out personally. And that one donor ended up giving $20,000 through their Foundation. That's what a Wealth Screening can do for you. It can give you valuable insights like how to segment outreach, who you should be prioritizing, and even who is more likely to give bigger gifts. Now imagine how much better your next Fundraising could be if you had the right insights on your donors. If you'd like us to help you out with wealth screening your donor list, comment "WEALTH" and we'll get in touch!

Using AI like Google is one of the biggest wastes of time you can make. It's the #1 mistake we still see people make... Treating LLMs like a search engine. One question, one answer, move on. All you'll achieve by doing this is wasting your time and resources, nothing else. And the sad part is, we know exactly how much time AI can help you save if you use it correctly. If you want to be serious about using these tools to help you out, what you need is to start using specialist systems: - A grant writer. - A social media writer. - A fact checker. Each in its own project. Each trained on exactly what it needs to know, isolated...Focused. But this is just the tip of the Iceberg. To get the most out of AI, you need to use it every single day. Add voice-to-text while you're driving. Take what's in your head and make it institutional knowledge your whole team can use. Go from 100 hours of grant research to 3 minutes. That's how AI can save you hours or even weeks of your life. And all of this is not theoretical; our Chief Strategist, Lee Domaszowec, spent 13 months living abroad, running PhoenixFire, and launching a foundation. All in the same 24 hours. Now, be honest: are you using AI to its true potential? Let us know in the comments