About Rich Foss and Evergreen Leaders

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Helping Community Nonprofits Thrive Through Sustainable Fundraising

So how did you become this Green Light Fundraising Guy?

It started in the spring of 1983 with a headache. Little did I know that headache would lead me on the path to discover that I love teaching fundraising.

I was participating in a day-long management training workshop for nonprofit managers.

At the time I was working in administration for a nonprofit but it wasn’t a position where I could apply all the compelling leadership ideas I was learning in the workshop.

By the end of the daylong workshop I had a splitting headache.

I woke the next morning at 5:00 a.m. with an idea for a position where I would have space to lead and be creative.

Later that day I wrote a job description for a new fundraising position. I was fortunate to work for an executive director who recognized the value of my proposed new position as the director of development.

Soon, in a rural area with a population of 30,000, we were bringing in over $100,000 a year through special events, an annual direct mail appeal, planned giving and great public relations.

Unfortunately, the special events took a lot of staff and volunteer time and left money on the table. I remember looking at the bottom line of our special events and feeling guilty. I knew that if we added in the salaries for staff time into the expenses, the numbers would be even grimmer.  I wondered if all the volunteers would be happy if they saw the same numbers as me. I had another sneaking suspicion. What if we had just sold a $100 ticket to someone who, if asked, would have given us $5,000?

Still I loved fundraising because I saw how the lives of people served by the nonprofit were transformed. I was passionate about telling the stories of the people served by our nonprofit—people who were often overlooked in our community but were given the opportunity to do amazing things through the work of the nonprofit. And I loved making it possible for donors to be part of transforming lives of these people I cared deeply about.

Then in the mid 1990’s I directed a $1.2 million capital campaign for the organization. The retired YMCA executive who volunteered to do our feasibility study was amazed at the great image we had in the community. The one complaint the study uncovered? We nickel and dimed people with our numerous special events.

Directing the capital campaign was a stretch for me and the organization. We were forced to learn how to raise major gifts and to recruit and manage over 100 volunteer leaders and solicitors. I am forever indebted to Bill Glenn, the retired YMCA executive who had consulted on more than forty YMCA campaigns during his career. Bill mentored me through the campaign, freely sharing wisdom and materials from his career, and despite the mistakes I made, the campaign surpassed its goal.

After completing the capital campaign, I began fundraising consulting and discovered that I loved to teach fundraising. I’ve always read widely on leadership development and enjoyed teaching leadership. I discovered that fundraising is a specialized form of leadership.

At the same time I discovered an unmet need. Smaller community nonprofits needed help to move beyond special events and direct mail to raise substantial funds each year.

And yet these smaller nonprofits could not afford traditional fundraising consultants who charge $1200 to $1600 a day. I began to create a fundraising system that eventually became Green Light Fundraising. The system is designed to be led by a solo development director, or, in that case of very small organizations, the executive director or a key volunteer. The system allows a leader to manage the systems and volunteers needed to raise $50,000 to $500,000 a year.

One of the first nonprofit that adopted the Green Light Fundraising system, the Youth Service Bureau of Illinois Valley, increased their fundraising income by over 700% in the first year. Every year since, even in the current deep recession, they have increased the amount of money raised.

I knew I had a system that worked. Now I needed an affordable way to teach the system. By then I had founded Evergreen Leaders, a nonprofit with a mission to provide ordinary people the tools they needed to help their groups thrive.

I began to ponder how I could create an affordable way to teach Green Light Fundraising to the leaders of smaller nonprofit who needed to raise more money every year.

Free is affordable to even the most cash-strapped nonprofit. Evergreen Leaders board and staff raised $40,000 to underwrite the cost of producing Green Light Fundraising: Your Sustainable Fundraising Guide to Raising $50,000 to $500,000 a Year to Light Up the Eyes of People You Serve and Your Donors, and making the book available as a free ebook download.

You are probably like me, passionate about seeing lives transformed. That’s why you work in the nonprofit world.

When a group of friends and I founded Evergreen Leaders in 2003, we could have made it a for profit business as most consultant firms are. But we chose to launch Evergreen Leaders as nonprofit to serve the nonprofit world we love.

Evergreen Leaders used to work with fundraising clients one-on-one. Now we have produced Green Light Fundraising ebook so that we can simultaneously teach many community nonprofit leaders to raise the funds they need.

We realize that not everyone is going to be able to read the book and implement a Green Light Fundraising system in their community nonprofit. To provide further affordable help, we’ve created the Green Light Fundraising Club where for $29 month you can access coaching calls, expert calls, and additional materials to provide you with support as you lead your nonprofit in sustainable fundraising.

We hope you find the site a valuable resource for growing in your ability to transform lives through fundraising, and for realizing your full potential as a fundraiser.

Now if your current fundraising is giving you headaches, the next place to go is Green Light Fundraising Club to see how the Club can help you set up a successful sustainable fundraising campaign. Or you can check out who we work with to see if your nonprofit fits the profile of the organizations we help establish sustainable fundraising.