Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership

Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership

A leader's guide to nonprofit career success!

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390: How People Work: 4 Things Every Nonprofit Leader Should Know (Nancy Bacon)
390
Oct. 14, 2026

390: How People Work: 4 Things Every Nonprofit Leader Should Know (Nancy Bacon)

Episode 390: How People Work: 4 Things Every Nonprofit Leader Should Know (Nancy Bacon) Episode Summary Most nonprofit leaders assume that passion is enough, that a motivated team is simply a team that cares, and that a performance problem is a training problem. Nancy Bacon, Founder of Nancy Bacon Consulting and co-founder of the Nonprofit Learning Center in Seattle, spent this conversation taking that apart, one piece of research at a time. She walks through self-determination theory’s thr...
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389: How to Stop Being the Invisible Sector (Dr. Mariane Asad Doyle)
389
Oct. 7, 2026

389: How to Stop Being the Invisible Sector (Dr. Mariane Asad Doyle)

Episode 389: How to Stop Being the Invisible Sector (Dr. Mariane Asad Doyle) Episode Summary Ask a nonprofit leader about advocacy and you will usually hear one of two things: there is no time for it, or it is lobbying and therefore off limits. Dr. Mariane Asad Doyle, Executive Director of the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Charlottesville, Virginia, takes both apart. Advocacy, she argues, is simply legislative education, and the line that actually matters is a bill. If you are pushing ...
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388: Why Half of Your Week Isn't in Your Job Description (Cyril Jefferson)
388
Sept. 30, 2026

388: Why Half of Your Week Isn't in Your Job Description (Cyril Jefferson)

Episode 388: Why Half of Your Week Isn't in Your Job Description (Cyril Jefferson) Episode Summary Most nonprofit leaders can feel that the week has gotten away from them, but very few can prove it, which makes the conversation with a board sound like complaining rather than evidence. Cyril Jefferson, Mayor of High Point, North Carolina, spent years on the other side of that problem as a consultant, and his fix is a four-week time audit: log every task in a spreadsheet as you do it, add a r...
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387: How to Build Something That Keeps Giving (William McNeely)
387
Sept. 23, 2026

387: How to Build Something That Keeps Giving (William McNeely)

Episode 387: How to Build Something That Keeps Giving Episode Summary Most leaders build as though time is unlimited, and the idea that would matter most sits in a notebook waiting on money that never arrives. William McNeely, Founder and CEO of Do Greater Charlotte, stopped thinking that way in 2017, and six weeks after a double lung transplant, with no money and no staff, he was on a stage pitching an organization built around one sentence he had written himself: commit to doing something...
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386: How to Build on Your Community Capital as a Nonprofit Leader (Dan Bevels)
386
Sept. 16, 2026

386: How to Build on Your Community Capital as a Nonprofit Leader (Dan Bevels)

Episode 386: How to Build on Your Community Capital as a Nonprofit Leader (Dan Bevels) Episode Summary Plenty of nonprofit professionals talk themselves out of executive roles because their resume does not show years of philanthropic experience. Dan Bevels, President of the Atrium Health Floyd-Polk Foundation in Rome, Georgia, nearly did exactly that, and applied only after his wife and a mentor pushed him. He walks through the case he made in place of the credentials he lacked: that what h...
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385: No Margin, No Mission: Building Nonprofits That Last (Cecilia Haag)
385
Sept. 9, 2026

385: No Margin, No Mission: Building Nonprofits That Last (Cecilia Haag)

385: No Margin, No Mission: Building Nonprofits That Last (Cecilia Haag) Episode Summary Nonprofit leaders are told that the urgency of the mission will carry the organization, and that financial and operational discipline is something the corporate world worries about. Cecilia Haag, President of Thompson Impact Consulting, came out of that corporate world, joining the 140-year-old human services organization Thompson as Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer after watching it decide to take...
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