Episode Summary

Nonprofit leaders and fundraisers are exhausted, and the instinct when results slip is to simply work harder. In this episode of Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership, Derric Bakker, Founder & CEO of DickersonBakker, argues that today’s struggle is not a down cycle teams can out-hustle but a structural shift in how people give, driven by demographics, the widening wealth gap, fraying community and religious ties, and donors who now expect the personalized experience every consumer brand delivers. Returning after his 2022 conversation (Episode #181), Derric makes the provocative case behind his new book: the relational behaviors long reserved for the top 1 percent of major donors, listening first, personalizing every touchpoint, stewarding consistently, and protecting trust, can become the operating system for fundraising at every level. He explains where AI makes that possible at scale, where it must never replace the human on the other end, and what a practical first step looks like, from rethinking donor survey data to reimagining portfolio size and gratitude. Listeners come away with a clear-eyed diagnosis of why the old model broke and a hopeful sense of the leadership and board decisions that move an organization toward a better way.

About Derric

Derric Bakker is the Founder & CEO of DickersonBakker, a fundraising consulting and agency firm that helps nonprofit organizations grow, thrive, and make a bigger impact, with a team of more than 50 working with over 100 clients a year. Across more than three decades in the sector, Derric moved through three chapters, roughly a decade as a frontline practitioner, a decade in consulting, and leadership of the firm he launched in 2010 that later merged to become DickersonBakker, and he is now entering a fourth focused on writing, teaching, and thought leadership as Andrew Olson takes the helm as president. Mentored early in his career by the legendary Jerry Panas, Derric built his expertise on relationship-based major gift fundraising, the foundation of his new book. Reflecting on the pace of change, he often points out that nearly everything about the work has been transformed by technology since he started, yet many of fundraising’s core assumptions have stubbornly stayed the same.

Resources

• Connect with Derric Bakker on LinkedIn and learn more about DickersonBakker

• Derric’s book: A Better Way to Fundraise: Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor — explore the book and discussion guides at betterwaychampions.org

• Recommended reading: Nonprofit AI by Nathan Chappell (who, with Brian Crimmins, was a past guest on Episode #211, Is Philanthropy in a State of Crisis?)

• Registration is open for Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy - Learn more at institutepl.org

• Learn more about Inperium, a nonprofit that helps health and human services organizations grow without sacrificing their mission: Inperium.org

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