How to Raise Money (HtRM) is a series of strategic workshops, tools, and templates purpose-built to help emerging nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs bring partners, expertise, and resources to their missions.
Scroll to learn more about HtRM. To enroll in the workshop or ask questions, please reach out for a chat!
(email us at HtRM@aspirationtech.org)
Raising money doesn’t have to feel intimidating; it can be learned. When done properly, it can be a source of meaning, growth, and subversive joy for your donors, your team, and you.
The workshops drive five shifts in how you approach fundraising:
HtRM helps you implement effective development strategies by:
My monthly sessions with him have been a space for me to learn from one of the best fundraising leaders in the sector and openly share my challenges and receive targeted and specialised advice (plus hands-on help) on tackling them. Geoffrey constantly challenges me to get out of my comfort zone and has shifted my mindset from being a recipient to that of building strategic and mutually beneficial funding relationships.
Workshops are capped at 5 people, facilitating meaningful participation and peer-based learning.
Participation is open to anyone who has strategic decision-making capacity within their organization, shared or otherwise.
We have a rolling start date, with each cohort setting a schedule that best works for everyone. (So email us right away!)
We meet 11 times over 5 weeks, for 12 hours of peer-driven learning. You also get 5 hours of 1:1 support from Aspiration staff to help get started.
Afterwards, we can provide 6-12 months of targeted support and mentoring. This can be useful for implementing systems, refining your narrative, or closing specific funding opportunities (as well as moral support!).
Leaders with issue expertise tackling a critical challenge, which requires new resources.
Founders seeking investment to launch ventures that blend traditional nonprofit and private sector objectives.
Program Officers and donors looking to support their grantees with skills training that can grow the pool of resources available to their field.
Questions? Want to talk with us about enrolling?
(email us at HtRM@aspirationtech.org)
There were three things that I loved about the workshops. First, it was clearly built from lived experience. Secondly, it's designed with clarity and purpose, which makes it well-suited for busy people. And finally, the philosophy behind it is empowering: donors need you as much as you need them. That's the starting point for every move, and it is a welcome shift from a lot of common thinking about fundraising.
Aspiration recognizes that issues of race, class, and systemic bias are inherent to fundraising. We are committed to fostering a supportive environment where you can be candid about your challenges and concerns. We follow inclusive practices designed to ensure equitable participation. Beyond prioritizing diversity, we aspire to be anti-racist and anti-capitalist. And while we can’t do anything to change the destructive history of wealth and power, we are dedicated to supporting leaders who are building something new.
We are committed to learning with and from you as we build this program. We invite feedback and dialogue at any point.
Aspiration provides equitable access to its leadership workshops. We’ll work with you to fit your budget, timeline, and needs.
The suggested cost is $2,500. We ask those who can to pay a little more to help our partners and allies in the movement who need to pay a little less. We are always happy to discuss sliding-scale pricing and scholarships.
Geoffrey is an accomplished leader and strategist in innovation change management. With more than 25 years experience in fundraising and advocacy, he has played a direct role in raising over $100 million and has helped individuals and teams raise hundreds of millions more in public, private, and philanthropic funding for start-ups, nonprofits, and established companies, and engaged millions of people in advocacy campaigns.
Geoffrey is an accomplished leader and strategist in innovation change management. With more than 25 years experience in fundraising and advocacy, he has played a direct role in raising over $100 million and has helped individuals and teams raise hundreds of millions more in public, private, and philanthropic funding for start-ups, nonprofits, and established companies, and engaged millions of people in advocacy campaigns.
Geoffrey served as the Vice President of Development at Consumer Reports (CR), where he developed strategy, built partnerships, and secured resources to protect consumers’ interests in the marketplace. He was a pivotal force in the creation and launch of the Digital Standard, an open and collaborative effort to create a digital privacy and security standard to help guide the future design of consumer software, digital platforms and services, and internet-connected products. He was also instrumental in the creation of CR’s new model for distributed consumer power, engagement, and participation, which underpins the design of its membership program.
Prior to joining CR, Geoffrey served as Vice President, Engagement, for the Mozilla Foundation, where he lead the design and development of Mozilla’s strategic development (fundraising and investment) program, as well as its policy and advocacy program. In this role, he established partnerships with premier philanthropic institutions and was a driving force in the StopWatching.Us campaign and the 2015 Net Neutrality grassroots advocacy victory.
Geoffrey has also served as:
A design junkie, MacDougall divides his time between Manhattan and Roxbury, NY where he and his family are restoring a 19th century farmhouse.
Amanda is a Principal Gifts Officer with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). She has worked in the development sphere for over 14 years and draws on experience ranging from membership to program building to co-creating principal and planned gift partnerships.
For HtRM, she utilizes her technical training as a Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy to walk participants through gifts of assets and how awareness of various giving options, financial constructs, and philanthropic approaches can help their organizations grow. Amanda is committed to advancing equitable climate action through her professional work and within her community and family in Denver, CO. To offset the anxiety that sometimes produces, she makes art with her two young children, runs long distances, and tends an ever-expanding garden.
Allen Gunn works to help NGOs, activists, foundations and technologists make more effective use of technology for social, racial and climate justice.
Allen Gunn is Executive Director of Aspiration (www.aspirationtech.org) in San Francisco, USA, and works to help NGOs, activists, foundations and technologists forge effective and sustainable digital strategies in support of social, racial and climate justice.
Gunner has worked in numerous technology environments from NGO to Silicon Valley start-up to college faculty to large corporation, serving in senior management, engineering, teaching and volunteer roles. He is an experienced strategist, mentor and facilitator with a passion for designing collaborative open learning processes. And once upon a time he was a roadie in a San Francisco rock-and-roll band.
In his role at Aspiration, he connects nonprofit organizations, free and open source projects, philanthropic funders and activists with strategic frameworks, technology solutions, digital practices and data skills that help them more fully realize their missions.
The common thread that connects all facets of Gunner's work is a focus on open approaches to capacity building and knowledge sharing in social change efforts. Aspiration prioritizes work that supports and contributes to open communities of practice who create technology and content that benefit nonprofit, foundation and activist efforts. The organization has designed and facilitated over 800 extremely open learning and knowledge sharing events, in over 50 countries across the globe, predicated on a philosophy of active participation that puts each participant “in control of their own destiny”, in contrast to approaches that place audiences in passive listening roles. Aspiration publishes all licensed work products, including software tools, books, papers and training materials, under open licenses; for published documents and media, the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike, and for software the GNU General Public License whenever possible.
Gunner is an active facilitator, contributor, advisor, and/or partner in a number of organizations and projects, including European Digital Rights (EDRi), SustainOSS, Reset.Tech, Ushahidi, Gathering for Open Science Hardware, Open Supply Hub, The Open Source Hardware Association, OpenReferral, OpenStreetMap US, OpenStreetMap Foundation, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Tor Project, Tails, and Mozilla.
He is a board member of Global Exchange, Peer 2 Peer University, Greenaction, and Forward Change, and serves on the Project Leadership Committee for the Reproducible Builds Project, and also serves in formal advisory roles with The Everett Program, Fair Share of Women Leaders, CorpWatch, and United for Iran. He is a former board member of The Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA), The Ruckus Society, Idealware and US Treks/Internet Treks.
Gunner is also a guest lecturer and former faculty member in Computer Science at Foothill College in California, and served on the Computer Science faculty at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia early in his career. Prior to his role at Aspiration, he served as Chief Tech Organizer for The Ruckus Society, and prior to that he was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Pensare, an eLearning dotgone. He has served as senior software engineer at firms including Novell, NetManage, and a number of startups, and has shepherded large software projects through all stages of development, from inception, design, engineering, and testing to deployment, support and marketing, in environments ranging from start-up to large corporation to nonprofit.
Geoffrey has been an invaluable partner as our team has launched a new not-for-profit. As Geoffrey quickly (and helpfully) diagnosed in our first meeting, our team spans the pendulum swing from having experience in organizations with extremely mature, fully built programs to members who have for-profit/ tech start-up experience, but less with philanthropy. The act of distinguishing this state immediately helped us address issues of language, expectations, planning and how to sit with donors.
Just reach out for a chat! The first step is to learn more about each other so we can make sure the workshop will be a meaningful and productive experience. During our conversation, we will answer any questions you may have, explore potential start times, and discuss the fee (if any).
(email us at HtRM@aspirationtech.org)
