Your donors don’t want to be managed. They want to belong.
I speak, teach, and consult on how nonprofits build belonging and earn trust — for conferences, AFP chapters, board meetings, staff days, and the teams doing the work in between.
The Welcoming Nonprofit: The Four Spaces of Nonprofit Engagement.
I make the case that belonging isn’t a pipeline — it’s a house, with four rooms. The Four Spaces draws on five decades of research into how humans experience space and belonging — Edward T. Hall’s proxemics, Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, Joseph Myers’ spatial theory — and hands it to your audience as a simple metaphor they can use on Monday.
Audiences leave able to name the room each of their supporters is standing in, and to say what they do in a sentence a stranger would actually repeat.
Conference keynotes, AFP chapter meetings, board retreats, and staff days. Virtual or in person. Roughly 45–60 minutes, with an interactive version that puts the room to work.
Hearing Todd speak, you realize you’ve hit the trifecta: fresh content, strong delivery, accessible language. If you’re ready to step out of what you already know, you cannot do better than inviting Todd ‘into your living room.’
The Analog Nonprofit: Creating Real Connection in an Age of Automation.
The talk from the book I’m writing now. AI can fake warmth at infinite scale — which means it can counterfeit belonging. My argument: when polish becomes free, effort becomes the signal. This isn’t anti-tech — a builder’s caution, not a luddite’s — it’s a way to decide what to automate and what has to stay human.
Audiences leave with a clear-eyed way to think about trust in an AI-flooded sector — and permission to use the tools without quietly eroding the relationships they’ve worked years to build.
Conferences and staff days wrestling with what AI means for their communications and their donors. This one’s newer to the circuit and still taking shape in public — book it while it’s fresh.
Want the Four Spaces in the room with your team?
A keynote reframes the thinking. A workshop changes what your team does Monday morning.
We take the ideas from The Welcoming Nonprofitand apply them to your actual supporters — naming the room each one is really standing in, drafting your Sidewalk Statement until it sounds like you, and finding where people get stuck or the ask is too big for the space.
Some teams want the language and the framework to run with themselves; others want to leave with the work done together, live, in the room. We’ll shape it around where your team actually is.
Virtual or in person · half-day or full-day · scaled to your team and goals.
Strategic Nonprofit Consulting
I take on a small number of deeper consulting engagements each year — the kind where I’m less a guest speaker and more a strategist sitting at your table for a while. Most of it comes down to two questions: is your brand welcoming the right people, and is your message clear enough that they can tell? Two of those engagements come up often enough that it’s worth naming them.
The Four Spaces Audit
A look at your whole house — not just the ask. We walk through all four spaces and see how your brand actually shows up in each one: where you’re welcoming people in, where a room sits empty, and which groups you’re quietly leaving on the sidewalk without meaning to. You come away knowing where the belonging breaks down, and where the openings are that you’ve been walking past.
Good when: you can feel that something isn’t connecting, but you can’t yet point at where.
Brand & Messaging Clarity
Helping you figure out where you stand in a crowded field and say it in a way people repeat. We work on the actual words — your Sidewalk Statement, your core message, the places your site might be accidentally telling the wrong story — and on the specific thing that’s stuck: donors who won’t convert online, a message that confuses more than it clarifies, a new audience you can’t seem to reach, or the classic “no one really knows what we do.”
Good when: you know what you do, and you’re tired of watching it get lost on the way to the people who need it.
These are shaped one at a time, around your organization and where it actually is — so the best place to start is a conversation, not a package.
Not sure which fits, working with a tight budget, or just have a question? Tell me a little about your organization and what you’re up against — we’ll find the right shape.
Get in touch