We're just over halfway through 2026, and if there's one thing we love more than helping organizations deliver impact, it's pausing to reflect on what we've actually learned this year. Between fireside chats, benchmarking data, and insightful conversations our partners, a few themes kept surfacing again and again in what we wrote and shared. So before the summer wanes and we head into the second half of the year, we wanted to revisit three posts that reflected the themes we’ve been hearing.
Defining Ownership Across Fund Management & Stewardship
This one came out of a fireside conversation with Chelsea Lamego, Lynne Wester, Shannon Knapp, and Lasserina Dowell, and it tackled a question that comes up in nearly every institution we talk to: who actually owns fund management? The honest answer is that it's rarely one department. It lives at the intersection of compliance, finance, stewardship, and donor relations, which is exactly why ownership gets so blurry. The webinar and blog post walked through where those responsibility breakdowns typically happen (siloed workflows, undocumented processes, systems that don't talk to each other) and offers a practical framework for shifting the conversation from "who owns this?" to "how do we own this together?"
Key idea: Fund management isn't a job title, it's a shared institutional commitment to honoring donor intent from gift to impact.
The 5 Manual Donor Reporting Tasks That Can Hold Back Your Spring Campaign
Timed right before spring giving season, this post got tactical about something we hear constantly: reporting workflows that eat entire weeks of staff time. Drawing on our Benchmarking Survey finding that 96% of stewardship teams cite manual work as a challenge, we broke down the five most common bottlenecks, from reformatting spreadsheets to tracking delivery across individual inboxes, and laid out a three-step path to centralizing data and automating the busywork. We also pointed to UC Riverside's results as proof it's not just theory: a jump from 56% to 99% in narrative request response rate, and reports delivered three weeks ahead of schedule.
Key idea: The busier your season gets, the more manual reporting costs you. Centralizing and automating now is what buys back that time later.
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Closing the Gap: Rethinking Donor Experience as Strategy, Not Sentiment
Written by Josh Birkholz of BWF, this post named something a lot of teams feel but rarely say out loud: giving totals are holding steady or growing, but participation is declining. Josh called this "the gap," the space between how organizations think they're engaging donors and what it actually feels like to be one. His framework calls for treating donor experience as infrastructure rather than sentiment, investing in social connection between donors, and communicating impact as an investment narrative rather than a transaction.
Key idea: Donor experience isn't a soft add-on to strategy, it's operational infrastructure, and organizations that treat it that way retain donors that others lose.
Read back-to-back, these three posts trace a single thread: fund management, reporting, and donor experience all come down to the same thing, whether an organization is structured to earn and keep donor trust.
Ownership clarity protects it, efficient reporting demonstrates it, and a better donor experience deepens it. That thread is exactly what we'll be pulling on next week in our upcoming webinar on Donor Trust, where we'll bring these ideas together into a single framework for building trust as a strategic asset rather than a byproduct of good intentions. We hope you'll join us.
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