Survival deserves to be celebrated. Survival is not a passive thing. Survival is the standing in the room when everyone has left. It is what happens when people decide, repeatedly and deliberately, to remain strong in conditions that were not designed for them to thrive. Standing requires strategy under constraint; adaptation without surrender.

It wasn’t a year of clean arcs or easy momentum. It was a year of recalibration, humility, courage, and rebuilding. A year that asked harder questions than usual and didn’t rush the answers. As we start the new year, I’ve been thinking less about what I accomplished on paper and more about what the work itself taught me.

Let's not sugarcoat it: 2025 was a brutal year for the nonprofit sector. Federal funding cuts sent shockwaves through the nonprofit sector, creating what I'd call a 'reverse trickle down effect'. Organizations that had long relied on government dollars suddenly found themselves locked out and forced to pivot toward foundation and corporate funding to stay afloat. The result? An unprecedented surge in competition for private foundation dollars. 

In reflecting on the year that just closed, I was expecting to share a lot of thoughts on the current fundraising landscape, how politics and the shifting economy have changed the game, and even some about AI’s influence. Instead, I realized that the lessons on my mind were about something else. For me, 2025 was the year I shone a light on bad internal culture.

2025 has come to an end. In my work as a visual artist, I felt an increasing pressure to produce more, better, and faster, often with different responsibilities at once. I learned just how relentless creative work can become under these conditions. For nonprofits especially, this pressure is always assumed to exist. Limited resources and tight timelines often mean that marketing work rarely happens in ideal circumstances.

2025 wasn’t a year you could coast through. Between global politics, a nonprofit sector under real pressure, and platform changes that quietly reshaped how content works, this wasn’t a year for autopilot.  Working with PhoenixFire forced that reckoning. We kept revising the work, stripping it down, ensuring that there was something valuable being shared. If something wasn’t useful, or important to share, it didn’t survive. It wasn’t comfortable. But it made the difference vis

I’ve been consulting for the past three years, and a big chunk of that time has been spent working closely with the PhoenixFire Strategic Consulting team. We’re a global bunch spread across three continents, and we built a lot of trust over screens. We’ve celebrated milestones and made big decisions without ever sitting in the same room. Last year, that changed when I finally got to meet some of the core members in Málaga.

In many nonprofits, campaigns are only considered successful if they raise money. That belief quietly undermines long-term fundraising. Some of the most effective campaigns do not include an ask at all. They inform, orient, and engage supporters so that when you do ask, people are ready and willing to say yes. Donor information campaigns, newsletters, and volunteer-focused outreach are not distractions from fundraising. They are the infrastructure that makes fundraising work.

Nonprofit leaders are often told they have to choose: lead with emotion or lead with data. Tell stories or prove outcomes. Inspire hearts or satisfy funders. That framing is wrong. The most effective nonprofit communications do not choose between narrative and numbers. They sequence and integrate them so each strengthens the other. When emotion shows why the work matters and data proves it works, trust follows.