After years in fundraising, finance, and communications, I keep returning to one lesson:
Connection is what sustains the work.
Build community that holds when the work gets hard.
I help nonprofits build lasting support by aligning storytelling, community, and fundraising strategy.
Even strong missions lose momentum when engagement weakens. The organizations that endure are not simply the most visible. They are the ones that build communities capable of holding together through uncertainty, disagreement, and change.
Turning connection into sustained support
Many nonprofit challenges present as technical or structural problems. Those problems do exist, it’s true, but underneath them are often more fundamental questions of connection, trust, clarity, and engagement.
What’s needed is a workable model.
My extended experiences in Phil Campbell, Alabama reshaped the way I think about fundraising, communications, and organizational sustainability. It’s worth emphasizing this lesson: With the help of my fellow Phil Campbells, I created a community of stakeholders where absolutely no community existed before. We then worked with an independent filmmaker to expand that community beyond our wildest ideas of what community can mean.
But it didn’t end there. We then worked for years to sustain our relationship with that community in Alabama. Why? The experiencing of helping the town recover felt more than just rewarding: It was a singularly meaningful experience in our lives.
That’s the kind of passion and commitment that will keep any good nonprofit going.
I’ve been repeating this formula for nonprofits as a consultant ever since.
My Services and Background
I’m a strategic fundraiser and communications professional with experience spanning nonprofit development, media, advocacy, and corporate finance, and so far I have helped raise more than $1.4 million for projects and nonprofits through donor engagement, sponsorship development, communications strategy, and partnership cultivation.
My work has crossed grant-writing, corporate partnerships, and individual giving, all the while contributing to broader initiatives tied to disaster recovery, social-justice issues, civic engagement, community-based organizing, and independent filmmaking.
Following the 2011 tornado in Phil Campbell, Alabama, I helped organize a nationally recognized grassroots campaign that drew international media attention and ultimately inspired the documentary I'm with Phil.
My background includes communications and storytelling work published in The New Yorker, Columbia Journalism Review, and Harvard Review, alongside corporate finance and operational leadership experience at Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon Media.
My work focuses on the intersection of fundraising, narrative strategy, public trust, and community-building for organizations seeking sustained engagement and long-term support.
…and I am a member of the following industry organizations…
Testimonials & Media
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes: Phil understands that successful fundraising depends on sustained relationships, not isolated asks. He combines strong communications instincts with strategic discipline and a clear understanding of how community engagement translates into long-term organizational support.”
— Eileen Loh, nonprofit communications director and former AP reporter
“I've had the privilege of working with Phil Campbell to promote better public transit in New York City with Friends of the QNS, a 501(c)4. Phil has a keen sense for what matters to the various stakeholders surrounding transit issues, can recruit partner organizations effectively, and excels at activating the community to his cause. This was evidenced by a hugely successful community activity to ride bikes along the route and produce a report, which gained us an audience with the NYC Department of Transportation.”
— Joshua Steinberg, board member of Friends of the QNS and a GTM director in the tech industry
"We miss Phil at our company! His communications skills with our clients were of the highest quality. Very few others got the sort of appreciative responses he received. We gave him some of the hardest accounts because we knew he could be counted on to clean them up. And his experience and ease with CRM (all of our software tools, really) ensured that I never had to worry whether he would meet (or exceed) monthly deadlines."
-- Rachel Pelowski, Sr. Manager at Yahoo