Purposeful. Strategic. Innovative.

If you’re looking for a partner who can help you stay on top of new innovations and put all the pieces of your fundraising puzzle together, you came to the right place!

Common Great was launched in 2022 with one goal: to help nonprofits build forward-looking fundraising practices that innovate and get results. We are a fresh alternative to outdated consulting models and practices that just haven’t kept up with the changing realities and evolving imperatives for justice and inclusion in the nonprofit sector. We offer fundraising and marketing strategy and implementation services, technology selection and implementation, and hiring and talent management services.

Common Great is a woman-owned, woman-led collective. Like many of our colleagues in the nonprofits we serve, our team and co-op include people who live and work at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, including race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and neurodiversity.

Our core team works with and consults for multiple nonprofits simultaneously. We operate with an iterative culture of teaching and continuous learning that empowers your team to build upon and continue the work after our engagement ends. We constantly test emerging best practices in real-time across all our clients, and apply those lessons to your organization too.

The Common Great Co-op consists of an assembled group of independent consultants and nonprofit experts with specialized skill sets and expertise that have been vetted by our founder, and are brought into Common Great projects. We draw on this incredible group as fractional support for many of our client nonprofits.

By the Numbers

$60MIL+

Raised with our clients

80+

Nonprofits served

130+

combined Years in the field

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Taking a percentage commission is against the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Code of Ethics. Every AFP member promises to put philanthropic mission above personal gain, which includes declining compensation structures built on commission or contingency, or that incentivize sacrificing long-term donor relationship-building for short-term results. Common Great works through project-specific flat fees, hourly rates, or retainers with clear services, deliverables, commitments, and policies.

  • Nope. Success in fundraising is dependent on many factors that look different for each organization: the existing donor base, the leadership and board’s commitment to participate, staff size and experience, random acts of deities, and more. But we can guarantee you’ll get our full attention, best ideas, and the benefit of our experience helping 120+ nonprofits raise over $40M.

  • While we run campaigns and can advise you on strategy for cultivating your major donors, being an “ace for hire” isn’t our style of consulting. In the long run, it’s far more effective for you to manage your own major donor relationships than to hand them over to a temporary team member. We infuse our projects with a culture of teaching and learning and focus on increasing your skills and capabilities. We don’t want to go fishing for you—we want to teach you how to fish. It’s always our goal to take the fear and apprehension out of fundraising, and to work our way out of a client needing us in order to succeed.

  • We’re not live event planners—our strength lies in the communications and philanthropic strategy for an event, along with knowing how to leverage events as an important tool in your year-long fundraising strategy. We’ve recently helped several organizations with converting their in-person events to virtual. If you need help with in-person event logistics, we can refer you to several trusted partners who specialize in event planning and can help you create the event of your dreams.

Racial Equity & Social Justice

Common Great acknowledges that we help nonprofit organizations navigate a world of structural and systemic inequities for BIPOC, APIDA, Latinx, womxn, LGBTQ people (including trans or gender non-conforming) and people with disabilities. We acknowledge the fundamental intersection of race with other sources of marginalization and oppression.

We refuse to work with organizations whose missions, programs, or advocacy activities result in greater social, economic or political harm and oppression of historically marginalized communities. 

We pledge to hold the organizations we work with accountable for their impact, not their intentions. We pledge to be accountable for our own impact, not our intentions.

We acknowledge that our role as experts, advisors, and practitioners gives us power and influence within nonprofit organizations and a nonprofit industrial complex that is complicit in systemic injustice. We have a responsibility to use—and even cede—that power in the fight for social justice.

We pledge to follow the anti-racist principles of community-centered fundraising, rather than donor-centered fundraising. We pledge to actively use the levers we have at our disposal to identify, challenge, and dismantle structures that prop up systemic racism.

We pledge to educate ourselves and proactively develop and use new levers in the future. We pledge to de-center whiteness and to lean into the discomfort that disrupting whiteness creates, instead of flinching away.

We pledge to shine a constructive light on white privilege, white fragility, and white saviorism where we encounter it. We pledge to be in community with our clients on their journey to addressing these aspects of systemic racism in their organizational strategy, culture, communications, and fundraising.

As a white-led organization, our team has made mistakes on this journey, and we know we will make more mistakes. We pledge to own and be accountable for these mistakes. We ask to be called in for our mistakes. We pledge that being accountable to the community for these mistakes won’t discourage us from continuing the journey, and that we won’t withdraw from it because we can’t be perfect.