In our recent blog post we encouraged you to take a break, and we gave you all our reasons. Now we’re going to practice what we’re telling you to do – we’re going to take a break ourselves! So, over the next several weeks, Richard and I won’t be writing our usual blog posts. This kind of break helps us recharge our mental and emotional state and helps us refresh our perspective.

Typically, we do this twice a year, once in late December and once over the summertime. In the past we continued to publish on our blog, but we used some of our most popular posts from previous years.

This year is going to be different, and it marks a change with the Passionate Giving Blog.

For the first time ever, we’re going to have guest bloggers! Richard and I believe that now is the time to introduce more diverse voices with this blog around the themes we’ve written about over the years.

We believe that having different and unique perspectives and experiences is absolutely vital to our work. Without it, we’re missing out on innovation and creativity, but also real stories that speak to things that Richard and I, frankly, don’t experience.

When we originally started this platform, our goal was to get a new vision and approach to major gifts out into the world. And for years since then, we’ve been writing about key fundraising principles, sharing experiences from the non-profits we work with, and much more.

Now, the time has come to broaden the perspectives, stories, and content that we share to reach an even greater number of you.

Don’t worry, we’re still focused on mid, major and planned giving and all the issues around those disciplines, but we want to open it up to others who we believe have a passion for helping non-profit leaders, managers, and frontline fundraisers be successful as you build authentic relationships with your donors.

We’ll be kicking things off with Karen Kendrick, who is our Director of Learning at Veritus. She has a unique background growing up internationally, has a background in diversity and leadership training, is an experienced coach, and was actually a Major Gift Officer herself for a major university. You’ll also be hearing from Christal Cherry of The Board Pro, who is a professional fundraiser turned board development specialist. We’ll also be sharing a few blogs from years past that we think are especially relevant today.

We hope you enjoy those new perspectives over the next several weeks, and Richard and I will see you again in August!

Jeff