About This Resource

This session was part of the Spring 2026 Planning Effective Fundraising Strategies CE Week series

Series Overview

Contributed revenue is a key strategic growth lever for many social enterprises across the country. This Continuing Education Series focuses on effective fundraising strategies that help you maximize your effectiveness and prioritize your team effectively to support your impact goals. Across three workshops we cover how to develop repeatable, winning funding pitches, utilizing your existing development resources to accomplish your annual fundraising goal, and Identifying key hiring decisions for the expansion of your development team.

Session Description

Both nonprofit and for-profit organizations are tasked with the work of raising capital through proposal writing. These may come in the form of grant applications, major gift proposals, or investment pitches. A winning proposal of any kind hinges on a clear promise of impact.

This workshop will help you evaluate the effectiveness of the proposals you’ve been writing. We will offer key features of effective proposals and review case studies. As a result of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Evaluate the key ingredients of winning proposals.
• Evaluate your organization’s proposal writing using this list.
• Identify one change you can make that will improve your proposals holistically.

Below is the session recording and accompanying materials

About Flying Whale Strategies

Hillary Frances has over twenty years experience working with nonprofit leaders. She is the Founder and CEO of Flying Whale Strategies, a boutique consulting firm working to launch a new wave of nonprofit leaders who design definitive solutions to age-old problems. She has supported over 125 national organizations and nearly 300 leaders as they clarified their fundraising strategy and operationalized their day-to-day practice.

She has worked for state government through the Colorado Refugee Services Program, and higher education as the Dean of Adult Education and the Language Learning Center at Emily Griffith Technical College where she was responsible for employment-focused education programs for over 2000 refugee and immigrant students per year. She is the co-founder of Prodigy Ventures, a non-profit social enterprise apprenticeship for young adults in Northeast Denver. She teaches as an Affiliate Faculty member of research methods at Metro State University.

These roles have built her reputation as a thoughtful and lean program designer and program evaluator. Hillary holds a Master’s degree in International and Intercultural Communication from the University of Denver.