Nonprofit strategy & development leadership
Growth Factor provides senior fundraising strategy, organizational capacity, and development leadership for nonprofits that need more than advice but do not always need another full-time executive.
When the mission needs more capacity
Fundraising pressure rarely exists in isolation. It connects to the people doing the work, the story an organization tells, the relationships it holds, and the systems that turn a promising conversation into a clear next step.
Growth Factor helps leaders make those connections visible, set priorities, and build a development system that can be operated immediately and strengthened over time.
How Growth Factor helps
Senior judgment and implementation support across leadership, fundraising, relationships, and the infrastructure beneath them.
Ongoing, part-time senior leadership to build and operate a stronger development function, with strategy, pipeline management, team coordination, board partnership, forecasting, and executive decision support.
Discuss sustained support ↗Temporary bridge leadership through a vacancy, leave, reorganization, or transition. Protect relationships, manage deadlines, maintain momentum, and prepare the function for its next permanent leader.
Discuss interim support ↗Connect mission, revenue, people, board participation, calendars, and metrics in an operating roadmap with clear priorities, owners, timing, and next actions.
Build a practical roadmap ↗Qualify the right foundation, corporate, and government opportunities, then manage proposals, budgets, reporting, and stewardship through repeatable research and funding systems.
Strengthen your funding pipeline ↗Build donor portfolios, cultivation and stewardship plans, relationship maps, and practical board roles. Prepare leaders for consequential meetings with clear objectives and thoughtful follow-through.
Develop a relationship strategy ↗Create useful CRM structures, development calendars, reporting frameworks, dashboards, and documented processes so leadership can see what is happening and who owns the next action.
Build a development system ↗Examine the campaign through Purpose, Culture, Systems, Human Experience, Pathways, Data, Measurement, and Learning. This approach is particularly relevant to Jewish communal and Federation-style campaigns and can inform broader annual-fund strategy.
Clarify what makes your organization distinctive and translate it into a case for support, campaign materials, donor and funder messaging, executive and board talking points, program cases, and a useful library of evidence.
Translate a mission idea into a fundable, executable program structure, connecting the problem, population, activities, staffing and partner roles, outputs, outcomes, indicators, and evaluation approach.
Connect actual revenue, receivables, committed and likely funding, weighted pipeline, operating assumptions, and cash timing. Explore scenarios and create board-ready management-planning tools.
Prepare research, stakeholder maps, briefing materials, talking points, meeting objectives, and strategic communications for public partners, elected officials, funders, and other consequential relationships.
Practical senior counsel for leaders navigating fundraising expectations, governance, development staffing, organizational transition, and growth. Donor and funder meeting preparation can include research, relationship history, clear objectives, talking points, likely questions, rehearsal, and next steps.
Working together
A single assignment can be the right answer. So can sustained leadership. Scope, deliverables, time commitment, and reporting cadence are defined before the work begins, with room to expand only when your needs justify it.
A focused starting point
A focused starting point to clarify a challenge and determine next steps. Bring the fundraising question, organizational pressure point, or decision that needs experienced perspective.
Start with a strategy sessionFor one tightly defined fundraising or organizational problem that needs senior judgment quickly. May include document review, a strategy session, written recommendations, and one revision or follow-up.
Typical timing: approximately 2–3 business days, depending on scope.
Start with a strategy sprint ↗For a clearly defined deliverable, such as a 30/60/90-day development plan, funder-priority map, board fundraising toolkit, campaign messaging package, or case-for-support refresh.
Typical timing: approximately 5 business days, depending on scope.
Start with a build sprint ↗A defined project addresses a bounded challenge. Ongoing counsel and monthly retainers support sustained implementation; fractional leadership adds continuing senior capacity, and interim leadership bridges a temporary gap. Each arrangement is scoped around your needs.
Talk through the possibilities ↗Sprint prices are starting points, not maximum project prices. Larger or more complex assignments are scoped individually. You can enter or leave the engagement path where it makes sense for your organization.
Growth Factor offers discounted professional fees to Jewish nonprofit organizations.
The work in practice
Community-based youth organization
A multi-month engagement began with fundraising counsel and expanded as organizational needs became clearer, connecting development strategy and institutional funding with financial planning, organizational modeling, stewardship, strategic planning, and development-management infrastructure.
The work illustrates how an immediate development need can become the starting point for more useful information, clearer decisions, and stronger organizational systems.
Tree of Hope
For an all-volunteer Pittsburgh nonprofit, Growth Factor created a GoFundMe giving hub and integrated it into Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising, alongside campaign planning, appeals, prospect research, media materials, stewardship, and public-sector outreach materials.
The public campaign later reached approximately $15,230 from 113 donations, against an initial public Giving Tuesday target of $8,000.
A factual example of prior work; future fundraising results depend on each organization and engagement.
Meet the founder
Founder & Principal, Growth Factor LLC
Understanding the whole organization, and building the capacity to move it forward.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗Joy brings more than 25 years of nonprofit executive leadership, fundraising, philanthropy, public policy, board development, organizational strategy, and consulting experience. Her career includes President and CEO, Executive Director, development, policy, and advisory roles across organizations facing growth, transition, and strategic change.
Systems thinking connects that work. Joy is often most useful when a problem does not fit neatly inside one department, because fundraising, finance, governance, people, programs, communications, and relationships are all interacting at once.
Her experience includes the Carolina Raptor Center, Holocaust Center of Greater Pittsburgh, Rachel Carson Homestead Association, Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, and development and capital-campaign consulting for the Aleph Institute.
Her international experience includes Israel-connected fundraising and relationship development, international policy research, and cross-cultural partnerships. Study at the University of Haifa, environmental policy research as a David L. Boren Fellow, and Federation leadership missions inform the perspective she brings to Jewish communal and Israel-connected organizations.
Ideas that inform the work
Joy’s writing explores philanthropy, nonprofit leadership, organizational systems, Jewish communal life, mission, and meaning. Her Annual Campaign framework asks what a campaign creates beyond a dollar goal, and how organizations can learn from the experience they offer donors, volunteers, and staff.
Read Joy’s InsightsEight dimensions of the annual campaign
Talk about what you need
You do not need to diagnose the consulting engagement before reaching out. Start with the problem, opportunity, or pressure point. We can determine whether a sprint, defined project, fractional role, interim assignment, or another approach makes sense.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Serving organizations nationally and remotely.