Meet Our Team

Let us show you how to make fundraising feel easier.

Our mission is to help you grow revenue.

Cultivate Giving is a small team with deep experience serving small-staffed nonprofits. We’ve been there! We know that fundraising can feel hard—but it doesn’t need to be. Our free downloadable templates and videos and low-cost fundraising coaching help nonprofit staff and boards build comfort around connecting with donors.

We also create workshops for foundations to help their grantees diversify revenue. Nonprofits that are funded mostly by grants are rarely sustainable, so we teach your grant recipients how to activate their boards and cultivate giving (and unrestricted funding) from individual donors.

Why work with us?

There are over 1.4 million U.S. nonprofits, and 70% have annual budgets less than $100,000. Helping small nonprofits grow revenue is our focus.

We work with executive directors and their boards to build revenue stability — especially by reaching more individual donors — and to create fundraising ease through online tools and training. We are:

  • Passionate about a vibrant, sustainable nonprofit sector.
  • Teachers, consultants, and mentors with years of hands-on fundraising experience.
  • Partners and allies to small-staffed nonprofits doing amazing work.
  • Focused on helping you build revenue from donations and major gifts.
  • Honored to have been of service to dozens of extraordinary nonprofit organizations.

Are you feeling responsible for funding the entire budget? Hoping to hire your first fundraiser? Starting a major donor program? Building a culture of philanthropy in your board? We can help get you from here to there.

Ask us a fundraising question

Melanie Hamburger
Principal
Passionate about the flow of capital to social change. Fighter for justice, equity, and opportunity. Grateful for community, mountains, shared meals, and digging in on big problems (and solutions)—together.
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Specialities: major gifts, board engagement, fundraising strategy, teaching.

Sian Romoli
Client Services
Excited to contribute to your nonprofit mission with my donor database and research skills as a former corporate librarian. Let me help make your dev ops smooth and train staff on gift entry and reports! Love the beach, water sports, and reading.

Specialities: donor databases, research and data, gift entry and reports, training ops staff.

Book a database strategy chat with Sian

More About Melanie:

I’m Melanie, and I know what it’s like to be the person bringing in all of the revenue for a nonprofit. I’ve been a development-team-of-one, responsible for donors, grants, database, website, enews, social media, events, and more. And I’ve learned two things:

  • Individual donors provide sustainable revenue. Grants don’t. And donors can be incredibly generous when you connect them to your work.
  • Your board can be your superpower in connecting with donors.

You can’t have mission success without sustainable, unrestricted funding for your programs. And an executive director can’t do it alone.

Let me bring my many years of experience as a development director, major gifts officer, fundraising consultant, mentor and trainer to your fundraising needs. I am passionate about increasing the flow of capital for social change.

We have helped nonprofits increase and diversify revenue for a wide variety of causes, including health and wealth equity, affordable housing, independent journalism, conservation, education, women, foster youth, veterans, LGBTQ+, African Americans, and LatinX communities.

Let’s connect!

I love talking about fundraising, and hearing about the great work that small nonprofits do.

We’ve created all of these free and low-cost resources in response to fundraising challenges we hear from the small nonprofit community we serve.

You’ve got this.