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Twenty-four live webinars. Twelve critical challenges. One year of moving from problem to solution to action.
You do not need another year of webinars that leave you with a full notebook but no clear plan for what comes next. You’re ready for relevant insight into the challenge in front of you, along with the time, structure, and support to put that insight to work. That’s why this series is different.
The Lock & Key Series pairs every essential donor relations topic with two distinct learning experiences. In the first webinar, DRG experts unlock the issue: what is getting in the way, why it matters, and the practical strategies that can move your program forward. In the second, we turn the key together through a highly participatory, real-world case study and working session designed to help you apply those strategies inside your own organization.
Across 24 live webinars, we will tackle 12 critical challenges and guide you from problem to solution to action. Gone are the days of passive professional development or generic advice to file away for “someday.”
Come ready to think, question, assess, decide, and build. Leave each month with a clearer path forward and work already underway.
One Topic. Two Webinars.
Real Progress
Every month follows a deliberate two-part rhythm
Part One: Unlock the Strategy
First, we make sense of the challenge. DRG experts will identify the real problem beneath the symptoms, share a practical framework for addressing it, and show you what good, better, and best can look like across different organizations, team sizes, and budgets. Expect focused instruction, real-world examples, useful tools, candid conversation, and one practical action you can take immediately.
Part Two: Turn the Key
Then, we trade the podium for the whiteboard. Using a case study, or facilitated scenario, you will assess your current approach, work through the proposed solution, identify barriers, make decisions about priorities, and begin building an action plan for your organization. With fewer slides and more polls, questions, exercises, and discussion, this session will feel less like a traditional webinar and more like a DRG client working session. The first webinar gives you the framework. The second helps you make it yours.
This Series Is for the People Doing—and Leading—the Work
The Lock and Key Series is designed for donor relations and stewardship professionals at every career stage, from practitioners building core systems to experienced leaders working to bring energy into their program's work. But donor relations does not happen in a silo, and neither should your professional development.
Throughout the year, we will identify the colleagues who should join you for each topic: advancement services, finance, annual giving, marketing and communications, events, IT, frontline fundraising, executive leadership, and other partners whose decisions shape the donor experience.
One registration gives your organization unlimited seats, so bring the people who can help turn a good idea into an organizational decision.
What You'll Unlock
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24 live webinars: two connected sessions each month from January through December 2027
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Unlimited seats: one purchase provides access for your entire organization
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Fresh, timely content: built for the realities donor relations professionals are navigating now
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Expert instruction and facilitated application: learn the strategy, then work through it
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Good, better, and best options: practical paths for different levels of capacity, maturity, and investment
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Real examples: samples, case studies, screenshots, tools, and approaches drawn from the field
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Meaningful participation: polls, scenarios, reflection prompts, discussion, and guided exercises
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Practical resources: downloadable tools and templates with select webinars
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Immediate action: a clear next step you can take after every session
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On-demand access: recordings, slides, and chat logs shared with registrants after each live webinar
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Live Q&A: direct access to DRG’s team of donor relations experts
Purchase Options
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We understand the unique challenges small nonprofits face. To support organizations with annual budgets under $2 million, we’re proud to offer the DRG Access Discount—a 50% discount on this webinar series, or individual webinars within the series.
To apply, send a copy of your most recent IRS Form 990 or non-US equivalent to info@donorrelations.com. Let us help you maximize your impact while staying within your budget.
Schedule & Topics
Choose Your Experience
Each month, choose the Lock on its own or pair it with the Key for the full experience. All webinars are recorded, with recordings sent to registrants within 48 hours.
THE KEY
Put it Into Practice (Second Webinar of Every Month)
You’ve got the framework. You’ve got the examples. Now it’s time to put them to work!
This is where DRG trades the podium for the whiteboard. Each “Key” session centers on a real-world case study, drawn from organizations that have wrestled with the same challenges you’re facing. You’ll use it as a testing ground for what you learned in Part One. You’ll assess where your organization stands, apply the framework to real examples and your own work, identify the barriers you’ll need to navigate, and decide what should happen next.
We’ll give you the structure and space to identify your priorities and begin mapping out your next steps to make change within your own donor relations program. Bring the frameworks and knowledge from the corresponding “Lock” session if you can, but you don’t need to have attended it to participate. Just come ready to think, decide, and build.
Learning Outcomes:
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Assess where your organization currently stands on this month’s topic against the framework introduced in Part One, using the session’s real-world case study as a benchmark.
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Identify the specific barriers most likely to stall implementation in your own organization.
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Leave with a prioritized, written action plan for taking the next concrete step on this topic.
JANUARY 2027
Challenge 01 of 12
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Building a Better Process
Here’s a scenario for you: It’s January and you’re still writing acknowledgments from December. Your faithful donor who gives every December 30 like clockwork is wondering whether anyone received their gift, meanwhile three different people are still “reviewing” the acknowledgment letter for reasons no one can quite explain. Sound familiar?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your acknowledgment process isn’t just an internal headache—it shapes each donor’s first experience of your gratitude. Penelope Burk’s research says donors are 31% less likely to give again without a timely thank-you, and to a donor, “timely” means two weeks, not two months. In this session, we’ll walk through a real acknowledgment audit, uncover where all the bottlenecks are hiding, and give you a clear path toward getting acknowledgments out the door in 5–7 days—making sure next January feels very different.
Learn how to:
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Pinpoint the specific steps in your acknowledgment workflow that are adding delay without adding value.
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Run a simplified acknowledgment audit on your own process with the provided framework.
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Leave with a concrete plan to move your average turnaround toward the best practice of 5–7 days.
FEBRUARY 2027
Challenge 02 of 12
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From “Thanks for Your Gift” to “Thank You for Being You”
Imagine you’re on a first date. You’re excited to get to know the other person, but, of course, you’re excited to talk about yourself, too. Now imagine your date spends the entire evening talking about themselves: their work, their accomplishments, their priorities. You barely get a word in. You probably wouldn’t call that a great date, right?! Yet that’s exactly what most acknowledgment letters do.
They talk about us: what we are doing, what we have accomplished, what we are grateful for. They’re stiff, institutional, and about as personal as a grocery-store receipt because, functionally, that’s often exactly what they are.
This session is about fixing that. We’ll teach you the “you vs. we” test to catch institution-focused language before it goes out the door. We’ll show you how to shift from marketing-speak to cause-focused writing that actually sounds like a human being wrote it, and share real before-and-after examples from the field. Because the acknowledgment sets the tone for the relationship to come, and the words we choose matter more than we sometimes realize.
Learning Outcomes:
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Apply the “you vs. we” test to identify institution-centered language in existing acknowledgment templates.·
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Identify specific changes that make acknowledgment language more cause-focused and donor-centered.
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Determine which elements of your current letters should be personalized and where standardization makes sense.
MARCH 2027
Challenge 03 of 12
MAJOR GIFT PIPELINE
Small Gifts, Big Future: Building Tomorrow’s Major Donor Pipeline
Quick gut check: when was the last time your annual giving donors got the same love as your major gift prospects? If you’re squirming a little, you’re not alone—most donor relations programs are understandably focused on the big gifts, while the donors who could become tomorrow’s big gifts quietly slip away.
Here’s the stat that should keep you up at night: EverTrue’s analysis of major donors found that the average time to a donor’s first major gift is 14 years. That means today’s $25 donor could be tomorrow’s major donor—if you don’t lose them first. Join us as we build a behavior-based framework for annual giving stewardship. We'll introduce the “honeymoon period” concept to protect first-time donors from a too-fast second ask, and show you how to make small gifts feel as valued as they should while setting the tone for a relationship that will grow over time.
Learning Outcomes:
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Explain why first-time and annual giving donor retention directly affects your future major gift pipeline.
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Design a behavior-based acknowledgment and stewardship approach appropriate for high-volume annual giving.
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Build a “honeymoon period” policy that protects new donors from premature re-solicitation.
APRIL 2027
Challenge 04 of 12
MODERNIZING DONOR RELATIONS
Modernizing Donor Relations, Part 1: Your Donors Don’t Need More Paper
Here’s a question we don’t ask often enough in donor relations: If we were building our acknowledgment and stewardship programs from scratch today, would we build them this same way?
Would we still route letters for wet signatures? Spend months creating a 40-page impact report? Manually produce hundreds of nearly identical endowment reports? Or keep communications on the calendar simply because “we’ve always done it this way”?
Donor relations teams have inherited a lot of processes. Some are truly meaningful to donors. Some haven’t kept pace with how people communicate today. And some may be taking up significant staff time without adding much to the donor experience.
This session is your permission slip to rethink the first two pillars of donor relations: Acknowledgment and Stewardship & Impact Reporting. We’ll talk about smarter acknowledgment production, video stewardship, financial and endowment reporting, personalized impact communications, outsourcing, automation, and ways to make better use of the technology you already have.
And this isn’t about going digital just for the sake of going digital. Our 2025 Pulse of Donor Relations results tell us you’re likely not getting more staff anytime soon. So, instead of asking your team to “do more,” let’s rethink how the work gets done—because modernization isn’t about replacing the human side of donor relations. It’s about spending less time managing processes so you can spend more time creating experiences donors value.
Learning Outcomes:
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Identify acknowledgment and stewardship processes that can be simplified, automated, outsourced, or eliminated without sacrificing the donor experience.
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Evaluate acknowledgment and stewardship activities based on the value they provide to donors—not simply organizational tradition.
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Audit your current technology and workflows to uncover opportunities for more timely, personalized, and meaningful donor experiences.
MAY 2027
Challenge 05 of 12
GIFT AGREEMENTS
Stop Letting Them Disappear Into the Void
Somewhere in your organization’s collective digital footprint (or maybe even a Steelcase filing cabinet!) is a gift agreement doing its best impression of a black hole: stuck in a donor’s inbox, buried on a shared drive nobody remembers exists, or caught between two departments that each assume the other one owns it. We’ve all been there, and it’s costing you more than you think.
When a gift agreement takes too long, or you can’t deliver on what was promised in it, trust erodes quickly—especially because gift agreements are typically reserved for the donors investing most heavily in your future. This session covers the systems, escalation criteria, accountability, and turnaround expectations that keep gift agreements moving, plus real examples of what happens when the process works well versus when teams are brought in to clean up when it doesn’t.
Learning Outcomes:
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Identify areas in your current gift agreement process where documents most commonly stall or go missing.
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Establish turnaround standards and escalation triggers for gift agreement approvals.
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Build an end-to-end accountability model to keep gift agreements from stalling or disappearing in the process.
JUNE 2027
Challenge 06 of 12
FUND MANAGEMENT
Turning Scrutiny into Strategy
Accumulated fund balances can sit quietly for years—until an auditor, board member, new leader, or other stakeholder starts asking questions. Why is the money still there? What was it intended for? Who is responsible for spending it? And what would it take to put those funds back to work?
That moment of attention can feel uncomfortable, but it can also create the opening you need to strengthen fund management. Together, we’ll walk through how to use scrutiny as a catalyst: clarifying purpose and ownership, identifying documentation gaps, and turning “why is this happening?” into a realistic, prioritized remediation plan. Balances built over decades don’t get fixed overnight, but they can become the starting point for a more strategic, sustainable approach.
Learning Outcomes:
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Explain why accumulated fund balances are usually a symptom of a broader fund management issue, not an isolated problem.
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Identify the foundational documentation and ownership gaps that block fund remediation.
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Prioritize which funds or program areas should be addressed first when building a remediation plan.
JULY 2027
Challenge 07 of 12
IMPACT REPORTING
Report Content: Stop the Scavenger Hunt
If gathering content for an impact report currently involves you personally hunting down a fund administrator, playing telephone through three gift officers, and then rewriting the generic paragraph that eventually comes back, then unfortunately, you’re running a scavenger hunt, not a reporting program.
The fix isn’t better writing. It’s a better pipeline. In this session, we’ll show you how to directly code fund administrators in your database so ownership is never a mystery again. We’ll discuss how to use tools you likely already have—Google Forms, SharePoint, texting campaigns, project management platforms—to collect content on a schedule instead of a chase, and how to ask beneficiaries better questions so you stop getting generic platitudes back. Even the hardest-to-report funds (yes, we see you, greatest-needs office supply funds) can become something a donor actually wants to read.
Learning Outcomes:
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Design a reporting-content pipeline that replaces ad hoc chasing with a scheduled collection process.
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Identify at least two existing tools in your tech stack that could streamline report content collection.
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Reframe report content questions to elicit outcomes and stories instead of generic thank-you language.
AUGUST 2027
Challenge 08 of 12
MODERNIZING DONOR RELATIONS
Modernizing Donor Relations, Part 2: Retire the Plaque.
Rethink the Event.
We used to send honor rolls. However, our own Pulse Survey shows the industry has largely stopped, and yet some of us are still quietly printing them, alongside a whole closet of other recognition and engagement habits that time, and donors, have politely moved on from.
This session takes the modernization conversation into recognition and engagement. We’re rethinking the plaques, giving societies, and recognition programs you’re obligated to maintain forever, and retiring the tired event playbook of clipboards, sign-in sheets, and chafing dishes in favor of 21st-century donor experiences. If your team isn’t increasing headcount anytime soon, the smartest move is asking for the right tech, outsourcing what isn’t in your wheelhouse, and getting more out of the stack you already have.
Learning Outcomes:
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Identify outdated recognition or engagement practices still running on autopilot in your program.
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Evaluate current event execution against modern, tech-enabled alternatives.
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Build a case for reallocating time or budget from legacy practices toward higher-impact donor engagement.
LOCK & KEY
2 WEBINARS
THE FULL EXPERIENCE
$150
Modernizing Donor Relations, Part 2: Retire the Plaque. Rethink the Event.
August 10, 2027
1:00 PM ET
Put it Into Practice
August 24, 2027
1:00 PM ET
SEPTEMBER 2027
Challenge 09 of 12
RECOGNITION SOCIETIES
Reassess, Revamp, Retire, Reimagine
Recognition societies have a way of accumulating over time. A program is created for a specific campaign, donor segment, or leadership priority, and years later, the organization is still maintaining it without clear documentation, consistent benefits, or a shared understanding of why it exists.
This session walks you through reassessing, revamping, retiring, or reimagining the recognition programs you’re currently running using a simple test: Is this recognition fulfilling a clear strategic purpose, or are we maintaining it because it has always been there? The goal isn’t to eliminate recognition. It’s making sure every program you keep is intentional, sustainable, and meaningful to your donors.
Learning Outcomes:
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Apply a reassess/revamp/retire/reimagine framework to your current recognition societies and programs.
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Evaluate whether each recognition program has a clear purpose, documented criteria, meaningful benefits, and sustainable expectations.
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Draft criteria for what makes a recognition program worth keeping versus retiring.
OCTOBER 2027
Challenge 10 of 12
DONOR EXPERIENCE
The Unique Experience Inventory: Retire the Rubber Chicken Dinner
Every organization runs some version of the same event: a long program, predictable remarks, the dinner that’s either too hot or, more likely, ice cold by the time anyone eats it. And every organization is competing for exactly the same scarce resource—a donor’s attention—against literally everything else they could be doing instead.
This session flips the question. Instead of “what event should we hold?” We start with “what can our donors experience here that they cannot get anywhere else?” We’ll walk through building a Unique Experience Inventory to surface the people, places, access, and behind-the-scenes moments that make your organization genuinely distinctive, then apply a Recommit, Reinvent, or Retire lens to the events you’re already running. If an event is expensive to produce, it should have to earn that investment, and this is how you make sure it does.
Learning Outcomes:
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Build a Unique Experience Inventory, identifying the people, places, and access unique to your organization.
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Apply the Recommit, Reinvent, or Retire framework to at least one existing donor event.
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Design one new experience element that goes beyond a standard tour or program.
NOVEMBER 2027
Challenge 11 of 12
FUNDRAISING & DONOR RELATIONS
Plan the Follow-Up: Your Donor Relations Work Is the Opening Line, Not the Whole Conversation
Most donor relations programs are built, rightly so, around major gifts. And whether donor relations and fundraising responsibilities sit on separate teams or with the same person, the work cannot operate in silos. CASE found that 89% of funds raised in higher education came from just 2% of donors. If your work isn’t helping set up the next conversation, what exactly is it setting up?
In this session, we’re talking about closing that loop. We’ll show you how to connect donor relations touchpoints—reports, events, acknowledgments, and other stewardship—to a clear next step for the person responsible for the donor relationship. You’ll leave with practical tools for building follow-up into your programming from day one, including CRM workflows, contact-report systems, and a shift from “here’s something donor relations made” to “here’s a fundraising opportunity we created together.”
Learning Outcomes:
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Connect at least three donor relations activities directly to a specific fundraising follow-up action.
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Design a simple contact-report or CRM workflow that prompts the appropriate relationship owner to follow up.
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Articulate the fundraising purpose behind a donor relations activity you currently run.
DECEMBER 2027
Challenge 12 of 12
STRATEGY
I Had a Plan… Now It Needs to Change: Surviving Leadership Turnover Without Starting From Scratch
You built the plan. You did the research. You had the approvals. And then a new VP walked in with different priorities, a different fundraising strategy, and an innocent-sounding question that makes your stomach drop: “So, what exactly are we doing for donors?”
Leadership turnover doesn’t mean your work was for nothing—it means the environment around it changed, and your strategy needs to change with it without abandoning years of thoughtful expertise. We’ll explore a bend-vs-break decision framework for evaluating new ideas from new leadership, how to proactively communicate the “why” behind your program before someone else defines it for you, and how to bring data instead of defensiveness into that first conversation. You don’t have to say yes to everything, and you don’t have to reject every new idea. The goal is to find the middle ground and protect what matters while adapting to what has changed.
Learning Outcomes:
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Apply a bend-vs-break framework to evaluate a new leader’s idea against an existing donor relations strategy.
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Prepare a concise, data-backed summary of your program’s purpose and results for a new leadership audience.
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Identify questions to ask a new leader to understand their priorities and working style before conflict arises.