Susan's Blog:
From Philanthropy Front and Center - Cleveland

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Welcome to our newest blogger, Susan L. Golden!

Who is she? Susan brings over 30 years of successful experience in fundraising to her irreverent chats about raising money.

She has worked with over 150 client organizations and companies, ranging from  capital campaigns for churches to new approaches in cosmology.  She has worked on advances in neurosurgery, improving gas mileage for trucks, helping victims of domestic violence, designing new optical polymers, and implementing dementia care mapping in U.S. nursing homes. 

She loves working on projects which contribute to better health care or high technology. She has special affection for economic development which benefits her home town of Cleveland, Ohio.  

Susan’s background includes a Ph.D. in English from Duke University, where she avoided working by reading lots of novels. Then she founded the Writing Lab at Cleveland State University and after that, the developmental Education Program at Dyke College.

By  1976, she realized that she had “Peter-Principal-ed” herself into college administration, and moved into fund development. For seven years, she earned her fundraising “chops” at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She often says it was heavenly to be able to hang out with musicians, but not have to practice!   

Twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, she wrote a best-selling book for Jossey-Bass Publishers, Secrets of Successful Grantsmanship: A Guerrilla Guide to Grantseeking.  Once the book was published, she began writing a column for Contributions Magazine.

What will she talk about? Her blog will address your questions on grantseeking. Please feel free to e-mail us your questions. From time to time, she will invite a funder to participate in a dialogue. For instance, she will pose the question, “How can you sleep nights knowing how you treat grantseekers?” Through the blog, Susan will also introduce you to new networking and learning opportunities with the most savvy grantseeking professionals in national and international groups.

Why read this blog? It’s worth reading Susan’s opinions, based on the experience which earned her clients success in over 75 percent of their solicitations. Since 1986, she has been involved in raising over $790 million. More important, she’ll make you laugh. She never loses sight of the absurdity of how hard it is to get a grant.

Remember, as our fellow grantseekers at the Association of Proposal Management Professionals say, “Hope is not a strategy and luck is not a tactic.”  We hope you enjoy Susan’s new blog, “The Guerrilla Grantseeker.”