It starts with a failure. A man, good at what he did, walks away.

Years ago, veteran fundraiser Alan Clayton watched a fellow fundraiser lose hope. He sat across from him, shoulders slumped over coffee, hearing the words, “How can it be so hard to save a child?” That failure lit the match. What followed was a 25-year journey—a search for answers, for a way to keep people like that man from walking away.

The answers didn’t come easy. Clayton and his collaborators—professors, fundraisers, researchers—spent more than a decade peeling back the layers. Hundreds of organizations, across continents and causes, were studied. Patterns emerged. Some organizations thrived. Others flatlined. The difference wasn’t luck or cause or market. It was something deeper, something internal. It was the Red Dot.

The Methodology

The Red Dot isn’t a theory. It’s what happens when a nonprofit, tired and confused, finds focus and energy again. It’s a meeting where decisions align. It’s a moment when leadership says, “This is who we are. This is what we’ll do.” The Clayton team didn’t invent it; they uncovered it. Over years, in boardrooms and interviews, they watched it happen. Then they turned it into something repeatable—a magnificent new book titled Great Fundraising Organizations: Why and How the World’s Best Charities Excel at Rising Money.

In this highly praised new book Alan talks about the research like an expedition. It started with large-scale nonprofits like UNICEF and global development organizations. These were the “giants,” raising billions, scaling projects, commanding donor loyalty. The research expanded to smaller nonprofits—regional community groups, grassroots movements, and even niche organizations like cultural institutions and research initiatives.

One of the pivotal studies was led by Professor Adrian Sargeant, who Alan calls the “foremost academic on fundraising.” Together, they explored patterns in growth: transformational growth wasn’t linear. It surged, then plateaued. And at the heart of each surge was a pivotal internal alignment—the Red Dot.

A great example of this is Trócaire, an Irish nonprofit struggling to connect with its donors. Their slogan, “Join the Fight for Justice,” resonated with their internal teams but alienated their donors—primarily older, devout Catholic women. Clayton’s team helped shift their messaging to “Until Love Conquers Fear,” a phrase rooted in theological language that spoke to donors’ emotional values. The result? A 515% growth in individual donor programs over five years.

The Heart of It

Alan’s remarkable book doesn’t just talk about organizations; it talks about people. The fundraiser who left. The donors like Marjorie, an elderly woman in the Australian outback, who gave not because of slick campaigns but because giving was what she had left.

Marjorie didn’t need efficiency or automation. She needed to feel she mattered. Marjorie called her nonprofit because she wanted to talk to someone. “I like coming into the office,” she told a fundraiser, “because I have no one else to talk to.” The organization didn’t ask her to set up automated donations. Instead, they made a note: “Be kind when Marjorie calls.”

Alan captures this perfectly: nonprofits have two businesses. One serves service users—the children, forests, or oceans. The other serves donors like Marjorie. These businesses often clash. Fundraisers want emotion and connection; service teams want precision and results. But organizations that thrive learn to manage this tension, recognizing that both missions matter.

The Lessons

Alan lays out the lessons, clear and simple, like the lines of a good story.

• Invest in the Long Term: Giles Pegram, a UK consultant, found that a $1 million investment in fundraising produced a 12x return over 14 years compared to traditional investments. [See detail in this Agitator post.] But nonprofits often demand immediate results, tying fundraising to one-year or three-year budgets. Clayton argues for patience and vision, reminding readers that fundraising is an investment, not a cost.
• Know Your Donors: Fundraising isn’t about data points or demographic segments. It’s about people. Organizations that know their donors as individuals build loyalty and trust. Clayton shares the story of a fundraiser who realized donors weren’t just giving to help—they were giving to heal, connect, and find meaning in their lives.
• Align Your Team: The Red Dot moment doesn’t happen by accident. It requires leadership willing to address internal conflicts—between short-term service goals and long-term fundraising ambitions, between credibility-focused messaging and empathy-driven storytelling.

Take CBM, a nonprofit focused on eliminating preventable blindness. Their team realized their mission wasn’t just about curing blindness—it was also about making donors feel they were good people, doing good things. That shift transformed their culture and their results.

The Style

Alan’s writing is practical, but with a heart that  beats strong. He weaves stories into data, drawing the reader into the lived experiences of fundraisers and nonprofits. He writes about failure without flinching, about success without boasting.

There’s a moment in the book where he describes meeting a senior Hewlett-Packard executive who explained his job: “I spend half my time selling to clients and the other half explaining to my company what the clients need.” Alan realized this was true of fundraising leaders—they aren’t just raising money; they’re translating donor needs to their organizations.

Why It Matters

This isn’t just a book for fundraisers—although every serious fundraiser should buy, read and re-read and heed. It’s for anyone who’s tried to change something and wondered why it’s so hard. It’s for leaders who feel stuck, for teams who’ve lost their way. It’s for anyone who’s looked at the world and thought, “There has to be a better way.”

Final Thoughts

Alan Clayton doesn’t promise easy answers. What he offers is a path—a way to take what’s broken and make it whole. The Red Dot isn’t magic. It’s work. But it’s work that matters.

Because in the end, this isn’t just a book about fundraising. It’s a book about making the world a better place. Faster. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?

Roger

P.S.  You can purchase Great Fundraising Organizations no matter where you live by going to this special link.