Episode Details

What happens when a former midnight-shift postal worker with zero nonprofit background builds a health organization by ignoring every rule she never bothered to read?

In this episode, I sit down with Kathy Ruiz-Carter, co-founder and Executive Director of the Lichen Sclerosus Support Network, for one of the most energizing client spotlight conversations I've recorded. Kathy sent 33 emails for her sixth annual summit, kept unsubscribes under 1%, and nearly doubled revenue to $29K with the exact same audience as the year before. Her organization has grown 30-50% year over year. She raised $1,000 in seven minutes from a single emergency email. And she built all of it while working solo, serving a community that deals with a deeply personal and stigmatized health condition. We dig into how she thinks about email as a daily conversation rather than a campaign tool, why she stopped feeling guilty about asking her patients to donate, how AI collapsed her timeline and dramatically changed her results, and why leaving the nonprofit marketing rulebook behind was the best thing she never did.

P.S. If you're ready to grow the way Kathy has, The Purpose & Profit Club® is where we do this work together. Go to splendidatl.com/start to learn more.

Topics:

• From monthly newsletter to daily emails: why more frequency means more revenue, not more unsubscribes
• Asking patients and service recipients to be donors, and why the guilt around this is costing organizations real money
• How AI collapsed her summit timeline and helped her go from $16K to $29K with the same audience
• Why radical financial transparency builds more donor trust than any campaign strategy
• The e-commerce and customer service mindset that outperformed the nonprofit playbook every time
• The emergency email that raised $1,000 in seven minutes, and what it proves about community trust

For a full list of links and resources mentioned in this episode, click here.

Bloomerang is the complete donor, volunteer, and fundraising management solution that helps thousands of nonprofits like yours. Book your demo here. Read The 2026 Giving Signals Report here. 

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Resources:

• Easy Emails For Impact™: The $5K+ Fundraising Campaign System
• Purpose & Profit Club® Fundraising + Marketing Accelerator   
• The SPRINT Method™: Your shortcut to 10K fundraisers 
• Instagram, LinkedIn, website , weekly newsletter  
• [FREE] The Brave Fundraiser’s Guide: Stop getting ignored. Start raising more.
  
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