Activate your outreach

Discover Meaningful Conversations

The Meaningful Conversations program, developed by Embolden over many years, helps a community foundation build and execute strategies that both streamline and transform its ability to cultivate and document relationships with fund holders, donors, prospects, professional advisors, and nonprofits. The Meaningful Conversations program is tailored for each community foundation to achieve a specific goal or goals, such as increasing unrestricted gifts, boosting donor engagement, growing a professional advisor program, or training new team members on how to communicate strategic priorities.

Over a series of eight weeks, Embolden and the community foundation collaborate during weekly working sessions with a core group of community foundation team members to learn—and deploy in real time—the basics of the Meaningful Conversations methodology. Embolden also conducts full staff training sessions, as well as a brief board session, so that each member of the community foundation team can learn how to use Meaningful Conversations in their own roles, ranging from finance to community investment to development.

At the conclusion of the engagement, Embolden delivers a Meaningful Conversations Playbook so that the community foundation team can continue implementing the principles to drive efficiency and impact.


Embolden’s Meaningful Conversations Program

  • Makes it easier to intentionally and proactively build relationships to attract new funds, engage existing fund holders, and generate fund holder support for unrestricted funds and leadership initiatives.

  • Helps you focus on key audiences and optimize your marketing and communications efforts.

  • Allows you to start where you are, scale at your own pace, and update CRM data as you go.

  • Enables easy tracking and helps motivate and align development activities toward measurable results.

  • Fosters an environment that celebrates both relationships and data integrity.

What is a Meaningful Conversation?

At the heart of the Meaningful Conversations program, not surprisingly, is a concept called the “Meaningful Conversation.” 

  • A Meaningful Conversation is any interaction with a fund holder, or member of another target audience, that materially enhances a community foundation’s relationship with that person and makes progress toward achieving the foundation’s engagement goals. 

  • A “Meaningful Conversation” is a “know-it-when-you-experience it” concept.

  • Reporting is on the honor system, and the program helps build peer-to-peer trust and accountability.

  • The goal of the program is to inspire and celebrate, not to monitor and micromanage. 

Three-step program

Kick Off

  • What is a Meaningful Conversation?

  • Which audiences do we want to engage (fund holders, donors, prospects, professional advisors, nonprofits)?

  • What are the ultimate goals for engagement (new funds, deeper fund holder engagement, unrestricted and leadership giving)?

Working Sessions

  • Conduct collaborative deep dives to discuss actual members of target audiences.

  • Review and update CRM data as we go.

  • Capture, plan, and execute Meaningful Conversations as we go.

  • Dive into the “anatomy” of a meeting to ensure that agendas are intentional and set up for success

  • Facilitate a brief board training session to make it easy for board members to conduct and report Meaningful Conversations.

Measurement & Reporting

  • Set activity goals for the number of Meaningful Conversations needed to achieve the ultimate goals.

  • Structure simple reports to celebrate the number of Meaningful Conversations.

  • Connect the dots between Meaningful Conversations and ongoing marketing and communications activities.

  • Utilize key collateral during meetings (see this prototype)

LEARN MORE