Activate your outreach

Discover Meaningful Conversations

The Meaningful Conversations program, developed by Embolden over many years, helps a community foundation build and execute development strategies that both streamline and transform its ability to cultivate and document relationships with fund holders, donors, prospects, professional advisors, and nonprofits.


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)