Project: ECOSYSTEM OF INFLUENCE ADVISING + ADDITIONAL SUPPORT
The Challenge
When Tamira stepped into the Executive Director seat at Diverse City Fund DC — a racial justice philanthropy intermediary in the nation's capital — she came in with a clear mission and a model that ran counter to how traditional philanthropy worked. Diverse City Fund operated on trust and partnership, not charity. The problem: many of the donors she needed to engage didn't yet see it that way.
She was simultaneously navigating multiple stakeholder communities, each with its own culture, expectations, and entry points. The most pressing gap was that she lacked both the language and the analytical framework to decode what individual donors — a community critical to the organization's sustainability — actually respond to, and how to communicate across the charity-to-partnership divide without compromising the integrity of the mission.
The vision was clear. What was missing was the structured support to turn that vision into a strategic, repeatable approach — one that could reliably move the right people toward genuine, lasting partnership with the work.
What shifted in your visibility, influence, or clarity as a result of our work?
What’s something that happened that wouldn’t have happened without this engagement?
How did this help you show up differently with funders, media, allies, or other key stakeholders?
What can you do now that you couldn't do before?
Have you noticed any shifts in the metrics you use to measure success?
The RESULTS
confident, discerning, adaptive
Through Visibility Engineering™, Tamira didn't just develop new messaging [1] — she built a new operating posture for donor engagement, working across two dimensions that fundamentally changed how she showed up.
The first was relationship design[2]. We mapped her donor ecosystem and profiled key stakeholder archetypes with close attention to the power dynamics embedded in her field — a philanthropy landscape where donors historically held charitable authority, and where Diverse City Fund's partnership model required a different kind of approach depending on where each donor was starting from. The output was language donors could actually hear themselves in, and a framework for calibrating the relationship based on who was in front of her — not a universal pitch, but a strategy attuned to power distance and entry point.
The second was behavioral design: the engagement architecture that would move donors along an intentional arc[3] rather than leaving each interaction as a standalone transaction. Tamira shifted from information-delivery mode to a conversation-first posture built to test alignment and deepen partnership over time.
"What you're bringing brought you in the door," she described it. "Now we're in a space where we're going to understand how this partnership works — and we’ll end up in the partnership that's needed to reach racial justice." Every touchpoint — an email, a visual, a one-on-one conversation — became an opportunity to advance that arc.
The downstream results were tangible: deeper donor relationships, increased financial commitments, longer retention, and a growing community as existing donors began bringing others in. "Confidence is a formula," Tamira reflected. "It involves knowledge, foresight, and tactical work — and that's what this work brings to the space."
[1] Blueprint your Communication
[2] Engineer your Endorsement
[3] Televise the Revolution
More from Tamira
How would you describe this work to a peer who's never heard of it before?
What would you say to a peer who’s unsure whether this kind of investment is worth it?
Who do you think this work is especially right for—and why?
“Chloé’s craft (assessments, platforms, presentations, and workshops) is well researched, detailed, and customized to my needs…Before our engagement, I was unaware I was dumping information on people without considering what specifically spoke to them. After our engagement, I changed the way I engage partners to center what matters to them in our relationship.”
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