Sophistication Presented Simply
Our Expertise
Who we are. What we do. How we do it.
Practical and Useful
Joy to Fundraiser and Donor
What’s Wrong With Fundraising?
I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of worthy organizations and over a thousand donors. I’ve led teams which collectively raised a half-a-billion dollars. I’ve successfully closed eight-figure gifts. I’ve coached numerous c-suite executives and led four institutional programs myself. Yet. . .
What I often see are leaders of nonprofits who experience fundraising as a continuous struggle.
At the same time, I hear the frustrations of philanthropists—big and small—when they tell me giving money to their heartfelt causes is nigh impossible.
I ask myself, “Why does it seem to be so hard?” If you’re involved in fundraising—as a professional, a board member, nonprofit executive, or volunteer—you may have asked this very question.
The fundraising landscape is changing. The number of donors is shrinking. Getting a donor to give again is harder than ever. The “channels” or ways of giving have exploded often creating more confusion than convenience. Events—long a mainstay of some organizations—have taken a body blow.
It’s clear business as usual is no longer an option.
No organization, no matter how worthy, important or critical, is immune to seismic shifts in the fundraising landscape.
However, amidst the changing, often confusing, landscape, lies incredible opportunity.
Millennials are giving at record rates. Philanthropists at all levels are looking for the right opportunities to invest. There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars–some say at least a billion–left on the table every year for lack of engagement by nonprofit leadership.
I founded The Eight Principles specifically to address the disconnect between worthy organizations and those who invest in them.
Philanthropy is one of the most powerful forces for the betterment of our communities. Unleashing its potential is what we’re about.
We’ve created a unique fundraising training platform focused on universal truisms and continuous learning.
Fundraising doesn’t suffer from lack of tools or techniques. The term “best practices” is often bandied about. What constitutes a “best practice” however, is constantly changing. Not every tool or strategy works in every organization. There is no “one size fits all.”
We focus on mindset. We help you embrace fundamental principles. With these you choose the set of methods and techniques which work for you.
Finally, and most important, our unique continuous learning platform allows your organization to achieve total alignment–from front desk to board room. That’s when transformation becomes permanent.
The Eight Principles® training experiences open the doors to sustained, growing revenue. To give you the path forward. To create transformational giving.
With The Eight Principles firmly in place, revenue growth of 2X, even 3X is well within your capability. We’ve seen growth of 6X in under a year. You also cut your fundraising costs—by up to half.
Anxiety free fundraising while raising many more funds—permanently.
Being successful doesn’t require starting from scratch or junking wholesale what you’re currently doing. Changing your perspective and your mindset is where lasting success lies. Continuous learning gives your organization the focus and alignment that’s required for lasting success.
We’ve staked our success on yours.
We’ve invested significant resources–financial and professional–in our training and tools to make them the most effective and authoritative available while being the easiest to use. We believe in what we do. Our training experiences and tools carry a money-back guarantee.
Our promise to you is to make the complex simple, create practical solutions and deliver joy. Take a moment to explore the details of our program and the unique ways we deliver it described below.
What are you waiting for? Let’s get started.

Larry C Johnson, Founder
Grab a time and share your challenges and goals. I’ll listen and give you clarity to move forward. That’s whether or not you choose to have us accompany you on your journey.

Why Eight Principles?
Those who grasp principles successfully select their own methods. Those who try methods, ignoring principles, are sure to have trouble.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
By starting with principles, the choice of methods becomes clear and simple.
The Eight Principles of Sustainable Fundraising® are the natural laws which govern all philanthropy—whether or not you’re aware of them.
Always operating, they determine what works and what doesn’t.
Click to Read More
So where do you start?
The natural laws which govern philanthropy. Unchangeable. Unbreakable. Principles are primary. Techniques are secondary. Principles are universal and unchanging. Techniques are situational and temporal.
Lasting fundraising success begins with adopting the right outlook. The right paradigm.
Most fundraising efforts focus on technique. Techniques without the right paradigm will never achieve lasting, sustained success. Hence the feeling of being on a treadmill experienced by most fundraisers.
What are the underlying principles?
The Eight Principles of Sustainable Fundraising®. When you internalize the principles, a whole new world opens for you. You realize that sustained fundraising success is 90% thinking and 10% doing.
You realize your donors—your investors—aren’t focused on money even as fundraisers almost always are. Your donors are focused on your outcomes and creating joy. Your task is to help them fulfill their dreams.
When you adopt the principles something transformational occurs. Synergy. When 1 + 1 = 3. You start looking at the world through a new lens.
With the principles a new worldview emerges. One brimming with opportunity.
Once you’ve committed to the principles, choosing your methods is (almost) a snap. Now you’re ready to create a program which fits your organization and will raise more money this year than last. Guaranteed.
With the actionable knowledge of the principles, you create a fundraising program which consistently raises the most money for least cost.
Your fundraising becomes virtually impervious to economic head winds. A fundraising program which gives you and your investors the joy of giving. Your family of supporters continues to grow.
What We Do
We enable worthy organizations and those who support them to realize their dreams.
We give our clients the opportunity to create joy to the donor, lasting passion for the fundraiser, and continuous healthy increases in philanthropic revenue.
Through unique guidance tools, and the only continuous learning platform on the market, we enable our clients to see revenue gains as high as 600% in a single year. Our training is unique: It’s created for professionals, board members, executives and volunteers alike. You learn by doing. You solve problems through team effort. You plot your path forward. To learn more please contact us.
You know where you want to go. We’ll get you there.
Click to Read More
We give you the winning mindset.
We provide you with the training that puts you on the path to growing, sustained fundraising success.
We show you how to think in new ways then act accordingly.
We start with our groundbreaking AI-powered Fundraising Pathfinder. The Pathfinder immediately identifies what’s helping and what’s hindering. Then it gives you a step-wise path to achieve your goals.
You learn fundraising success is 90% thinking and 10% doing.
We align the thinking of your staff, fundraisers and board members through one or more of our interactive workshops. Created for adults with high levels of participation, activity and accountability.
You discover new revenue streams and increase the ones you have.
When you adopt The Eight Principles you deepen support among your current supporters while discovering many new ones.
Your fundraising costs—how much you’re spending to raise a dollar—drop dramatically.
The ROI of your fundraising efforts, the “return on investment” can go from a pathetically low of 25% to an eye-popping 600%. With a low ROI, high costs are consuming much of what you’re currently raising. Not good.
We show you how to make fundraising a true joy.
For many executives, board members and even fundraisers, the anxiety of “asking for money” is stifling.
With The Eight Principles®, the pit in your stomach that comes when someone says, “It’s time to fundraise”, goes away. You realize helping others realize their dreams is an opportunity to bring joy to your investors and yourself. Your real fundraising potential is now in sight.
Our training brings significant organizational stability.
No more revolving doors for staff and board members. The right people get involved–and stay. Building an incredibly strong and stable organizational culture.
Your success becomes permanent.
With our Continuous Learning training platform we prepare your in-house facilitators to deliver The Eight Principles® training to your fundraisers, staff and board members anytime—all the time. This approach to professional caliber training is unique in the nonprofit world. It produces outcomes which are higher in quality and creates an unassailable fundraising culture within your organization. And it does so while costing a fraction of typical training.
Never has quality training been so accessible and affordable.
We know we have the best. We want to share it with you. For more informaiton, please contact us.


How We Do It
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
–Benjamin Franklin
Learning by doing creates opportunities for synergy and instills permanence.
Eight Principles training is unique in the fundraising world. We offer the only continuous learning fundraising training on the market. From the opening video to the closing planning exercise, each Eight Principles training session actively involves every participant in the learning experience. Whether professional or volunteer.
We employ the Feynman technique. The learning technique devised by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. When you reduce any concept to its simplest idea and teach it to another, you master it.
Groups of individuals become living, organic teams.
Click to Read More
We train to achieve results:
Engaged, high-functioning boards. Confident, energized executives. Productive fundraisers and development staff. And perhaps most important, significantly improved fundraising performance: raising much more money—permanently—at lower cost.
Adults learn by doing. By involving others.
Our training experiences are created for action. For team building. For productive change. To learn how this will benefit you, please contact us.
What you’ll experience:
You’re never seated classroom-style in a stuffy hotel meeting room listening to a speaker relay their expertise using 12-point slides, while taking a few notes, asking a few questions. And hoping you’ll remember enough to make some practical use of what you’ve heard.
With Eight Principles continuous learning you’re in a small group, typically 6 to 8. You’re learning by hearing, seeing, and doing. Auditory. Visual. Kinetic. Less than 40% of an Eight Principles training experience is direct instruction. The remaining 60%+ is participant activity.
Professionally produced videos stimulate your thinking. The live facilitator takes your questions and encourages discussion.
Individual and group exercises put what you’ve learned into practice, even as your group becomes a functioning team.
There’s role play. Learning something new in a protective setting of mutual self-respect.
Internalize what you’ve just been taught by teaching another.
You encounter challenges which require you and another to arrive at a solution that neither of you had thought of before. The third way.
You create your personal accountability plan. You develop a plan for implementing in your organization what you’ve learned. Both with built-in status and progress checks.
With your own Participant’s Journal, you create a personal record of what you’ve accomplished.
What can you expect:
The most engaging and rewarding training you’ve ever experienced. Expect to be challenged. Expect to see familiar things in totally new ways. Expect to receive flashes of insight. Expect to emerge more confident, more informed and better prepared than when you began.
Expect to experience 1 + 1 = 3.
What Makes Us Different
We show you how to look at what you’re doing with a new perspective. One that sees abundance not scarcity.
Our focus is on attitude and altitude. We know that every worthy charitable organization—no matter their current level of fundraising—can achieve significant, permanent revenue gains.
Whether you’re a mature fundraising program or just starting out, with an Eight Principles perspective you can achieve gains you didn’t think possible.
It’s not so much a matter of what you’re doing but, rather, how you’re thinking.
Click to Read More
Our approach isn’t radically new, just uncommon.
What we provide isn’t radical or obtuse. It’s actually been around for quite some time. Until now, it’s just been the exclusive domain of a handful of very successful organizations and white-shoe consulting firms. With the creation of our unique-in-the-industry continuous learning platform, transformational fundraising success is available to any organization that truly desires it.
But there are some differences.
Look at any high-performing fundraising program. You know–the ones that raise more money next year than this. Year in year out. What makes them successful? It’s not their appealing mission. It’s not their powerhouse board. It’s not their top-paid fundraising staff. It’s not their sophisticated tracking programs and donor research. It’s not their cutting-edge donor engagement technology.
All of these things are contributors to their success. But they’re not the driver.
What delivers success isn’t complicated.
What drives top-performing success is an organization’s adherence to The Eight Principles of Sustainable Fundraising®. Even if they’ve never heard of them.
Very few organizations ever get anywhere close to full alignment with The Eight Principles.
Since lasting, over-the-top success is about understanding and application, it’s available to any charitable organization whose leadership truly desires it. Any organization.
The Eight Principles stands by its tools and services.
That’s why we have the only money-back guarantee in the industry.
Try us out. Put The Eight Principles into action. We promise you’ll be amazed.

The Eight Principles is the only comprehensive expert-based, fundraising curriculum for nonprofits.
Book A Demo SessionOur tools, training and insights provide the foundational elements crucial to building sustained giving, scalable fundraising and an engaged donor base.
The Core Team

Larry’s thirty-year career spans both program development and capital fundraising. After serving with the nation’s leading fundraising consultancy, he served four institutions of higher learning as chief advancement officer. He lead teams that collectively raised over a half-a-billion dollars. He has personally closed eight-figure gifts. He's coached the board, executives, and fundraisers of hundreds of nonprofit organizations in the United States, Canada and Great Britain.


People are his passion and his level of service is second to none.
His goal is that each client achieves the results and exceeds the goals they set for themselves. His engaging smile helps, as well. Empathetic listening is perhaps Daniel’s greatest skill. He knows that understanding precedes any guidance.

He serves as Executive Board Member for JaneAcuf Global, exclusive licensee for The Eight Principles in India
Sachin has 20 years of experience in the education sector and specializes in international education with specific focus on institutional collaborations. His belief that ‘Education is no longer local’ has driven him to establish institutional partnerships worldwide. During his years in higher education he has a wealth of experience of working with nonprofits and understands the importance of fundraising activities.
Facilitators and Certified Advisors
Facilitators and Certified Advisors deliver The Eight Principles curriculum to their organizations using our continuous learning platform, Train-the-Trainer. Certified Advisors are qualified fundraising coaches and consultants who use The Eight Principles curriculum in serving their clients.

Jay Lugo

Melissa Brown

Ed Hughes

Roger Shefield

Elie Rubenstein
Elie Rubinstein is a non-profit professional and humanitarian with more than 20 years of leadership experience working for the advancement of underserved individuals, families, and children, locally and internationally. A skillful fundraiser, Elie Rubinstein most recently served as the Executive Director of H.E.S., a community center in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Under his leadership, the agency’s annual operating budget rose from $4,000,000 to $6,000,000. Elie Rubinstein earned his BA from Belorussian Polytechnic Institute in Minsk, Belarus, his MA in Management from the Heller School, Brandeis University, and most recently he started Horizons University’s online Doctor of Business Administration program. In his spare time, Elie likes to play chess and run marathons.
The Eight Principles Fellows
The Eight Principles Fellows Council is comprised of thought leaders from around the globe in fundraising and philanthropy who are committed to the furtherance of relational philanthropy.













Emeritus Fellows



