Sophistication Presented Simply
Who, What & Why
Who we are. What we do. Why we do it.
Practical and Useful
Joy to Fundraiser and Donor
What’s Our “Why”?
I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of worthy organizations and thousands of donors and volunteers. I’ve led teams which collectively raised over 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 approach focused on the relationships between investors and the organizations in which they invest.
We focus on mindset. We help you embrace fundamental principles. With these you choose the set of methods and techniques which work for you.
Most important, we know fundraising is ultimately about people. It’s about authentic bi-lateral relationships between the investors (AKA, “donors”) and the organizations in which they invest.
Our training experiences are crafted to achieve the highest levels of retained learning and skill.
Adults learn through doing, seeing, and reading in that order. Only a small fraction of learning is achieved by listening. Which, ironically, is on what most fundraising training relies. Siting in a room listening to someone share ideas or experience, usually with static slides.
With our training you’re actively engaged. Thinking, doing, and acting in small groups. Individual assessments. Creating plans of action.
We make our training available to you in ways which fit your goals.
Our Five Step Plan subscription provides self-paced on-demand instruction which gives you a working fundraising plan for your organization in five, straightforward steps.
The Eight Principles Certified Practitioner gives the practicing fundraiser or nonprofit executive serious practical competence in the relational model while attaching them to a living, breathing community of like-minded professionals.
Our Eight Principles Certified Coach takes it to next step by enabling the fundraising professional or consultant to train others and help create culture change within their organizations or for their clients.
Bottom line, The Eight Principles® training delivers growing revenue. Transformational giving. 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.
With The Eight Principles driving your fundraising, revenue growth of 4X, even 5X 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.
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 most accessible. 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.
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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.
Our unique training experiences are for professional fundraisers, nonprofit executives, board members and volunteers. Through a unique assessment tool and the only execution platform on the market, an Eight Prnciples Coach is uniquely qualified to create a high-performing fundraising culture inside their organization or for their client. You learn by doing. You solve problems through team effort. You plot your path forward.
We enable you to give joy to the donor, create lasting passion for the fundraiser, while achieving continuous healthy increases in philanthropic revenue.
You know where you want to go. We get you there.
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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.
As an Eight Principles Coach, you’re able to provide targeted training where and when needed. No trips to a campus or conference. As Coaches you deliver The Eight Principles® training to your fundraisers, staff and board members anytime whether you’re inside the organization or as counsel. This approach produces outcomes which are higher in quality and creates an unassailable fundraising culture within an 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. Our training platforms employ the methods which achieve the highest levels of retention and understanding in adults.
From the opening video to the closing planning exercise, each Eight Principles training session actively involves every participant in the learning experience. Everyone acquires actionable understanding. Whether professional or volunteer.
Groups of individuals become living, organic teams.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 training platforms, 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 provides the only comprehensive training in relational fundraising.
Contact Us to Learn How We Can Help YouOur training leads to professional certifications for fundraisers and coaches providing the executable skill 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.
Eight Principles Certified Coaches
Certified Coaches use The Eight Principles training to create strong fundraising cultures withing their organizations or to guide their clients to lasting fundraising success.







Mr. Korin is a certified Quadrant 3 Leadership Coach with a particular interest in strengthening the development practices of directors of development and the organizations they lead.
A resident of Phoenix, Arizona he has served on several nonprofit boards, including Jewish Major Leaguers Inc., The American Jewish Committee, The New England Aquarium, Hillel Foundation at Brandeis University, Friends of Brandeis Athletics. After serving on their alumni board, he was appointed a President Councilor of Brandeis.


initiatives that have positively impacted the lives of countless children, setting an example for others to follow.


Thomas holds Masters in Political science and Public administration from Mysore University and Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (PGDBA) from St. Joseph’s college of Business Administration. In addition he has specialized himself with several Diplomas and Certificates in Human Resources including OD, Project Management, Coaching.

Has played a pivotal part in development of Corporate Social Responsibility journey in India as a thought leader, practitioner and former head of the FICCI Aditya Birla CSR Centre for Excellence. He is a motivational speaker, executive coach and consultant. At present Professor and Chairperson, Centre for Sustainability & CSR at Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), DELHI (NCR) India.

He is a result driven action-oriented person, worked in different parts of India and lead the team for new and existing operation. His areas of expertise include- Operation Management, Concept selling, Corporate and institutional presentation, Resource Mobilization, Program Management, Team-building, Recruitment, Induction, Training & Development, Mentoring, Performance review & appraisal and Monitoring and evaluation.
The Eight Principles Fellows
The Eight Principles India Fellows are Certified Eight Principles coaches who also serve as the charter senior advisory panel for Eight Principles work in India.

initiatives that have positively impacted the lives of countless children, setting an example for others to follow.


Thomas holds Masters in Political science and Public administration from Mysore University and Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (PGDBA) from St. Joseph’s college of Business Administration. In addition he has specialized himself with several Diplomas and Certificates in Human Resources including OD, Project Management, Coaching.


Has played a pivotal part in development of Corporate Social Responsibility journey in India as a thought leader, practitioner and former head of the FICCI Aditya Birla CSR Centre for Excellence. He is a motivational speaker, executive coach and consultant. At present Professor and Chairperson, Centre for Sustainability & CSR at Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), DELHI (NCR) India.

The Eight Principles Affiliates
The Eight Principles Affiliates are licensed agents of Eight Principles products and services.

Sapna is a charter member of TiE Global. TiE Global is a nonprofit organization devoted to entrepreneurs in all industries, at all stages, from incubation, throughout the entrepreneurial lifecycle.
She is also a graduate of the Georgia State University - J Mack Robinson School of Business