I had a really great experience with Jen as my coach. Navigating my new role as an Executive Director was challenging and stressful. Jen guided me through self-reflection and self-awareness using various activities and discussions, which allowed me to become an effective leader. I am continuing to use the guidance that Jen provided in my professional life, as well as in my personal life. I appreciate the opportunity to have grown as a leader with Jen’s coaching.

As I was navigating a career transition from marketing & communications to social responsibility operations, I was fortunate to have Jen Weiss as my coach. Her strategy-focused and empathetic coaching style helped me prioritize joy and personal values in my professional decisions. Jen was extremely patient and helpful in guiding me through developing actionable fundraising strategies that aligned perfectly with my new position as Chief Operating Officer.

Her insightful questioning and tailored sessions enabled me to ‘do the work’ around my career and personal mission. Each session left me more equipped and confident to face the challenges ahead while staying aligned to my core values. I am deeply appreciative of her guidance, which has been transformative, both professionally and personally.

Jen’s holistic approach to coaching is truly empowering. I highly recommend her to anyone seeking meaningful and sustainable growth in their career and life.

I came to coaching with Jen during a period of transition in both my professional and personal life that
required me to grow as a leader and department head. Jen’s coaching style was a great mix of empathy
and gentle (but firm) pushing to challenge my existing beliefs and approaches to what it means to be
successful in my role. I found it incredibly useful to have a fellow fundraiser as a leadership coach
because few people outside the field truly understand the stresses, challenges, and emotional labor the
role requires. Jen offered me useful frameworks that I was able to take back to my team to identify and
center our priorities, recognize the limits of what we can and can’t control, celebrate our wins, and drive
better collaboration in the future. Greater access to coaching like Jen’s could go a long way toward
addressing turnover and burnout in the fundraising field, and I hope more of my colleagues are able to
experience the benefits of working with a coach like her!

Jen’s coaching practice gave me the clarity and confidence to approach challenges and opportunities in all aspects of my life. Her strategies, approach, and accountability practices pushed me to delve deeper into who I am and what fuels me. I have found myself returning to those strategies time and time again. In addition to the practical application of her coaching, I left each session feeling like we unearthed something deeper for me to ponder. I have returned to the framework we established many times. Jen’s coaching enabled me to feel stronger, more aligned with my values, and confident in my own abilities. She asked important questions that pushed me to really think critically about my assumptions and she encouraged me to think outside the box I had created for myself. Thank you Jen for your gentle prodding, stellar coaching technique, and compassionate approach.

Making the decision to work with Jen as a Coach was hands down, the best decision I made this past year. Her insight, feedback and thoughtful questions led me down a guided path to solidly identifying and feeling strongly aligned with my core values, purpose, goals and aspirations. I left every session with Jen feeling both extremely grateful and extremely motivated as she helped me work through one of the most challenging transitions in my professional career. Looking ahead, I will continue to use the many tools she gave me in order to reach my goals and make the greatest impact both personally and professionally. The lessons I learned by working with Jen are invaluable and applicable in all facets of my life…thank you, Jen!!

Jen’s thoughtful coaching allowed me the space and time to ensure all facets of my life were aligned with my core values. Her ability to to focus and hone in on my strengths and challenges gave me the reflection I needed to make decisions that ultimately improved my quality of life and work. I appreciate Jen’s compassion, tenacity and humor. I needed a guide to walk me through the process in order to clearly see where to best invest my internal and external resources and Jen went above and beyond. Her coaching and deep listening helped ground me in an aspirational time of transition.

Jen is a coach who seeks to support and empower her clients. Her strategic challenges, as well as her thoughtful exercises, help clients achieve their goals. I would recommend Jen’s coaching to anyone who is looking to explore areas of their life where they believe they can be more fulfilled and to anyone wondering about how they might grow through challenge and change. I am grateful to Jen for the nurturing and support she provided me during a critical time, and believe in the power of her coaching wholeheartedly.

It has been an incredible opportunity to work with Jen as a coach. She brings a holistic approach to the work that is centered in my values and life’s purpose. She helped me articulate goals in the key areas of my life, and each session she puts me in the driver’s seat to figure out where I need to focus next. I was able to build trust with her very early on, which enabled me to open up more and get more out of each session. I leave our meetings with a fresh perspective, inspiration and direction.

“I have had the pleasure of working with Jen Weiss for over a year. She has been invaluable to Global Citizen Year’s fundraising efforts, and to my personal growth as a manager. Jen’s clear-eyed approach has helped our organization figure out a development team structure, improve board relationship management, set strategies on major gift prospects, and segment our donors in a way that allowed us to develop a communications plan for smaller level donors. As you can see, her skills are far reaching! Anything we have asked Jen to help with, she has been able to execute with skill and professionalism. Our Development department is now noticeably more efficient and successful – from the leadership team to the support staff.

For me personally, Jen has been an extraordinary coach as the team has grown and I’ve expanded my managerial responsibilities. She has helped me identify and elicit the strengths of my team, navigate tricky staffing issues, and be a better fundraiser who can manage up to our CEO and Board. I’m extremely grateful for this time with Jen. It will serve me well for the rest of my career.”

“I left each phone call with Jen feeling more optimistic and energized to go about the work of fundraising for our organization. She set clear agendas for each call and clear expectations for my work between calls. With her help our agency was able to create our first ever development plan and launch a board “give & get.” She also connected us to other fantastic consultants to help in areas where our staffing is limited. I can’t say enough good things about working with Jen!”

“Jen’s support was invaluable! She knows how to get things done, can navigate complexity seemingly effortlessly and draws upon her deep experience and strong judgment to provide fantastic advice time and again. Working with Jen was one of the best decisions I made.”

“Jen’s work with us transformed our development function from a fragmented, reactive and taxing process to a pro-active, strategic and highly organized team raising even more philanthropic dollars. She helped us build our first fundraising plan, engage our board in an entirely new and effective way, and get the right people all working in the same direction.

She was instrumental in helping us strategize for individual high net-worth donors. She worked with us to determine next steps, find connections, pro-actively engage our current and prospective donors, and close the ask.

Our development function and team are absolutely in a different and markedly improved place because of Jen’s support. guidance and leadership. I don’t know what we would have done without her support!”

In our work together, Jen has served as a trusted and critical thought partner. I’ve sought her advice and guidance on myriad topics from board management, donor strategy, team development, and the ever-elusive challenge of striking a work-life balance. She navigates each topic with skill and I’ve left each of our meetings feeling supported and clear on next steps.

I worked with Jen to strengthen our fundraising department, engage the board in playing a bigger role, and focus the efforts of the fundraising team. We created an Annual Fundraising Plan that helped align Board and staff on our key priorities for the year; she counseled on how best to leverage fundraising events, and she helped me feel more confident in managing and delegating the work flow.

Jen invests in teams and builds relationships with authenticity to drive major growth and results. She singlehandedly supported our organization in building a development infrastructure and codifying our short and long-term strategy for fundraising.

For years, our organization relied on the strength of our external relationships and early connections – this worked for a while, but it wasn’t sustainable. Under Jen’s guidance, we built a donor database, created numerous case statements and collateral for meetings and email campaigns, sent our our first email campaigns, implemented new check-in processes for our state and national portfolios, and installed new board committees on development and governance.

Most of these processes were almost completely new to our organization. Jen helped us keep up with our development activity in real-time while also making the long-lasting systemic changes for our department that will guarantee success into the future years.

Working with Jen has brought us success in stewarding and increasing existing commitments, bringing in new gifts, pulling off numerous high-profile events that netted new relationships and dollars for the organization… I would recommend Jen to any nonprofits that are looking to really professionalize their development department’s operations and strategy. Her rare combination of analytical skills and empathy allow Jen to easily connect with people – a vital part of getting anything done through others.

I worked with Jen in my capacity as chairperson of a national nonprofit organization. We engaged Jen to support the development of our development function, as we needed to shift from “start-up” mode to a more professionalized fundraising operation. She has helped us to grow our pipeline, streamline operations, and manage relationships across multiple partner organizations. Her work has been indispensable to our growing sophistication.

Jen has been extremely effective in enabling KIPP Bay Area Schools to achieve significant fundraising results. As our Director of Development for five years, she built a sophisticated development operation, assembled a talented team, and launched and led a successful comprehensive campaign. These philanthropic funds enabled us to open new schools while putting us firmly on the path to serving even more students across the Bay Area.

In addition to achieving ambitious results, Jen built our reputation as an organization that hosts well-produced and powerful events, with student testimonies as the centerpiece of how we reach not only the minds but also the hearts of our donors. She helped nurture a culture of fundraising participation and leadership among our board, while also enabling donors to come to love KIPP, entrust us with their generous gifts, and join us in pursuing our mission on behalf of students.

More recently, Jen has also served a valued consultant to our team, helping to onboard new teammates and supporting our work with major donors. As a result of these accomplishments and her expertise, I have recommended Jen with confidence to other organizations who can benefit from her tremendous experience and expertise.

While I have worked with Jen during the entire period of her employment at KIPP Bay Area Schools, I worked most closely with her in my role as Campaign Chair for our $125 million growth and innovation campaign. The campaign was the largest ever by a charter management organization, and we completed it a year ahead of schedule. Jen led the staff team working on the campaign, and was my principal contact in our joint work to identify prospective investors, research their philanthropic interests and investing histories, and planning a succession of interactions and activities to deepen their relationship with KIPP and commitment to the work that the organization does.

Throughout our work together, Jen was thoughtful and creative in helping us to put our best face forward as an organization and to create the strongest relationships possible with these prospective investors. Jen is also appropriately dogged, which is actually a key attribute for excellence in a development team leader.

Jen is also very strong in the ongoing stewardship of relationships with our existing investors, both in terms of her own relationships with them, and also in ensuring that an appropriate Board peer or peers are effectively engaged as well.

I have greatly enjoyed my professional relationship with Jen, and I give her great credit for the terrific success of our development work at KIPP Bay Area.

Jen was instrumental in our achieving unprecedented fundraising success that truly brought our organization to the next level of sophistication and impact. She cares deeply and executes relentlessly. She is a force!

As a consultant to KIPP Bay Area Schools, I had the pleasure of working very closely with Jen in her role as Director of Development. We worked together as part of a team consisting of internal staff leadership and board leadership, with me as consultant. Jen played an invaluable role in running the team and making certain that solicitation strategies were implemented effectively and successfully. The results were dramatic, and the goal was increased and exceeded several times. I have the greatest respect for Jen and admire her intelligence, drive, commitment, and integrity.

I had the pleasure of working closely with Jen where she spent over a year leading our fundraising efforts, guiding our development team, and liaising with our Advancement Committee as the organization focused its efforts on a comprehensive campaign in a difficult economic climate due to Covid. Jen is not only a strategic thinker with the ability to think big, but she never loses sight of the details, pushing us all to reflect on the Headlands story and how best to raise dollars for both operating budget and campaign. We worked together closely on several projects, from developing compelling financial materials for donors to conducting a rigorous search for our next permanent Director of Development. Jen’s thought partnership was invaluable to me during my time at Headlands, and her carefully-considered and sometimes challenging perspective helped advance my own thinking. She is a trusted colleague who brings her whole self to the work, and I will certainly miss her authentic leadership and collaborative working style.

Headlands Center for the Arts began our relationship with Jen at the beginning of 2020, and we were very fortunate to work with her during a difficult year. With Jen’s expertise and guidance we were able to respond to a difficult fundraising climate, and finish the year with our most successful year end campaign to date.

Jen was truly a part of the staff and became an integral member of the senior team. Her guidance, both on an individual basis and throughout the organization, helped to strengthen the fundraising skills and confidence of the entire board and staff. As a new Board Chair, Jen helped me hone my confidence in meeting with supporters. Her counsel was integral to understanding how to share our mission and vision.

I credit Jen with helping to successfully navigate our organization through a most challenging moment.

Jen was an invaluable coach for Voices College-Bound Language Academies new Development team and helped us get off the ground running. She supported our team in turning our initial fundraising ambitions into clear goals and processes that defined our day to day work.

As a coach, she helped improve our team’s work interpersonally by encouraging us to have essential conversations about our strengths and how we can leverage them to form a cohesive team. Her strengths in writing and editing were essential to the establishment and improvement of our organization’s newsletter and grant applications. Her expertise left me with a clear picture of how to write for an audience of potential funders.

As a result of Jen’s coaching, my understanding of the nonprofit development world improved after each meeting. I would recommend her to anyone looking to start building their expertise in fundraising or to refine their current skills.

Coming directly from the for-profit to nonprofit world, I was thankful that I had Jen’s coaching to help me become quickly acclimated to my new world. She was able to determine the priorities of my new position, and she made sure I was focused on creating and completing our team’s goals each week. It was comforting to know that I had a proven professional in my corner every step of the way during my training. Her mentoring allowed me to become confident and set me up to win in the nonprofit space. I would recommend Jen to any individual or organization who seeks a coach to help them hit the ground running and succeed with proven methods, and proven results!