About What’s Under the Lid

This newsletter is for fundraisers, nonprofit ops folks, and dev admins who are tired of feeling like they're the only ones struggling with their systems—and want to see how others are solving the same problems.

Real operational wins. CRM sanity. Smarter workflows. And the occasional pop culture moment that explains how our work is connected.

Hi, I’m Dena, your fundraising sous chef.

I run Good Soup, a fundraising operations agency supporting small to mid-size nonprofits. Most days you’ll find me inside CRMs, cleaning data, building workflows, and helping development teams create systems that actually match how they work. I prep the kitchen so nothing slips through the cracks, whether that’s donor pipelines, campaign logistics, or acknowledgements.

What’s Under the Lid is where we peek inside the systems, strategies, and stories that make fundraising work, without the jargon, the overwhelm, or the fantasy of unlimited capacity.

Here I share:

• CRM experiments that worked, and the ones that absolutely didn’t

• Practical processes you can implement immediately

• Lessons from philanthropy, culture, and current events

• The occasional insight sparked by walking my dog Wally through the forest

Because good operations shouldn’t feel boring. They should support real people doing meaningful work.

I started this newsletter after noticing the same pattern everywhere. Talented fundraisers who deeply understood their donors, buried under operational chaos. Spreadsheets in every corner. Data nobody fully trusted. Systems built by someone who left years ago.

I’ve lived that reality as a development director. Now I help organizations build sustainable infrastructure so fundraisers can get back to the relationships that actually move the work forward.

Who this is for:

• Development directors juggling too much with too little

• Executive directors wondering why fundraising feels stuck

• Operations and CRM folks navigating nonprofit tech realities

• Anyone who believes fundraising infrastructure can be calm, effective, and human

If you’re trying to do meaningful work without burning out on messy systems, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe and pull up a chair. There’s always room in the kitchen.