Concord Leadership Group founder Marc A. Pitman helps leaders, especially in nonprofits, lead their teams with more effectiveness and less stress. He’s the author of “Ask Without Fear!®,” the executive director of TheNonprofitAcademy.com, and an Advisory Panel member of Rogare, a prestigious international fundraising think tank.
Marc’s expertise and enthusiasm engages audiences around the world and has caught the attention of media organizations as diverse as The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Al Jazeera, SUCCESS Magazine, and Fox News. Marc tweets regularly at @marcapitman.
He is the husband to his best friend and the father of three amazing kids. And if you drive by him on the road, he’ll be singing 80’s tunes loud enough to embarrass his family!
Over the past 16 years, Marc’s organizational and leadership coaching and trainings have helped tens of thousands of nonprofits advance their missions, meet revenue goals, and improve the lives of their staff and supporters including clients like the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, Georgetown University, In Defense of Animals, Habitat for Humanity, and the Association of the U.S. Army.
Marc’s first move toward leadership coaching in nonprofits began in 1997 in his first fundraising position. At the time, he was coached by his boss, a skilled fundraiser, through asking for major gifts in a final phase of a multimillion dollar campaign. Coaching quickly helped Marc get comfortable with asking for large gifts and keeping the relationships with donors long after the campaign was over.
In the early 2000’s, Marc was promoted to a leading role in a development office. But as is typical in nonprofits, his new position required him to still meet the goals of his previous position. So he engaged a leadership coach to help meet the sometimes conflicting demands that were arising. Leadership coaching helped him identify and leverage his core talents, better understand the people he worked with, and shape the fundraising work to shape goals in concert with his strengths and the strengths of his team. He found his stress levels went down even as his professional effectiveness increased.
Throughout the next decade, Marc amassed experience in working with boards, creating internal systems, and running all aspects of fundraising programs including annual funds, grants, planned giving programs, alumni relations, and special events. He also ran or worked in a dozen capital campaigns. As the leader of fundraising for a community hospital, he became involved with internal coaching as he helped shape the hospital’s “Leadership Institute,” their leadership development program for employees. There he helped assessed the needs of managers and their staff’s, hired trainers, and created action plans to ensure the ROI of the trainings.
Marc received a Masters of Organizational Leadership, culminating with a staff retention benchmark study entitled “Faculty Retention on a Shoestring” to help independent schools retain key faculty members. He became a Certified FranklinCovey Coach, started FundraisingCoach.com, wrote the first book in the Ask Without Fear!® series, and started giving on-demand training at TheNonprofitAcademy,com. Throughout the decade, he strove to get the best leadership and fundraising training to all nonprofits, whatever the size of their professional development budget
Over the years, Marc has coached leaders from organizations with less than $100,000 in revenue to those with over $200 million in revenue. He’s trained the top major gift officers of national and international organizations like Habitat for Humanity International, Georgetown University, and KLOVE/Air 1. And he has coached new nonprofit CEOs who were transitioning into leadership roles either from the private sector or as a hire from within the nonprofit sector.
Marc is regularly sought out by broadcast and print media to speak about leadership and philanthropy and he travels around the world speaking to teams and keynoting at conferences.