Louise Sausele Furrow
Founder / Consultant

Louise’s career has been entirely in the nonprofit sector. She’s had experience working in human resources and in community relations. While serving as the operations manager for the Child Psychiatry Fellowship at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, she wrote her first grant proposal, which was funded for $500,000. It was a seminally impactful experience to have the opportunity to illuminate important, critical work and to experience the joy of shepherding philanthropic investment in a way that extended the work and aligned with the funder’s objectives.

For the last 15 years, Louise served as the Vice President for University Advancement at two different universities, one in Los Angeles and one in Seattle. Her span of care included all fund-raising functions (annual giving, mid level and major gifts, planned giving, and foundation relations) as well community engagement, alumni and parent relations, major university positioning events, video production, and university leadership at the cabinet level. Over the past 24 years she worked very closely with the marketing communications departments of those universities and became deeply versed in communication cascades, constituent centric strategies, and crisis communications. Highlights include being part of shepherding three significant gift commitments of $8 – $10 million, and doubling the amount of gifts and donors participating in an annual giving program over a five year period. But even more, it has been a privilege to know good work that matters in the world has made a difference because of the work of the nonprofits- but also in the lives of the donors themselves.

Louise is a transformational leader who is experienced in leading through change. She’s always looking for the opportunity to take what is available and move to higher productivity. The hallmark of her career was being tasked with challenges to be addressed and problems to be solved. This always requires working with others to evaluate vision and goals, assess operational structure and available resources (budget, people, systems, software, expertise, etc.) to solve a problem or take an enterprise to the next level. She is experienced in creating structure where there was none (it either neither existed or was broken), expanding effective operations for broader or deeper impact (growth), and with achieving greater efficiency (savings). She’s had way more experience than she’d like with producing results with slim resources! Consistently the solution has been building teams- understanding the strengths and passions of the staff members; aligning the work to be done with those suited to do it; articulating goals clearly, and empowering talented staff within parameters. Repeatedly she’s been in awe at what high performing teams are able to accomplish.

Want to work with Louise? Schedule a free consultation.