A former executive director of the nonprofit Breakthrough New York, Rhea Wong is a podcaster (she hosts Nonprofit Lowdown), fundraiser, and consultant who helps executive directors and development staff raise money. She runs the Fundraising Accelerator, an executive coaching program.

She’s also the author, with Isabella Masucci, of a new book, Get That Money, Honey: The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Raising More Money for Your Nonprofit.

The book is part manifesto, part utilitarian workbook, with do-it-yourself exercises scattered in between Wong’s crisp words of advice for executive directors and nonprofit fundraisers.

Wong’s approach focuses on pursuing (and securing) large, private philanthropic gifts.

NPQ spoke with Wong this May.

NPQ: What brought you to write this book?

Rhea Wong: I was a 26-year-old executive director, and like a lot of executive directors, I was kind of thrown in the deep end without a lot of training, a lot of support. They handed me the keys and my email address in the first day and said, “Good luck.” And so my first day on the job, I did two Google searches. One was: what exactly does an executive director do? Two was: how do you fundraise? Unfortunately, I think a lot of people in our sector are thrown into the same types of situations. And so I wrote the book for the 26-year-old me who had no idea what to do. The idea behind it was, if you’re new to this, if you don’t know anything, grab this book and it’ll at least give you a starting point. Because the other thing is, I learned by trial and error, I made a ton of mistakes along the way. And so my hope is that I can save people who read the book, you know, some of the basic mistakes, like don’t make the same mistakes I made, make new and different mistakes.

Read the full article about nonprofit fundraising by Isaiah Thompson and Rhea Wong at Nonprofit Quarterly.