A structure for reading what is underneath a conversation — used in every discovery meeting, contact report, and proposal that comes out of Empowered Fundraiser's client work.
The living rooms of our society.
The open spaces for our soul.
The places that hold the health of our democracy.
Asking good questions and then listening, deeply, is the only way I know to understand donors' motivation.
Five categories, worked through in order after any meeting, call, or relationship-building conversation. Each one turns a loose impression into something you can act on.
What lights this person up. Their personal mission, professional purpose, what they keep coming back to in conversation without being prompted.
What they bring. Budget, network, decision-making power, influence — the practical resources that make them useful to a campaign, not just willing.
Who is in their orbit. Decision-makers, partners, and stakeholders they name unprompted — the map of who else eventually needs to be involved.
What is hard. The problem underneath the one they name first, and what they have already tried that didn't work — the difference between fresh ground and a repeat of a dead end.
Where they show up and how they prefer to be reached. Social platforms and posting cadence, IRL communities and conferences, where they get their information, and their preferred channel — email, DM, text, phone, in person.
PAPPA is not a script. It is a lens to apply after the conversation, while filling in what you learned.
PAPPA only works if the conversation surfaces something worth writing down. Before your next meeting, watch Celeste Headlee's TED talk 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation — enter assuming you have something to learn, stay curious with open questions, stay out of the way of the answer, and don't repeat yourself.
Don't run the five letters as questions during the conversation itself. Let the conversation happen naturally — PAPPA is what you sort it into afterward.
Write two to four sentences per category. Mark a gap plainly — "not surfaced yet" is a prompt to go find out, not a failure.
The Approach category is what turns the report into a next step — the channel, the timeline, and what each side committed to.
Invent a donor who doesn't exist. Write it, talk it out loud, or type it in. First you'll get a quick read on what you've got, then a prompt to take the rest of the way with AI.
| Category | Words | Read |
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Copy this and paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant to keep the exercise going.
Confirmed places PAPPA is defined or used, drawn from the Empowered Fundraiser Digital Fundraising Twin.
A good conversation and a usable contact report are not the same thing. PAPPA is the difference between remembering a person was interesting and knowing exactly what to do about it.
The consultant's job in discovery is to figure out how to reach this person and keep reaching them. That is what Approach is for.