Chad Barger [BAR-jur] helps nonprofit staff and boards raise more money with less wasted effort. He’s an internationally top-rated speaker and coach, and the owner of Productive Fundraising, where he turns the latest fundraising research into tactics small and mid-sized nonprofits can actually use.
Plenty of nonprofit folks know him as “fundraiserchad,” host of the free monthly Productive Fundraising webinar series and curator of a library of fundraising templates and samples built to help you skip the blank page.
Chad has spent his whole career in fundraising, in shops big and small across higher ed, social services, and the arts. Campaigns he’s worked on have raised more than $220 million for the charities he’s had the honor of serving. In 2024 he became just the 117th person in the world to earn the ACFRE (Advanced Certified Fund Raising Executive) credential. He earned the CFRE in 2007, is an AFP Master Trainer and an Advanced Certified Nonprofit Professional (ACNP), and received Central Penn Business Journal‘s 2018 Nonprofit Leadership Excellence Award.
He keynotes and leads workshops at conferences across the US and Canada, serves on the ACFRE credentialing board, is a past president of AFP Central Pennsylvania, and teaches fundraising at Messiah University, and previously at Temple University.
His fundraising career started as a student phone-a-thon caller at Slippery Rock University. An AmeriCorps stint there, leading classmates on service trips around the country, sealed the deal on a nonprofit career.
His home base is just outside Hershey, Pennsylvania (yes, where your chocolate bars come from), where he and the lovely Mrs. Barger are raising two teenage boys. Chad is an avid hiker and trail maintainer (trail name: Friday), scout leader, adventurous eater, travel buff, and arts lover. He’ll do just about anything for a jumbo bag of jalapeño kettle chips, which are banned from the Barger house for the sake of his waistline.
At heart, he’s a productivity nerd on a mission to help you raise more money for the cause you love.
Short Bio
Chad Barger, ACFRE, ACNP, helps nonprofit staff and boards raise more money with less wasted effort. As owner of Productive Fundraising, he turns the latest research into practical tactics for small and mid-sized nonprofits. He’s an internationally top-rated speaker and a go-to coach for boards that “don’t want to fundraise.” Chad is just the 117th person in the world to earn the ACFRE, teaches fundraising at Messiah University, and hosts a free monthly webinar series as @fundraiserchad. Off the clock, you’ll find him on a hiking trail near his home in Hershey, PA.
