The People Behind PurposeWorks

Sherry Bell has been helping organizations grow since 1998 and has focused exclusively on nonprofit fundraising since 2005. A veteran entrepreneur and executive with more than 25 years of business leadership experience and more than 21 years in the charitable sector, she has built sustainable fundraising programs by combining strategic vision, operational excellence, and exceptional donor experiences. Since launching her first business in 2000, Sherry has developed deep expertise in customer experience, business operations, and organizational leadership, bringing a unique cross-industry perspective to fundraising strategy and organizational growth.

Over the course of her career, Sherry has consistently served at the director level and above, spending more than a decade in executive leadership positions including CEO, COO, and President across both nonprofit organizations and fundraising agencies. This experience gives her a practical understanding of the challenges leaders face when balancing growth, sustainability, mission impact, and financial performance.

A recognized leader in face-to-face fundraising, Sherry has worked throughout North America, including Canada, as well as the United Kingdom and Australia, helping nonprofits and fundraising agencies launch, optimize, and scale donor acquisition programs that generate long-term value. Her experience spans emerging organizations, established national charities, and some of the world's most recognized nonprofit brands.

As an entrepreneur, executive, consultant, and board leader, Sherry has built organizations from the ground up, led multi-million-dollar fundraising operations, developed donor stewardship strategies, managed complex vendor and agency partnerships, and guided teams through periods of growth, transformation, and operational change.

Today, Sherry specializes in three core areas: Face-to-Face Fundraising Strategy — helping organizations build and optimize sustainable donor acquisition programs; Sustainer Journeys and Donor Retention — designing donor experiences that strengthen engagement, improve retention, and increase lifetime value; and Operational Excellence and Sustainable Growth — aligning people, processes, technology, and strategy to support long-term success. Sherry is especially passionate about creating donor-centered fundraising programs that deliver exceptional experiences while generating measurable and sustainable results.

She is also a leading advocate for ethical and sustainable face-to-face fundraising practices. As a co-founder of the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association (PFFA), she has helped advance industry standards, support responsible self-regulation, and promote transparency, accountability, and long-term channel sustainability across the fundraising profession.

From a single street corner in New York City to global impact across multiple continents, Ashley Bloom has spent her career helping nonprofits build donor programs that last.

She found her path on the streets of New York City, joining Greenpeace as a canvasser and signing up her first recurring donor within hours of her first shift. She was hooked. She quickly discovered the unique power of face-to-face fundraising — its ability to build transformative member bases, fuel campaigns, and raise community awareness — a passion that continues to shape her work today.

With more than 20 years of experience in face-to-face fundraising, Ashley has led, managed, trained, and coached teams that have acquired hundreds of thousands of recurring donors globally, generating millions in sustained funding. She advanced through every role on the face-to-face managerial ladder before becoming Greenpeace International's in-house Face-to-Face Consultant and Trainer, supporting teams across the U.S., Mexico, India, and Asia-Pacific.

For the past decade, she has consulted with a diverse range of NGOs across the United States — from global nonprofits to local grassroots organizations spanning humanitarian, environmental, and animal justice movements. She collaborates closely with leaders at every level to strengthen fundraising strategy, team performance, program innovation, and donor retention.

Today, Ashley brings deep industry expertise, hands-on experience, and a genuine passion for change to every partnership — working together to build stronger fundraising programs that advance the missions that matter most.

Sharon Dreyfuss is a fundraising and direct marketing professional with more than four decades of experience helping nonprofit organizations acquire, retain, and engage donors through strategic, data-driven fundraising programs. She began her career at The Wilderness Society in 1982, where she spent 14 years in a variety of fundraising and membership roles, ultimately serving as Director of Membership Planning and Analysis. During her tenure, she developed expertise in direct mail acquisition, direct response fundraising, telemarketing, membership development, strategic planning, and analytics.

After leaving The Wilderness Society, Sharon continued to build her expertise across the nonprofit and fundraising consulting sectors. She served as a Marketing Analyst at OMP, a Senior Marketing Analyst at World Wildlife Fund, Director of Analytical Services at Integral, and Senior List Broker/Analyst at CELCO — roles that strengthened her knowledge of donor analytics, list strategy, and direct response fundraising programs.

In 2008, Sharon returned to World Wildlife Fund, where she spent nearly 18 years leading direct response donor acquisition and channel strategy initiatives. She managed WWF's acquisition and reinstatement mail programs, oversaw the organization's telemarketing efforts, and played a key leadership role in expanding WWF's multichannel fundraising strategy. A recognized leader in nonprofit telemarketing, Sharon has spent more than 25 years leveraging the phone channel to acquire, retain, upgrade, and steward donors, consistently demonstrating its value as an integral part of a strong fundraising program even as technologies and communication trends shifted around it.

In 2015, Sharon helped launch World Wildlife Fund's face-to-face fundraising program, introducing a powerful new donor acquisition channel and helping establish a more diversified sustainer fundraising portfolio. By integrating face-to-face fundraising with direct mail, telemarketing, and digital outreach, she helped create more cohesive supporter journeys designed to improve acquisition performance, donor engagement, and long-term retention.

Throughout her career, Sharon has been a steadfast advocate for direct mail, helping organizations preserve and strengthen the effectiveness of one of fundraising's most enduring and impactful channels. She understands that while fundraising tactics and technologies evolve, donor-centered communication and relationship-building remain at the heart of successful fundraising — and she has consistently championed an approach where channels work together rather than compete with one another.

After retiring from World Wildlife Fund in early 2026, Sharon joined PurposeWorks as a Senior Fundraising Consultant, where she continues to support nonprofit organizations with strategic guidance and practical solutions. Her expertise spans individual giving strategy, mass marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, face-to-face fundraising, donor acquisition, and donor retention. Known for her thoughtful, analytical, and collaborative approach, Sharon is passionate about helping organizations build integrated fundraising programs that respect donor choice, maximize channel effectiveness, and create lasting relationships between supporters and the causes they care about.

Ali Jones began her career more than 18 years ago in the UK, working in recruitment across the health, social care, and nonprofit sectors — an experience that gave her an early understanding of the people, teams, and infrastructure behind mission-driven organizations. From there, she moved into working directly within the nonprofit sector, where she has spent the past 15 years building and leading fundraising programs.

Her career has taken her from the UK to the U.S., with opportunities to work as a specialist internationally and develop a strong understanding of how cultural differences shape the ways people connect with organizations, causes, and one another. She has built and led internal face-to-face fundraising programs, established internal telemarketing operations, overseen donor care, managed external vendors, developed peer-to-peer texting programs, and created engaging fundraising experiences at events and festivals.

Ali approaches marketing and fundraising strategy through a behavioral economics lens — exploring not only what organizations communicate, but what influences people to act, engage, and stay connected. She believes organizations should do more than state their mission: they should create experiences that allow supporters and staff to feel it. She also has a keen interest in how AI can be used ethically and thoughtfully to strengthen nonprofit organizations, teams, and supporter experiences.

In 2025, Ali founded Retentionomics to bring her experience to other nonprofits, helping organizations think differently about acquisition, retention, engagement, and sustainable growth. She has a particular passion for developing leaders, building high-performing teams, and creating the infrastructure, culture, and support that enable people and programs to thrive and sustain long-term impact.

Ali is a proud member and Board Director of the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association (PFFA), committed to advancing ethical, professional, innovative, and sustainable face-to-face fundraising practices and strengthening the future of the sector.

Sam graduated from Yale in 2006 and immediately went into grassroots organizing, campaigning, and face-to-face fundraising in Morgantown, WV. The first canvass he ever directed was in Portland, Maine in 2007. Throughout his twenties, he directed face-to-face operations that raised millions of dollars for the Human Rights Campaign and other groups in numerous states. Having knocked on a lot of doors and stopped a lot of folks on the street himself, he learned that what often influences the outcome is: does the person feel seen, or processed? He has spent the twenty years since trying to build organizations where the answer is "seen."

Sam spent nine of those years as CFO and COO of The Public Interest Network, responsible for more than 900 staff and the face-to-face, telemarketing, direct mail, digital, and mid-level donor programs. He grew annual gross revenue by $25 million and increased net revenue 3.3x during his tenure, largely by introducing new technology and techniques to fundraising operations.

As Principal of Saidin Strategies beginning in 2020, Sam has helped nonprofits and businesses launch new brands, campaigns, and revenue programs internationally. In 2023 he co-founded Chorus, where he serves as Chief Operating Officer. Chorus is a marketing intelligence platform built on the insight he first learned through face-to-face: donors respond when you understand them as the individuals they are — and that understanding is finally possible at the scale of a multi-million-person file.

What motivates Sam now is what motivated him from the start of his career. Every supporter is a person deciding whether your cause deserves a place in their life. The organizations that honor that decision can really improve their results.

Jamal holds a B.F.A. from The New School University and has turned what was meant to be a four-month stint as a street canvasser for a children's charity into a 20-plus-year career raising sustainable funds for nonprofits.

He has built and managed fundraising campaigns for CARE USA, Plan USA, Oxfam US, Children International, UNICEF Mexico, Amnistía Internacional México, Oxfam Mexico, and Save the Children Mexico, and has consulted on campaigns for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, Humane World for Animals, Open Creates, Oxfam US, and the Working Families Party.

Jamal founded One Voice as a full canvassing agency after returning from a field visit to Ethiopia with a children's charity client in July 2019, and co-founded 1 Voice Latinoamérica in Mexico in 2021. Under his leadership, both agencies have been industry leaders in sustaining-donor retention, built on teams that work with integrity, respect, and genuine passion for the missions they represent. Jamal has also served on the board of directors of the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association (PFFA).

Alongside running the agencies, Jamal designed and built a complete fundraising training system — a bilingual English/Spanish curriculum and app covering pitch development, objection handling, rapport, emotional intelligence, and campaign management. Developed to train One Voice's fundraisers across every market the company operates in, the system is now available to license or deploy for organizations building teams of their own.

That combination — running campaigns and building the people who run them — means Jamal works as easily with organizations that want an outsourced program as with those looking to build and train a fundraising team of their own.

Salim Shariff is the founder of Radicle Digital, a digital fundraising and strategy consultancy that helps progressive nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and political campaigns build stronger online programs. Over the past 15 years, he has managed multi-million-dollar digital advertising campaigns, helped raise millions of dollars online, and mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to take action for causes they believe in.

Salim founded Radicle Digital in 2023 after the birth of his son, driven by a desire to partner directly with mission-driven organizations. Before that, he served as Executive Director of Contest Every Race, a Movement Labs initiative that recruited more than 250,000 potential Democratic candidates to run for office. His career began on President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign in Ohio, where he first fell in love with using the internet for good. He later served as a Digital Advisor to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and returned to Ohio to lead Hillary Clinton's digital program there during the 2016 election.

Since then, Salim has focused his career on helping progressive organizations build power through digital strategy, fundraising, and organizing. He has worked across issues including reproductive freedom, climate action, criminal justice reform, affordable housing, democracy, and public health.

Today, Salim lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and their two young children. What motivates him most is helping organizations build authentic relationships with their supporters and use digital tools not just to raise more money, but to create lasting movements for change.

Over her career, Anna has delivered at all levels in fundraising — from directing entire fundraising departments to getting that one piece of copy exactly right. The thread running through her work is an instinct for what's missing: a welcome pack, a stalled channel, a program that doesn't exist yet. She has a track record of both filling those gaps and building the strategies that change the whole picture — growing Children First Foundation's fundraising operation from a team of one to a full department.

Anna has led teams from the Face-to-Face fundraising department at Sense in the UK to the Marketing and Fundraising department at the Australian NGO Good Return. She has worked in depth with a wide range of client partners over the years and brings that accumulated knowledge to every project. Her clients have included Amnesty, Children First Foundation, UNHCR, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, RNIB, and Marie Curie Cancer Care. She served on the Board of the UK's Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA) and was a consultant for the PFRA in Australia.

Today, Anna consults as a fundraising director and manager, a trainer and coach, and a copywriter. Her sweet spot is individual giving: strategy across every tier, hands-on in cash and regular giving, mid-value and creative, and setting up major gift and bequest programs properly so the right fundraiser can take them and run.

What she cares about most are audiences — how to make their journeys as accessible and loving as can be, with as little getting in the way of their giving as possible.

Anna is Principal at Crimson & Violet Consulting, a small shop based in Washington, DC, working with nonprofit and for-purpose organizations across the US, Europe, and Australia. When she's not helping good organizations do more, or rocking out at a show, she's cooking for people or co-running her neighborhood school's volunteer road safety program.