We know Face-to-Face Fundraising.

Robert Lilly built his face-to-face fundraising career from the ground up in Seattle, beginning as a frontline fundraiser and progressing through team leadership, campaign management, city management, and national special projects. He has trained top-performing fundraisers, developed industry leaders, and helped transform struggling operations into productive fundraising programs.

His experience spans virtually every level of a face-to-face fundraising organization, from entry-level canvasser to campaign manager, national manager, and CEO. He has worked across markets including Seattle, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Southern California, giving him firsthand experience with the operational, recruiting, training, management, compliance, HR, and competitive realities of the industry.

Robert previously founded, built, scaled, and ultimately sold a face-to-face fundraising agency that was ranked the #10 fastest-growing marketing agency of 2016.

Starting from the ground up, he developed the organization into a multimillion-dollar operation and fulfilled multimillion-dollar contracts ahead of projections. The company achieved national recognition, being named the #173 fastest-growing private company in America and the #10 fastest-growing marketing agency in the United States on the Inc. 500 list.

His work includes developing high-compliance systems for face-to-face fundraising organizations, including California compliance, donor fraud protection, and regulatory compliance. He has worked with local and state authorities to maintain compliance for a multimillion-dollar, multistate agency, navigating employment law, fundraising regulations, California requirements, and the operational demands of large-scale fundraising campaigns.

Robert has also built HR functions from the ground up, including onboarding and termination systems, responding to employment claims, and establishing HR departments for a multistate agency to high professional HR standards. He has recruited and developed leaders from entry level through senior management, including CCO and CEO-level leadership.

His operational experience includes improving fundraising performance through ethical performance strategies, establishing secret shopping and donor verification systems, preparing offices with functional infrastructure, developing charity relationships and the administrative systems needed to maintain them, and identifying and launching new productive markets.

That combination of frontline experience, executive leadership, entrepreneurship, compliance, HR, training, operations, and market development ultimately led Robert to found Creating Recognition LLC. Creating Recognition LLC brings that firsthand industry experience and entrepreneurial perspective to face-to-face fundraising, with a focus on helping organizations build, improve, and operate high-performing fundraising programs.

With this background, built from the ground up, having led multiple organizations, trained top-performing teams, turned around struggling operations, and achieved explosive growth, Robert brings a proven track record to Creating Recognition LLC. His experience provides a unique perspective on what it takes to build, improve, and scale successful face-to-face fundraising programs. Today, he is bringing that experience back to the industry to help organizations recruit better, train better, operate better, and succeed now.