Sami Zoss

Sami Zoss grew up in Beresford, South Dakota, and got to college because people gave. That early experience — of philanthropy as something that changes trajectories — became the lens through which she built her career. At the University of South Dakota she served as student body president, advocating before the Board of Regents and the state Legislature, and found her way into the USD Foundation after graduation. What started as an engagement coordinator role grew into something bigger: leading student and young alumni initiatives, coordinating national campaigns, and discovering that the mechanics of how nonprofits build donor relationships were both broken and fixable.

She took that realization to Miami University, where as associate director of donor engagement she restructured how the team managed donor households — building a collaborative model that handled more than 100 relationships at a time, roughly four times the typical load, without sacrificing the relational quality that makes stewardship actually work. She earned her MBA from Miami’s Farmer School of Business along the way, with a joint focus on finance and marketing. From there she moved to Dakota State University as executive director of constituent services and engagement, eventually serving as COO and acting CEO of the DSU Foundation — one of the few advancement professionals who has worked both sides of the operation, from front-line relationship building to organizational leadership.

Sami now runs Zoss Collaborations, a consulting firm she founded to help nonprofits solve the operational and strategic problems keeping good organizations from doing great work. Her practice spans donor engagement strategy, operational efficiency, technology integration, and organizational development. She’s particularly active at the intersection of AI and nonprofit practice, co-hosting the AI4Anyone LIVE podcast and bringing a practitioner’s fluency with both human systems and digital tools to every client engagement.

As co-author of The Donation Equation with Brian Gawor, Sami helped translate years of research and field experience into a framework any fundraiser can use. Her contribution to the book comes from where she’s spent her career: in the rooms where donors are cultivated, stewardship is built, and organizations either earn long-term loyalty or lose it. At Giving Geek, she brings that operational and relational depth to clients who need more than strategy — they need someone who has done the work.