From a one-off fundraiser that lived in Kathy’s head to a documented process she can hand over and run every year.
Held+Free was a new charity supporting women business owners in crisis. They’d just pulled off a successful launch fundraiser and wanted to make it an annual event. The problem was that the whole thing had been built in real time, with the process living in Kathy’s head and scattered across documents. To run it again next year, she’d effectively be starting from scratch.
What did Kathy need me for?
Kathy was honest about where she was: short on time, dealing with illness, and with, in her words, “a lack of time and interest in the process and admin side of the project.” The fundraiser had gone really well, but nothing about how it worked was written down anywhere she could hand to someone else.
So the knowledge needed to get out of her head and into a form that would survive to next year, and it needed doing in a way that asked very little of her, because very little was what she had to give. What she wanted was someone she could hand the whole thing to and trust to deliver.
What did I do?
I designed a three-week project around the reality of Kathy’s capacity, so the work fit within what she could give rather than adding to her plate.
The starting point was a detailed questionnaire to pull everything out of Kathy’s head:
the process
the decisions
the reflections from this year’s event.
The questionnaire let her contribute on her own time, with no calls to schedule and no back and forth emails to keep up with.
Alongside it, she handed over the documents the team had already produced during the launch.
“You understood really well what I needed, based on what was provided,” she said afterwards, which was of course the aim, to make the extraction capture as much as possible without feeling long or difficult.
From there I built the documentation itself, a full record of what was involved, what to consider, and reflections to carry into future events.
I delivered it in two formats: a Notion workspace, because that’s where Held+Free already works, and a Google Doc as a portable backup they could share externally if they ever needed to.
And because the whole point is that someone can pick this up next year, I included a Loom walkthrough so whoever runs the next event can navigate the documentation without needing a handover call. The handover is built into the deliverable itself.
No amends were needed on delivery.
What’s different now?
Held+Free has a complete record of how the launch fundraiser ran in 2026, sitting in the tools they already use, ready to hand to whoever takes it on next. The event can run again without relying on memory and without starting from scratch, which is exactly what turns a successful one-off into something that can genuinely repeat every year.
What stood out most to Kathy, though, wasn’t the document. It was the experience of handing something over and having it simply get done.
In Kathy's Words
"Working with Lauren was a reminder of how rare it is to work with people who simply do what they say they will. On time. On scope. No scrambling at the end, no gap between the promise and the delivery. In an industry where overpromising is almost expected, they are a genuinely reliable exception."
Kathy Rhodes, Held+Free
Tools Used
Google Workspace, Humanitix, Loom, Notion