Dennis Fois

Bloomerang's Indianapolis headquarters sits roughly 2,000 miles from Dennis Fois's home in San Francisco, and even further from the fishing village in Sardinia where he was born. That trajectory - island to Netherlands to seven countries and counting - is not incidental. It is the whole story of why a man with no nonprofit background walked into a room in January 2023 and said: I want to lead the company that changes how nonprofits raise money.

Fois had spent the previous four years as CEO of Copper CRM, a Google Workspace-native platform backed by over $100 million in venture funding. Before that, he ran NewVoiceMedia - a cloud contact center company he shepherded into a $350 million acquisition by Vonage. Before that, Rant & Rave in the UK, where he doubled revenues. Before that: eGain, Barclays, ADP, Solera. The pattern is not CRM exactly - it is complexity reduction. Every role has been some version of "make the technology less painful for the people who need it."

When he arrived at Bloomerang, the company already served thousands of nonprofits and had a genuine reputation for warmth and customer care. What it lacked, in Fois's reading, was edge. He was candid about it from the start: "My feelings were that Bloomerang fell too much on the empathy side, without any bite or desire or drive or ambition." That observation - made publicly, in a company Q&A, weeks into the job - is a useful signal about how he operates. He says the quiet part out loud, then builds toward the answer.

The nonprofit technology sector has long run on institutional patience. Donors give. Nonprofits track donors. Software companies build the tracking tools. The cycle repeats with incremental improvements. Fois is allergic to this framing. He talks about the sector the way a product manager talks about a broken workflow: systematically, with frustration, and with a clear idea of what should happen instead. "There's literally no reason why giving shouldn't be going up every year," he told one interviewer, noting the concentration of wealth in the United States as a structural tailwind that nonprofits are chronically failing to capture.

That conviction - that the sector is underperforming a massive opportunity rather than simply doing its modest best - is the intellectual engine behind what Bloomerang is now calling the First Giving Platform. The thesis is simple: nonprofits have been handed piecemeal tools when they need a unified system. Fundraising software here. Volunteer management there. Event planning somewhere else. Donor data fractured across platforms. Fois is assembling the pieces. Bloomerang's acquisition of Qgiv, a fundraising technology platform, and InitLive, a volunteer management tool, are the early moves in that integration strategy.

In February 2024, Warburg Pincus - one of the oldest private equity firms in the world, with over $80 billion in assets under management - made a strategic investment in Bloomerang alongside existing investor JMI Equity. This kind of capital event does not happen because a company is doing fine. It happens because someone with significant capital believes a company is about to do something substantially larger.

Fois describes the moment as validating a framing that had been, until then, largely theoretical: that the nonprofit technology sector is not a niche but a category. Bloomerang had already tripled its revenue, headcount, and customer base since JMI Equity's initial 2020 investment. The Warburg involvement was the institutional confirmation that the space has room to become something much bigger - and that Bloomerang, under Fois, is the right vehicle.

"It's a once in a lifetime opportunity," Fois has said of leading Bloomerang, "where unbelievable financial success and outcomes comes together with genuine world impact." He says this without irony, and without the performative hedging that typically accompanies tech-adjacent mission language. The nonprofit sector, by his reckoning, processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Technology that helps raise another 10% of that is not a feel-good story. It is a category-defining business.

There is a specific kind of leader who talks about accountability in the abstract - the performance review kind, where someone gives feedback in private and everyone moves on. Fois is not that kind. He has spoken publicly about building cultures where leaders name their failures out loud. "People start to become accountable to each other publicly," he told the Gene Hammett podcast. "I really messed that one up. Here's what went wrong." He considers the willingness to say that sentence - without defensiveness, on the record - a prerequisite for building teams that can scale.

The logic is mechanical rather than idealistic. Fast-growing companies generate mistakes faster than anyone can track them. If the culture penalizes admission, problems compound in the dark. If it normalizes it, problems surface early and get solved. Fois has applied this framework across multiple companies and multiple continents. The specific industry changes. The principle does not.

He mentors students through the Global Mentorship Initiative - a detail that sits alongside his competitive tennis habit and his chihuahua named Coco. These fragments matter because they sketch a person who is genuinely competitive, genuinely invested in other people's development, and apparently comfortable with very small dogs. The combination is, at minimum, unusual in enterprise software.

Fois is not sentimental about nonprofits in the way that makes good press copy. He is analytical about them in the way that makes good business strategy. The United States has an unusual concentration of wealth. That wealth is going somewhere. The question is whether the organizations doing the most to address inequality, disease, education, and community have the tools to capture an appropriate share of it.

His answer is that they do not - yet. The donor retention numbers in the nonprofit sector have historically been poor. Average donors give once and rarely return. The software sitting underneath that relationship has not kept pace with what's available to commercial sales and marketing teams. Bloomerang's original insight - donor retention over donor acquisition - was the right one. Fois is scaling that insight into a full platform, applying decades of CRM best practices to an industry that has been, by his measure, significantly under-served by technology companies.

"They actually shook things up," he said of early nonprofit tech disruptors. "They were the catalysts for more investment, more technology, better resources." He positions Bloomerang as the next stage of that disruption - not incremental improvement, but category redefinition. The First Giving Platform is the bet. Time will measure the result.

His Twitter bio reads "Leading with a cool head and a warm heart." It is the kind of thing that sounds like a platitude until you see it operate. The cool head part shows up in how he talks about business mechanics: retention rates, shared accountability, platform consolidation, capital deployment. The warm heart part shows up in his reasoning for taking the Bloomerang role in the first place - and in the fact that he mentors students internationally when he could simply not.

Born in Sardinia. Grew up in the Netherlands. Educated at The Hague University and De Baak. Has since worked in the UK, the US, and across Europe. Currently based in San Francisco. Married, with three daughters and a chihuahua named Coco. Plays competitive tennis. These are the coordinates of a life built on motion - across cultures, industries, and company stages.

What ties it together is not geography but disposition. Fois is constitutionally oriented toward problems that are too big and too complex for most organizations to solve cleanly. Each company in his timeline was either scaling past its infrastructure or needed a new identity to reach the next level. He walks in, identifies what's actually stopping the organization from performing, and builds toward it - methodically, publicly, with a clear sense of what accountability looks like at the top.