Hey, Buddy.
I'm Joey Schmidt, founder and principal of Buddy Co. I come at this work from three directions most fundraising consultants don't: fundraising, education, and art. Ten years across them shapes how I work.
I build the frameworks, stewardship systems, and pipelines that make unique partnerships possible and keep them sustainable, so the money they raise goes on uplifting the people and communities the organization holds dear.
Fundraising is the core. I build corporate and institutional partnership programs and the systems underneath them. My education background is why I teach the work instead of doing it for you. I spent two years as a Teach for America corps member teaching fifth-grade English in Kansas City, and the instinct to work myself out of a job never left. Your team should be able to run the program after I'm gone.
I started this practice because I kept ending up in rooms where the fundraising was technically working and nobody felt that good about it. I kept seeing development professionals burning out inside programs built for stale transactions. Corporate sponsors writing checks they weren't proud of, to organizations that didn't feel aligned with them either. Everyone going through the motions and calling it fundraising.
What I believe is that the strongest corporate partnerships are the ones built on genuine values alignment, where a company looks at an organization and sees a real reflection of what it stands for and what’s to be a part of it. Those partnerships hold, and they grow into the kind of multi-year stability that lets an organization have power and sends real, transformative dollars and activations into the communities the nonprofit exists to serve.
That's what I build: the frameworks, stewardship systems, and pipelines that make partnerships possible and keep them sustainable, so the money they raise goes on uplifting the people and communities the organization holds dear.
Every engagement starts with you.
Before I touch anything, I get into your world, your data, your existing partners, your team's real capacity, and what's been quietly failing. I synthesize what I hear and build a plan with you, not for you.
Then I stay in it. I'm not the consultant who asks good questions and leaves. I show up on a schedule, hold you to the goals we set together, and teach you to hold yourself accountable after I'm gone. The engagement ends when you can run the program without me. That's not a tagline. It's how the work is designed.
Community first, always.
Not every partnership looks the same.
Some organizations I work with don't want a national brand sponsor. They want the small business two blocks away, the family foundation that grew up in the same neighborhood, the company whose employees are already showing up as volunteers on weekends. Those partnerships, the ones where a company looks at a nonprofit and genuinely sees itself reflected back, are the ones that last and actually mean something to both sides.
I don't come in with a list of companies to call. I come in to understand what your organization stands for, who actually belongs in your community, and how to build a program that brings the right people in at whatever level they can show up, and grows them from there. An in-kind donor becomes a sponsor. A volunteer becomes a board member. A one-time gift becomes a multi-year commitment. That's not luck. That's a system. That's you.
Companies give for four reasons: client entertainment, employee engagement, marketing exposure, and mission give-back. All of them are real and worth building toward. My job is to make sure your organization is ready to meet them there, and that the relationship has somewhere to go once it starts. The goal is never just the check. It's the company that sends its people, brings its networks, and fights alongside you for the mission and the community year after year.
I'm also a working artist.
Painting, printmaking, photography. It shapes how I work across everything else. It's how I hear what's underneath a problem and help an organization find the story that makes the right partners want in. Because I make things, I can sometimes help build the materials a partnership needs, depending on the project. The art isn't a side hobby. It's part of how I see the work.
