The Role of the Development Committee Chair
Executive Summary
Board fundraising is the number one area requiring improvement across the nonprofit sector, and the most common failure mode is not a lack of willing donors — it is unclear accountability at the committee level and the absence of a structured process for board members to participate. At the center of that accountability structure sits one person: the Development Committee Chair.
This post covers the full picture — what the role requires, what the tasks are, how to structure the committee for success, how to recruit the right person, and how to run development committee meetings that members actually want to attend. The last point is where most guides stop short: the Chair can be perfectly suited for the role and still lead a committee that drifts, produces status reports instead of decisions, and slowly loses its best members to disengagement. Meeting structure is not an administrative detail. It is a leadership instrument — and this post treats it as one.
Table of Contents
Why the Development Committee Chair Is Your Most Underestimated Asset
What Makes an Effective Development Committee Chair: The Leader-Manager Balance
How to Structure a High-Performing Development Committee
The Five Core Responsibilities of a Development Committee Chair
How to Run Development Committee Meetings That Produce Results
How to Recruit a Development Committee Chair Who Will Actually Raise Money
Your Action Steps
1. Why the Development Committee Chair Is Your Most Underestimated Asset
Your fundraising team has many important players — the CEO, in-house development staff, paid consultants, board members, and campaign volunteers — but none is more consequential, or more frequently underestimated, than the Development Committee Chair.
Board fundraising is consistently identified as the number one area requiring improvement across the nonprofit sector, according to governance research cited by BoardSource and the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and the most common failure mode is not a shortage of willing donors but unclear accountability at the committee level and the absence of a structured process for board members to participate. The Development Committee Chair is the person who creates that accountability and builds that structure. When the role is filled well, the committee multiplies the organization's fundraising capacity — activating personal networks, setting strategic direction, and holding the board accountable to its giving and getting responsibilities. When it is filled poorly, or left effectively vacant by a chair who does not lead, the committee drifts into reporting mode, attendance drops, and the board's fundraising potential goes largely unrealized.
Up to 36 percent of board members are considered ineffective in their fundraising roles, with low engagement among the primary causes. Low engagement is not a character flaw — it is a structural problem, and the Development Committee Chair is the person positioned to solve it. Understanding what that requires begins with the nature of the role itself.
2. What Makes an Effective Development Committee Chair: The Leader-Manager Balance
The Development Committee Chair must be two things simultaneously, and the combination is genuinely uncommon: an inspirational leader and a disciplined manager. Organizations that recruit for one quality and ignore the other consistently find that the role underperforms.
As a leader, the Chair must be knowledgeable about fundraising — or curious enough to learn quickly — conversant with the organization's mission at a level that allows them to speak about it compellingly to prospective donors, and genuinely enthusiastic about the work. They set the tone for the committee's culture, and a chair who attends meetings but does not give, does not ask, and does not make introductions communicates through behavior that those things are optional — and the committee follows that signal.
As a manager, the Chair must keep track of development program details, ensure that the strategies being implemented are the correct ones, and hold other committee members accountable for the work they have committed to complete between meetings. The managerial function is where many otherwise strong volunteer leaders fall short — they are comfortable leading a room but less comfortable following up with a peer who has not delivered on a commitment. Both functions are required, and neither compensates for the absence of the other.
The boundary between the committee's strategic oversight role and the development staff's operational role must also be maintained, and the Chair is responsible for holding it. A development committee that begins doing staff work — writing appeals, managing donor databases, coordinating events — is a committee that has lost its purpose and is exhausting its volunteers. The committee's job is to open doors, set strategy, and hold the program accountable, while the staff's job is to execute. With both the leader and manager dimensions of the role clear, the structure within which the Chair operates deserves equal attention.
3. How to Structure a High-Performing Development Committee
Before turning to what the Chair does, the committee they lead deserves clear description — because a Chair can only be as effective as the structure they are working within.
Optimal size is 6 to 12 members. Fewer than six and the committee lacks the network breadth and working capacity to function effectively, while more than twelve means meetings become unwieldy, accountability diffuses, and the most capable members disengage because the group is too large for genuine conversation.
Composition should include non-board members, and this is more important than most organizations recognize. Community leaders, major donors, professional advisors, and sector specialists who are not yet board members bring fresh networks, external perspective, and freedom from the governance dynamics that can make board-only committees politically cautious. Non-board committee members also serve as a natural pipeline for board recruitment — they learn the organization, demonstrate their commitment, and can be invited to join the board when a seat opens.
Time commitment is 4 to 10 hours per month per member, including meeting preparation, the meeting itself, and the cultivation and outreach work that happens between meetings. This should be stated explicitly when recruiting — both for the Chair and for every member — because volunteers who join without understanding the real time commitment become the absent members the Chair must manage.
The Chair as succession candidate. One dimension of the role that is rarely discussed is its place in the board's leadership pipeline. The Chair should be capable of eventually succeeding the board chair or president, and the role should be understood as a steppingstone within the board's succession plan. This framing elevates the position's strategic importance and attracts more ambitious candidates.
Where to find a job description. BoardSource publishes development committee resources at boardsource.org/fundamental-topics-of-nonprofit-board-service/fundraising/, including guidance on the committee's responsibilities and structure. A free, publicly available Development Committee Job Description is also available at cfmco.org — a practical starting template that organizations can adapt to their own context. With the structure established, the specific work of the Chair comes into focus.
4. The Five Core Responsibilities of a Development Committee Chair
The Chair's work falls into five areas, each essential and none optional.
1. Serve as the interface between the Development Committee and the full Board. The Chair makes presentations to the board on the committee's progress, brings policy and strategy recommendations from the committee to the full board for authorization, and reports between meetings to the board chair on the committee's work. This liaison function ensures that the committee's work is visible to governance and that the board understands what is being asked of its members in cultivation and solicitation.
2. Communicate actively with Development Committee members. The Chair provides updates to members who miss meetings, works with members to ensure that between-meeting assignments are completed, and has direct private conversations — as needed — with members whose attendance or engagement is falling short of what the committee requires. This last responsibility is the one most chairs avoid, and its avoidance is the most common cause of gradual committee deterioration. A chair who will not address underperformance models the message that accountability is negotiable.
3. Participate directly in fundraising. The Chair takes a leadership role in the cultivation, stewardship, and solicitation of gifts — not as a supervisor of this work but as an active participant. They make personal introductions, attend donor meetings, and make their own significant gift. Their personal giving is not a formality. It is the credential that makes their leadership of others credible.
4. Facilitate Development Committee meetings. The Chair reviews the agenda — prepared by the development director or fundraising counsel — at least 48 hours before each meeting, suggests additional items as needed, and ensures that the most recent information is in members' hands before they arrive. The meeting facilitation role is addressed in detail in the next section because it is where most chairs face their greatest operational challenge.
5. Track and evaluate progress — and demand the reports that make it possible. Through informal evaluation, the Chair monitors whether each strategy is advancing and what it needs to move forward. On a formal biannual basis, the Chair leads the committee's evaluation of the ROI achieved by each strategy and the development program as a whole.
This evaluation function depends on data, and the data is available — but only if it is demanded. Every major CRM — Salesforce Nonprofit, Bloomerang, Raiser's Edge, DonorPerfect, and others — has donor pipeline, retention, giving trend, and cultivation activity reports built in as standard features. The Chair should require that these reports be generated and distributed before every committee meeting, and the pipeline review should be a standing agenda item at every meeting, not an occasional update. A committee that reviews the same pipeline data at every meeting develops the pattern-recognition to catch stalls early and act on them before they become campaign-threatening gaps. The Chair's insistence on this discipline is what makes the difference between a committee that monitors progress and one that discovers problems too late to correct them. With the responsibilities clear, the most consequential skill the Chair brings to the role is how they run the meetings through which all of this work happens.
5. How to Run Development Committee Meetings That Produce Results
This is where most development committees fail — not in the quality of their members or the commitment of their chair, but in the structure and conduct of their meetings. A development committee that spends most of its meeting time receiving status reports is not a working committee. It is an audience, and audiences stop showing up.
The failure modes are consistent and correctable. The meeting is packed with information updates that could have been read in a pre-read document. There is no single strategic question to work through together. Assignments from the previous meeting are not reviewed at the opening of the next one. Virtual meetings drift because cameras are off and there is no structured way to engage. And the chair, trying to be collegial, allows the meeting to run long rather than enforcing the agenda — which signals that members' time is not actually valued.
Here is the structure that works.
Before every meeting — in person or virtual
Distribute materials — the CRM pipeline report, gift chart progress, and agenda — at least 48 hours before the meeting. Label each agenda item as Inform, Discuss, or Decide, so members know what kind of attention each item requires before they arrive. Routine items that require no discussion should be grouped as a consent agenda — approved by a single vote in the first five minutes — so that the meeting's working time is protected for the things that actually require collective judgment. For a full explanation of how consent agendas work and why they are among the most effective tools for preserving meeting time, see the companion post on this blog: Consent Agendas Can Improve Board Meetings.
The in-person meeting (90 minutes)
Minutes 0–5: Approve the consent agenda — previous meeting minutes, routine reports, any items that generated no questions in the pre-read. One motion, one vote, five minutes.
Minutes 5–25: Dashboard review — pipeline report with named prospects and their current cultivation stage, gift chart progress against goal, retention metrics for the current period. This is a review, not a report: members have read the CRM data in the pre-read and the Chair is orienting the group to what the numbers mean, not presenting them for the first time.
Minutes 25–65: Working session on one strategic question. One, not four. A single, well-framed question — "Which of our top five unassigned prospects should we prioritize this quarter, and who in this room has the relationship to make the introduction?" — produces more value than forty minutes of miscellaneous updates. The Chair's role is to frame the question, facilitate the discussion, and bring it to a decision or a clear next step.
Minutes 65–80: Cultivation assignments distributed with named owners and specific deadlines. Every member who leaves the meeting should have at least one named action they are personally responsible for completing before the next meeting.
Minutes 80–90: Close, confirm next meeting date, and briefly acknowledge what the committee accomplished in the session. The acknowledgment matters — it signals that the work is noticed and valued.
The virtual meeting (60 minutes)
Virtual meetings require more discipline, not less. Cameras on is a stated expectation, not a preference — a camera-off virtual meeting is a webinar, and webinars do not generate the peer accountability that makes committee work function. The pre-read is even more important virtually, because the meeting has less time and fewer of the informal cues that in-person gatherings provide.
Minutes 0–5: Consent agenda approval and brief check-in.
Minutes 5–20: Dashboard review — same as in-person but tighter, because the pre-read has done more preparation work. The CRM pipeline report is on everyone's screen, shared by the development director or the Chair.
Minutes 20–50: One strategic working question, with a note-taker capturing decisions and assignments in real time on a shared screen so members can see the record being built as the conversation happens.
Minutes 50–60: Assignments with named owners and deadlines, close, confirm next meeting.
The National Council of Nonprofits recommends rotating which member leads each section of the meeting — a practice that re-engages members, builds leadership capacity across the committee, and distributes the facilitation burden from the Chair. It is worth building into the meeting rhythm from the outset.
Between meetings
The Chair follows up personally with each member who received an assignment at the previous meeting — a brief message or call, not punitive but consistent. Members who know the Chair will follow up complete their assignments. Members who learn the Chair will not begin to treat assignments as optional, and the committee's effectiveness declines from there. With the meeting structure established, the only remaining question is how to find the right person to lead it.
6. How to Recruit a Development Committee Chair Who Will Actually Raise Money
Recruiting a Development Committee Chair is one of the most important talent decisions a board makes, and it deserves more strategic attention than most organizations give it.
The right candidate is a mid-tenure board member — someone who knows the organization well enough to speak about it credibly but is not yet in the final years of their board service. They should have demonstrated personal comfort making asks — not necessarily experience as a professional fundraiser, but the willingness to ask peers for their support and to hear no without retreating. They should have a strong personal network relevant to the organization's donor cultivation needs, and they should understand before they accept the role the full time commitment: 4 to 10 hours per month, including meeting preparation, the meeting itself, and between-meeting cultivation work.
The recruiting conversation should be direct about all of this, and it should also name the succession dimension: the Development Committee Chair is one of the most natural paths to the board chair role, and framing the position that way attracts candidates who are thinking about their board leadership trajectory.
Do not recruit a chair who is reluctant to give personally. A chair who has not made their own significant gift cannot credibly ask others to do so — and the committee will know it. The chair's gift is the first gift of every campaign, and it belongs on the gift chart.
After the chair is recruited, invest in their development. Share current fundraising literature with them. Arrange an orientation conversation with the development director or fundraising counsel at the outset of their tenure. Review the committee's CRM reports together so they understand the data they will be tracking. And build in a formal check-in at six months to assess how the role is fitting and what support they need.
7. Your Action Steps
Assess your current chair against the criteria in this post. Does your current Development Committee Chair give personally and ask others? Do they follow up on between-meeting assignments? Do they facilitate meetings that produce decisions, or meetings that produce reports? The answers will tell you whether the role is being filled at the level the organization needs.
Demand the CRM reports. If your development committee is not reviewing a pipeline report and gift chart progress at every meeting as a standing agenda item, schedule a conversation with your development director this week about what reports your CRM can generate and how to build them into the pre-read distribution. The data exists. The discipline of using it regularly is what most committees are missing.
Review your meeting structure. Pull the agenda from your last three development committee meetings and categorize each item as Inform, Discuss, or Decide. If most items are Inform — and most are, in most organizations — restructure the agenda so that Inform items move to the pre-read and meeting time is protected for Discuss and Decide.
Implement the consent agenda. If your development committee is not already using a consent agenda to handle routine items, that is the single most time-efficient governance improvement available. See the companion post on this blog — Consent Agendas Can Improve Board Meetings — for a full explanation of how to implement one.
Name a succession candidate. If your current chair is in the final year or two of their term, identify the board member who is the strongest candidate to succeed them and begin cultivating that person for the role now — not the month before the transition.
How have you gone about recruiting the right Development Committee Chair for your organization — and what has made the difference between a committee that performs and one that drifts? Share your experience in the comments section of the website.
A Note on Use
This post is offered freely for educational purposes. Please share it with board chairs, executive directors, development directors, and committee members who may find it useful — provided the author's byline remains intact: By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA. Reproduction in publications, training programs, or institutional materials requires attribution.
