What Makes a Great Fundraiser — and Why the Sector Keeps Losing Them
Executive Summary
I wrote the original version of this post in 2015. The problem I described then — that too many fundraisers leave their organizations without making the impact they were capable of, going out with a whimper rather than a bang — has not improved. It has gotten significantly worse.
The average fundraiser's tenure is now 16 to 18 months. More than half of fundraisers plan to leave their current organization within two years. A third plan to leave fundraising altogether. The nonprofit sector's annual turnover rate of 19 percent is more than 50 percent higher than the all-industry average. The Stanford Social Innovation Review has described fundraising, without hedging, as an abused profession.
This post does two things the original did not do fully enough. It names the three qualities that distinguish great fundraisers from merely competent ones — updated with eleven more years of observation and the current data that makes the stakes unmistakable. And it names the systemic failures that make those qualities so difficult to sustain — the structural problems that are not the fundraiser's fault and that the sector has been unwilling to confront honestly.
Table of Contents
Eleven Years Later: The Problem Is Worse
Why Fundraisers Leave: The Data Is Damning
Why We Are Stuck: The Systemic Causes
What Needs to Change: Six Structural Reforms
What Great Fundraisers Do Differently: Three Qualities
Your Call to Action: For CEOs, Boards, and Fundraisers
1. Eleven Years Later: The Problem Is Worse
In 2015, I wrote that many fundraisers are neither memorable nor impactful, and that when they leave an organization they go out with a whimper, not a bang. I named three qualities I believed separated great fundraisers from good ones. I hoped the piece would start a conversation.
It did. It was widely shared and generated more responses than almost anything I had published that year. And then the field moved on — and the problem deepened.
In 2026, the average fundraiser's tenure in a single position is 16 to 18 months, according to the Orr Group and multiple sector surveys — barely enough time to understand an organization's donor base, let alone cultivate the relationships that produce transformational gifts. More than half of fundraisers plan to leave their current organization within two years, according to a Chronicle of Philanthropy survey of 1,035 fundraisers, and 30 percent plan to leave fundraising altogether.
The sector's annual turnover rate for all nonprofit staff stands at 19 percent — compared to 12 percent across all industries — and the nonprofit sector has outpaced the all-industry rate every year since that gap was first measured. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing by Shaker, Rooney, Nathan, Bergdoll, and Tempel — Eugene Tempel, whose scholarly voice runs throughout this blog series — found that even under the most optimistic measurement, fundraiser job tenure averages 3.6 to 5.4 years, with wide variation by sector and role.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review named it plainly in 2023: fundraising is an abused profession. The study Underdeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising documented the unrealistic goals set by people who know little about the work, the limited resources devoted to a demanding job, and the chronic lack of appreciation that fundraisers experience across the sector. That characterization — abused profession — is not hyperbole. It is the finding of peer-reviewed research.
I am as troubled by this in 2026 as I was in 2015. More so, because we have had eleven years to address it and have not. The data that explains why — and that names the specific conditions driving people out — is now extensive enough to replace opinion with evidence.
2. Why Fundraisers Leave: The Data Is Damning
The reasons fundraisers leave their positions are well-documented and have been consistent across surveys conducted between 2023 and 2025: too much work and too little support, cited by 59 percent of departing staff; limited growth opportunities, cited by 54 percent; unsupportive management, cited by 52 percent; and inadequate pay and benefits, cited by 50 percent.
Notice what is not at the top of that list: passion for the mission, connection to the cause, or the quality of the fundraising program itself. Fundraisers do not leave because they stop caring about the work — they leave because the conditions under which they are asked to do the work are unsustainable.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2024 report found that 95 percent of nonprofit leaders surveyed expressed concern about staff burnout, and that 75 percent reported burnout was at least somewhat affecting their organization's ability to achieve its mission. These are not marginal organizations struggling with unusual circumstances. These are the mainstream of the sector.
The most damaging statistic is the one that connects turnover directly to organizational performance: when a fundraiser leaves after 16 months, the donor relationships they were building, the major gift prospects they were cultivating, and the institutional knowledge they were accumulating leave with them. The next fundraiser starts over. The major donor who was 18 months away from a transformational gift never gets asked — or gets asked by someone who does not know them. The organization's revenue flatlines, and the board blames the fundraising program rather than the conditions it created.
This cycle — unrealistic expectations, burnout, departure, lost relationships, flat revenue, more pressure, more burnout — is not a management problem at individual organizations. It is a structural failure of the sector. Structural failures are not solved by individual acts of resilience. They are solved by changes in the incentive systems, professional standards, and leadership cultures that produce them — which is the subject of the next section.
3. Why We Are Stuck: The Systemic Causes
If the problem has been documented for more than a decade, why has it not been solved? The answer is uncomfortable: because solving it requires boards, funders, and executive leadership to change their own behavior, and the incentive structures of the sector make that change difficult.
The starvation cycle continues. The Bridgespan Group's research on the nonprofit starvation cycle — the systematic underfunding of organizational infrastructure, including development offices, in response to funders' overhead aversion — identified the structural mechanism twenty years ago. It has not been corrected. Funders still cap overhead at 10 to 15 percent. Boards still eliminate development budget lines in the name of fiscal responsibility. Development directors are still expected to raise significantly more than their offices are resourced to raise. The gap between what is expected and what is resourced is precisely where burnout begins.
Goals are set by people who do not understand fundraising. The top reason fundraisers leave is unrealistic expectations. Not their own — the ones imposed on them. The Stanford Social Innovation Review cited a development director whose board member set a goal three times what the organization could raise because he "just thought" they should "reach high," having never reviewed the budget and saying so openly. That single act of uninformed authority decimated morale and produced results no one met. Multiply that experience across thousands of organizations and you have the sector's retention crisis.
The time-lag problem is not understood. Fundraising is a developmental process — the word "development" is not metaphorical. A major gift cultivated by one fundraiser will often be closed by their successor, or by no one, if the successor does not know the relationship exists. The research is consistent: the lag between cultivation and revenue realization is typically 16 to 36 months. A fundraiser evaluated on a 12-month revenue cycle — which describes most development positions — is being judged on a timeframe that does not correspond to how philanthropic relationships actually develop. The board that fires a fundraiser for "not producing" often discovers, two or three years later, that the pipeline that fundraiser built is now generating the results they demanded.
Mentoring is inconsistent and underfunded. A lack of authentic mentoring has plagued this profession since I began writing about it. We now have more certificate programs and graduate degrees in fundraising than ever before — the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, AFP's professional development programs, and degree programs at NYU, Columbia, and elsewhere have all expanded — but organizational investment in mentoring remains sporadic and voluntary. Most new development professionals learn by trial and error, in organizations that give them neither the time nor the guidance to do it well.
The profession remains misunderstood. What fundraisers actually do is still generally misunderstood or oversimplified by the boards, executives, and funders who set their working conditions. When I wrote What Do Fundraisers Do? in 2015, it was the most widely circulated piece I had published that year. The appetite for a basic explanation of the profession's work reflects how poorly understood it remains. That misunderstanding produces the unrealistic expectations that drive departures.
So how do structures actually change? Slowly, nonlinearly, and only when multiple pressure points operate simultaneously. The evidence from comparable professional fields — medicine's residency hours reform, law's billable hours reckoning — shows that structural change requires three things working together: a documented body of harm that is undeniable and public, professional standards bodies willing to set and enforce new norms, and funders or market actors willing to change what they reward. All three are now in motion in the nonprofit sector, even if too slow. The Underdeveloped study and the SSIR's characterization of fundraising as an abused profession constitute the documented body of harm. AFP's emerging position on fundraiser well-being and BoardSource's governance standards represent the professional standards lever. And the Ford Foundation's full-cost initiative, MacKenzie Scott's unrestricted giving model, and the growing body of evidence that well-resourced development offices produce dramatically better returns are beginning to shift funder behavior. Structural change also accumulates through individual organizational decisions: every organization that pays its development director fairly, funds professional development, sets evidence-based goals, and mentors junior staff creates a proof of concept that others eventually imitate. The lever any individual organization can pull today is the latter — and that is precisely what the six reforms in the next section address.
4. What Needs to Change: Six Structural Reforms
The turnover crisis is not solved by telling fundraisers to be more resilient. It is solved by changing the structural conditions that make resilience necessary. Here are six specific reforms, each within reach of any organization willing to act on them.
1. Boards must set revenue goals with fundraisers, not for them. No revenue goal should be approved by a board without the development director's written input, the results of a feasibility assessment, and the concurrence of the CEO. A board member who sets a fundraising goal without reviewing the prospect database, the gift chart, and the development program's capacity is setting a number that reflects ambition, not reality — and ambitious numbers without evidence produce departure, not performance.
2. Development offices must be adequately funded. The fundraising program's budget — staff, technology, communications, travel, prospect research, and professional development — should be treated as a revenue investment, not an overhead expense. An organization that budgets $80,000 for a development director's salary and $5,000 for everything else the development office needs is not running a fundraising program. It is running an experiment in how quickly a talented professional can be exhausted and driven out.
3. The time lag must be formally acknowledged in performance evaluation. Development directors should be evaluated on pipeline development, donor relationship depth, cultivation activity, and moves management metrics — not only on dollars raised in a 12-month period. A fundraiser who has moved fifteen major gift prospects meaningfully forward in their cultivation journey has done exceptional work, even if none of those gifts have closed yet. Boards that cannot read a pipeline report cannot fairly evaluate a development program.
4. Mentoring must be institutionalized, not hoped for. Every organization that hires a development professional should assign a mentor — ideally a senior fundraiser from outside the organization — and budget for at least one professional conference per year, AFP chapter membership, and access to current fundraising literature. The AFP Mentoring Program (afpglobal.org/mentoring) is a structured, accessible resource most organizations have never used. The investment is modest. The retention impact is documented.
5. Career pathways must be made visible. The second most cited reason for leaving is limited growth opportunities. Organizations that create a visible development career ladder — from associate to officer to senior officer to director — and that communicate clearly what advancement requires retain staff longer and attract stronger candidates. A fundraiser who can see a future in your organization will stay to build it.
6. The CFRE Deserves Organizational Support, Not Skepticism. The Certified Fund Raising Executive credential — available at cfre.org — is the profession's most rigorous and most widely recognized standard of excellence. Organizations that pay CFRE examination and renewal fees, allow study time, and recognize the credential in compensation send a clear message: we take this profession seriously, and we invest in the people who practice it. Organizations that treat the credential as a personal preference to be pursued on personal time send the opposite message — and wonder why their best people leave.
These six reforms are not aspirational. They are within the reach of any organization willing to prioritize the conditions that keep great fundraisers in place. What those great fundraisers actually do — the qualities that distinguish them regardless of the structural environment they work within — is the subject of the next section.
5. What Great Fundraisers Do Differently: Three Qualities
Structural reform is the sector's responsibility. But within whatever conditions exist, there are fundraisers who distinguish themselves — who build careers of genuine impact, who stay long enough for their work to compound, and who leave organizations fundamentally stronger than they found them. They share three qualities.
Quality 1: They Understand the Full Revenue Picture
Great fundraisers do not operate in the silo of their own portfolio. They understand the organization's complete revenue landscape — every funding stream, every vulnerability, every dependency — and they use that understanding to connect their individual giving and major gifts work to the organization's actual financial survival.
When I first wrote this post in 2015, I described a fundraiser I had spoken with who did not know that his agency had lost 90 percent of its overall revenue. He believed everything was sound because his own work was producing results. He was raising the 10 percent of revenue that came from private grants and individual giving while the organization's government licenses — which funded the other 90 percent — were being revoked for malfeasance. When he was laid off, he discovered he had had a successful ride on the Titanic.
This is not an isolated failure of individual awareness. It is a predictable consequence of development offices that are structurally separated from financial management — the same integration gap addressed in the development audit and cash reserves white papers in this series. The fundraiser who understands the full revenue picture is the fundraiser who can make the case internally for what the development program needs, who can counsel the board when financial conditions change, and who can connect their cultivation work to the organization's genuine survival rather than its programmatic preferences.
The Finance Director can be the development director's most important internal ally. Great fundraisers cultivate that relationship with the same intentionality they bring to donor relationships.
Quality 2: They Embrace Conflict and Have Intentional Conversations
Fundraising requires asking for things — from donors, certainly, but also from boards, executives, and colleagues who may not understand what the development program needs to succeed. The fundraiser who cannot engage in difficult conversations — who avoids conflict rather than manages it — will be less effective in every dimension of the role.
The conversations worth having are not arguments. They are deliberate, well-prepared exchanges conducted at calm moments, before a crisis has made the stakes feel personal. A physician who delivers a difficult diagnosis does not wait for the patient to be in distress — they choose the setting, prepare the information, and deliver it with both honesty and care. Fundraisers need that same discipline: the ability to tell a board chair that the revenue goal is not grounded in prospect data, to tell an executive director that the development office is understaffed for what it is being asked to produce, to tell a major donor that their restricted gift, while valued, cannot solve the organization's operating deficit.
These conversations are not single events. They are repeated, refined, and built upon — and the fundraiser who has them consistently, calmly, and with evidence earns the credibility to influence the decisions that shape their working conditions.
Quality 3: Stay Put, If You Possibly Can
Of the three qualities in this list, this is the most countercultural and the most important.
The data is unambiguous: fundraisers leave too early, their impact is diminished as a result, and the organizations they leave pay a steep price in lost relationships, lost pipeline, and lost institutional knowledge. A fundraiser who leaves after 18 months has barely completed the discovery phase of their tenure. A fundraiser who stays for eight years builds something that compounds — and whose impact, as I described in the original post, can outlast their tenure by decades.
I once conducted a forensic audit of a faith-based retreat center's current revenue to answer a board's complaint that their former development officer had been ineffective. The audit revealed that 85 percent of the organization's current income traced directly to planned gifts that officer had closed during his eight-year tenure — gifts the board had completely forgotten about, because the relationship between cultivation and revenue realization is so poorly understood. The board did not believe me until I showed them the documents. That fundraiser had been gone for years. His work was still sustaining the institution.
What I did not say in the original post is this: that fundraiser stayed in the profession. He retired after a forty-year career and looked back with genuine pride on what he had built across multiple organizations. He was not a hero in his own telling — he was simply a person who was alive with the missions of the nonprofits he served, who looked past the daily frustrations and the slow pace of the work to keep his eye on the actual goal. I considered him a hero. The organizations he served, though they often did not know it, were sustained by his refusal to leave before the work was done.
Staying put is not always possible. There are organizations whose cultures are genuinely toxic, whose boards are genuinely unreasonable, and whose conditions are genuinely untenable. When those conditions exist, leaving is the right decision and this post is not directed at convincing anyone to stay in a damaging situation. But when the conditions are manageable — when the mission is compelling, when the leadership is functional, when the donor base has real potential — the fundraiser who stays and builds will outperform the one who moves every 18 months, in every metric that matters.
The sector desperately needs fundraisers who will stay. And it needs the leaders, boards, and funders who employ them to create the conditions that make staying possible — which is where the call to action that follows is directed.
6. Your Call to Action: For CEOs, Boards, and Fundraisers
If you are a CEO: Schedule a meeting with your development director this month to ask two questions: Are your revenue goals grounded in your prospect data? And what does your development office need that it does not currently have? Listen to the answers without defending the status quo. What you hear will tell you whether you are creating the conditions for a great fundraiser to stay — or setting the stage for another departure.
If you are a board member: The next time your organization sets a fundraising goal, ask to see the gift chart, the prospect database capacity, and the development director's written assessment of what is achievable. If those documents do not exist, that is the answer to your retention question. And if you are evaluating your development director, make sure pipeline development and cultivation activity are part of the assessment — not only revenue closed in the past twelve months.
If you are a fundraiser: Know the full revenue picture of your organization, not just your portfolio. Prepare for the difficult conversations rather than avoiding them. And where you genuinely can — stay. The work compounds. The impact is real. The fundraisers who changed this sector did it by staying long enough to finish what they started.
We have been talking about this problem since 2015. The data has gotten worse every year. The conversation needs to move from observation to structural action — and that action begins in the boardroom, in the budget process, and in the hiring conversation where an organization decides whether to treat its development director as a strategic partner or as a revenue machine with a 16-month warranty.
What has your experience been — as a fundraiser, a CEO, or a board member? What has made the difference between staying and leaving, between impact and a whimper? Share your thoughts in the comments section of the website.
A Note on Use
This post is offered freely for educational purposes. Please share it with executive directors, board members, and development professionals 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.
