(Photo by iStock/artursfoto)
There is a quiet crisis unfolding inside the development offices of nonprofits across this country. It doesn’t make the front page and won’t generate the kind of urgency that a budget shortfall or a federal funding cut triggers. But it might be the most consequential threat to the long-term health of the philanthropic sector that I’ve witnessed in four decades of this work.
Senior fundraisers—the relationship architects, legacy builders, and mission storytellers who have spent careers learning the art of transformational giving—are retiring. Not only are we not replacing them, but we are failing to attract young professionals into the field. And as the pipeline narrows from both ends, the transactional, quota-driven, relentlessly metrics-obsessed culture we have built is accelerating the exodus of those still in the middle.
Without a fundamental cultural transformation in how we practice, recruit, and sustain fundraising as a vocation, the trend will only continue.
The Numbers Are Not Ambiguous
The average tenure of a development professional today is less than eighteen months. In a profession built on relationship-building, in which a major donor relationship can take three to five years to mature into a transformative gift, our people leave before they hit their stride.
Why? For one thing, 84 percent of fundraisers feel “tremendous pressure to succeed” in their roles, and 55 percent feel “often unappreciated” in their work. Half of chief development officers surveyed by CompassPoint planned to leave their positions within two years; 40 percent were not even sure they would remain in the fundraising profession at all.
The financial cost of this churn is staggering. Because it takes an average of four years for a fundraiser to reach full potential in a role, the departure of a development professional with four or more years of tenure can cost the organization as much as five times that person’s annual salary in lost revenue. And this internal crisis connects directly to the crisis facing donors: the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s 2024 report shows a 4.5 percent decline in total donors, the fourth consecutive year of decline, while first-time donor retention hit its lowest recorded rate, only 19 percent. As I have written, just 3 percent of donors now account for 78 percent of total charitable dollars given: We are narrowing at the top while hemorrhaging at the base. We have too few experienced relationship builders left to reverse that trend.
Our Workforce Problem Is a Culture Problem.
The reasons why gifted, mission-driven professionals leave, but talented young people do not enter, go much deeper than compensation and career pathways. Those things matter, of course. But the core issue is the pervasive, stubborn, and ultimately self-defeating transactional culture that has taken root in too many development offices across this country.
When organizations treat their fundraisers as quota machines rather than relationship architects, they tell the fundraiser and donor simultaneously that the gift matters more than the giver. When we judge development professionals solely by dollars raised and calls made and asks completed, we strip the work of its humanity. Then we wonder why the best people leave. The real drivers of fundraiser departure are unrealistic expectations set without adequate resources, unengaged leadership, lack of investment in tools and systems, and, most telling, a poor culture of philanthropy within the organization itself. No amount of salary adjustment will fix a culture that treats fundraising as extraction rather than transformation.
The connection to donor outcomes is equally direct: when donors feel they are only contacted for monetary transactions, they do not stay. Transactional cultures produce transactional donor relationships. Transactional donor relationships produce declining retention and declining revenue. The result is burned-out fundraisers operating in rote, transactional mode pass that fatigue directly to their donors. You cannot fake genuine connection, and you cannot manufacture the kind of authentic relationship that transforms a one-time gift into a decades-long partnership (when you are simultaneously grinding through unrealistic prospect lists with the clock ticking on a job you already know you are about to leave).
Learning From Other Professions
Ours is not the first profession to face this double squeeze of aging senior practitioners and a failing recruitment pipeline. Nursing offers a particularly instructive case study, with experienced nurses retiring in large numbers, insufficient new nurses entering the pipeline, unsustainable workloads driving mid-career burnout. Sound familiar?
Rather than waiting for the problem to resolve itself, leading healthcare systems invested aggressively in new pipeline architecture. The American Hospital Association documented approaches including earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship models, high school pipeline programs (Grady Health in Atlanta launched a Teen Experience and Leadership Program so oversubscribed it had to turn hundreds of applicants away), simulation-based training centers shared across multiple institutions, and upskilling investments like UC Health’s $50 million Ascend leadership program. They also invested in reconnecting clinicians to purpose, explicitly calling for ways to reconnect clinicians to purpose and provide the support, training and technology they need to thrive.
Purpose, not just pipeline. The core insight is that talent development is not a passive HR function, but a strategic mission imperative: build intentional pipelines, invest in the culture people will be entering, and connect the work to purpose, not just performance.
What would it look like if the fundraising profession took these lessons seriously?
1. Anchor fundraising apprenticeships in relationship work. We need formal, paid apprenticeship models that pair emerging fundraisers with senior practitioners in real cultivation and stewardship, not data entry and event logistics. The apprentice should be in the room, at the lunch, witnessing what transformational giving actually looks and feels like.
2. Build high school and community college pipeline programs. The nursing field learned that you need to introduce the profession early and make it tangible. Nonprofit organizations partnered with community colleges could develop “Philanthropy Explorer” programs that introduce mission-driven fundraising careers before students choose their path, the same way healthcare systems now send professionals into high schools to recruit the next generation of nurses.
3. Create purposeful retention models for senior practitioners. Rather than simply watching experienced fundraisers retire, organizations should build intentional phased-retirement structures that keep senior wisdom in the building. Part-time mentoring roles, Emeritus Fundraiser designations, project-based consulting arrangements: these create structured ways to harvest and transfer the relational capital that walks out the door when a 25-year major gifts officer retires.
4. Conduct culture audits before hiring. If transactional culture drives talented people out, every organization preparing to hire a development professional should first conduct an honest culture audit. Are expectations realistic? Does leadership understand the relationship cultivation cycle? Does the organization invest in its team’s professional growth? (If the answers are no, hiring is not the solution. Culture repair is).
5. Tell the profession’s story compellingly. Fundraising is routinely portrayed as asking people for money, which is to say, as awkward, transactional, mercenary. We must tell a different story: the planned gift that funded a cancer research center, the scholarship that changed a first-generation family’s trajectory, the donor whose giving became the fullest expression of a life well-lived. This is what we actually do. We need to say so loudly, and often, and in the places where the next generation is listening.
6. Build university-nonprofit practicum partnerships for lived learning. Schools with nonprofit management and public administration programs should be creating structured partnerships with local fundraising organizations, not internships where students stuff envelopes, but genuine co-creations where emerging professionals lead donor stewardship projects, develop case statements, and sit across the table from real philanthropists. This is where vocation is formed.
7. Create a Transformational Culture Certification for nonprofits. A recognized standard, think of the “Best Places to Work” model applied specifically to philanthropic culture, that recognizes organizations committed to transformational fundraising practices would signal to job seekers that this organization values relationships over transactions, invests in its people, and practices the kind of philanthropy that both donors and fundraisers want to be part of. The talent market would respond.
The Transformational Imperative
The greatest threat to the future of fundraising is not the economy, not demographic change, not even declining donor participation, as alarming as those trends are. The greatest threat is the failure of imagination about what this profession is and who it is for.
When we build cultures that grind fundraisers down with unrealistic goals and by treating them as revenue-generating units rather than relationship stewards, we send a message to young people that this is not a profession worthy of their gifts. We also send a message to donors: you are a means to our ends, not a partner in a shared vision.
The professions that have navigated this crisis most successfully did not simply recruit more aggressively. They asked deeper questions: Why are people leaving? What would make young people want to enter? What kind of culture would make talented professionals choose to build their careers and legacies here?
The answer, in every case, was the same. Purpose. Belonging. The sense that the work matters and that the organization sees the whole person, not just the performance metric.
That is the transformational argument. Not just for how we treat donors. For how we treat each other.
The chair left empty by the retiring major gifts officer, who spent 30 years building relationships with your community’s most generous families, will not be filled by better job postings. It will be filled by organizations that have built the kind of culture that makes a gifted young professional say: I want to spend my career here. I want to learn from these people. I want to be part of something that takes both the donor and the fundraiser seriously as full human beings.
Read more stories by Mark Dobosz.