A nonprofit director told us recently that fundraising just hadn’t worked for them. They’d tried grants and got almost nothing back. Donor development was on the plan every year and never really moved.
Then she described who’d been doing it. A volunteer wrote the grant applications when he had time, which wasn’t often. Donor development sat with her, and she’d never done it before. She was also running programs, managing the board relationship, and handling everything else in a job with no obvious edges.
Her fundraising wasn’t broken. It was unstaffed.
That’s a pattern we see constantly, and it isn’t a failure of effort. It’s what happens when an organization needs expertise it can’t afford to hire.
The skills don’t come in one person
Here’s the awkward shape of it. A small nonprofit needs several distinct kinds of expert, and needs each of them for a few hours a week.
Donor development is a relationship discipline. Knowing how to move someone from a one-time event attendee to a sustaining giver, when to ask, how to structure a campaign, what a stewardship calendar looks like in practice.
Grant writing is a research and writing discipline. Finding the right funders, reading a call properly, matching your program to their priorities, and producing something that survives a committee.
They are not the same job. They don’t attract the same people, and they don’t cost the same. Donor development expertise carries a meaningfully higher rate than grant writing does.
So the full-time hire runs into a problem before it starts. Write a job description that covers both and you’re looking for someone rare, expensive, and probably not excellent at either. Write one that covers only the higher-value skill and you’ve spent your entire budget on part of the problem.
Most organizations do neither and default to the third option, which is spreading the work across people who are already there. Whoever has capacity gets it, and capacity is not the same as capability.
What the default actually costs
The cost isn’t only the work not getting done. It’s slower and harder to see than that.
An executive director learning donor development on the job will get there eventually, and every hour spent learning is an hour not spent on the thing only she can do. Fifty grant applications written by someone without grant experience will produce roughly the return you’d expect, and then that result becomes the organization’s evidence that grants aren’t worth pursuing.
That’s the expensive part. The conclusion is wrong, and it sticks. Boards make decisions off it for years.
The director we spoke with had a donor pool sitting there. Real people who had given before and were willing to give again. Nobody had developed them, because developing them is a skill and nobody in the building had it.
What fractional changes
The unlock is that you stop buying a person and start buying hours of specific expertise.
For that organization, the sensible shape was two people rather than one. A donor development specialist for a smaller number of hours at a higher rate, because the strategic work is where that expertise earns its cost. A grant writer for more hours at a lower one, because the work is more volume-driven and the rate reflects that.
Two experts, each doing what they’re actually good at, for less than one mid-level salary. Neither on payroll, neither needing benefits, and neither needing to be a permanent commitment before you know whether the approach works.
That’s a different question from “can we afford to hire a development director.” Most small nonprofits can’t. Most of them can afford six hours a week of someone who has run development before.
The budget has to come first, and that’s fine
There’s a real difference in how nonprofits buy, and it’s worth naming because it shapes what’s possible.
A business owner can say she has two thousand a month and ask what that gets her. A nonprofit director usually can’t, because the number needs board approval, and to justify the number she has to already know what it buys. She’s stuck asking for something she can’t fully describe yet.
A budget-based arrangement works better here than a job posting for exactly that reason. A director can go to her board with a figure and a scope attached to it. If the board approves less than she asked for, the arrangement flexes. Fewer hours, or a different split between the two roles. A salary line doesn’t flex. It’s approved or it isn’t.
If you’re in that position, ask any agency you’re talking to for a written scope you can take to a board rather than a proposal aimed at you. Those are different documents. One of them survives a room you’re not in.
Two situations where this bites hardest
You’ve just become your own organization. Groups that spin out of a parent nonprofit carry a strange combination. Years of history, an established program, a real donor list, and none of the infrastructure, because the parent handled it. One director described her organization as being in its second decade and its first year at the same time. The expectations are set by the age. The systems are set by the age of the independence.
You lost someone and the budget line survived. When a staff member leaves, the salary stays in the budget for a while, but refilling the role is hard to justify to a board that’s watching costs. That money can buy considerably more expertise as fractional hours than it can as a replacement hire, and it doesn’t commit the organization to a permanent position it may not want.
Don’t let that open budget line sit idle or waste months trying to draft a impossible job description. We can help you map out a fractional scope to show your board exactly what those hours buy. Book a call →
Where to start
If your fundraising has underperformed and you’re about to conclude that fundraising is hard, check something first. Look at who has actually been doing it, and whether they had ever done it before.
If the answer is a volunteer with limited time, or you, then you don’t have evidence about fundraising. You have evidence about what happens when skilled work goes to whoever was free.
That’s a much easier problem to fix, and it’s cheaper than it looks.
The place to start isn’t a job description. It’s a list. What actually needs doing, which parts of it call for real expertise, and roughly how many hours each one takes in a month. Write that down and the budget conversation becomes possible, because you’re no longer asking your board to approve a number you can’t explain. You’re asking them to approve a plan that happens to have a number attached.
Need help with that list? Grab our delegation planning guide here →
