When a Fundraiser Leaves, What Goes With Them

A fundraiser leaving is treated as a staffing problem and costed as a recruitment expense. For an organization whose income is concentrated in a few relationships, which is a large minority of the sector, it is closer to an unplanned revenue event, because what walks out is not the role. It is the only copy of what the organization knew about its largest donors.

This page covers what the evidence actually says about how often it happens, what is at stake when it does, and the handover that turns it from a loss into an inconvenience.

The statistic everyone quotes, and where it comes from

You will read that the average tenure of a development director is 16 to 18 months. It appears in vendor blogs, conference decks and consultant proposals, almost always without a citation, and we could not find an underlying study that supports it.

The best available evidence says something different. A peer reviewed study of 1,663 US fundraisers, published in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing in 2022 by Shaker, Rooney, Nathan, Bergdoll and Tempel, found a mean tenure in the current job of 3.6 years and a median of 2 years, with a mean of 3.9 years across fundraising jobs. In the year ahead, 20% intended to leave their organization and 7% intended to leave fundraising altogether.

The 2013 CompassPoint and Haas Jr. Fund study UnderDeveloped, which surveyed more than 2,700 executive and development directors and is the source most often gestured at, found that half of development directors expected to leave their job within two years and that 40% were not committed to a career in fundraising.

Put together, the honest version is this: a median fundraiser has been in post about two years, a fifth expect to be gone within a year, and half do not expect to last two. That is a serious retention problem. It is not the near total annual churn the 16 month figure implies, and a plan built on the wrong number solves the wrong problem. The interesting finding in the 2022 study is that salary had the largest and most consistent effect on both tenure and intention to leave, which the salary benchmarks put in context.

What is actually at stake

The cost of a departure is usually written up as recruitment fees and a vacancy period. The larger exposure is the money that was already coming in, and the returns show how concentrated that is.

Of 119,516 charities sitting the public support test that asks about donations, 46,263 (38.7%) report giving above the 2% line, meaning at least one donor whose five year giving exceeded 2% of everything they raised. For the median one, 16.5% of five year public support sat above that line. For 5,786 organizations, more than half did, and 65.9% of those sit within 7 points of failing the test that keeps them a public charity. The full analysis is in donor concentration.

Those are the relationships a departing fundraiser was carrying. In a concentrated organization the departure risks three things at once: the gift that was in progress, the renewal that depended on a person, and in the worst case the public support percentage that depends on both.

What leaves with them is specific, and none of it is usually in the database:

• Why the donor gives. Not the campaign they gave to, the reason. The program their late sister used, the board member who introduced them, the thing they said at the dinner in 2019.
• What was promised. Named recognition, a visit, a report in a particular format, a commitment that the gift would not be publicised.
• Where the relationship is. Whether an ask is weeks away or was refused last spring, and which subjects to avoid.
• Who else matters. The spouse who actually decides, the adviser who must be copied, the assistant who controls the diary.
• The rhythm. That they give in November because of their tax year, that they never answer email but always answer the phone.

The handover, in the order it should happen

Most handovers happen in the last week, when the departing person is distracted and their successor has not been hired. The work should start the day notice is given.

In the first week of the notice period. Agree the list of relationships being transferred and rank it: the top 20 by importance to next year’s income get a full written brief, the rest get a short one. Send the donor handover document and book the time to complete it rather than hoping it happens between other things.

Through the notice period. One brief per relationship, written by the person leaving. Then, for the top tier, a joint contact: an email or a call where the departing fundraiser introduces the interim contact by name. A donor who has been introduced is a donor who has been handed over. A donor who receives a form letter in March has been abandoned politely.

In the last week. Move the substance out of the personal inbox and into the system: correspondence, proposals, pledge documentation, the notes file everyone keeps privately. Check the calendar for commitments that outlive the person, such as a promised visit or a pledge instalment due in four months.

In the first month after. Somebody senior contacts the top tier personally, without an ask. The message is that the organization knows who they are and what they care about, which is the thing a donor is quietly testing. Then re-rank the portfolio against the hours the remaining team actually has, because the commonest failure after a departure is the pretence that a vacant portfolio is still being worked. Our portfolio sizing guide covers the arithmetic, and the moves management tracker is where the ranking lives.

If they have already gone

The common case is not a planned departure with a notice period. It is a resignation, a short handover that never happened, and a successor six months later with a database and no context. Three things recover most of what is recoverable.

Read the outbound email, not the CRM. With the organization’s permission and its own account, the sent folder of the departed fundraiser is usually the best record of what was actually said to donors. It is also the one nobody looks at, because it is tedious and it is not in a fundraising tool.

Ask the donor. “I have just taken this on, and I would rather hear it from you than guess from our records” is a sentence that works, and it opens the relationship rather than exposing the gap. Do it before a renewal, not during one.

Reconstruct from the giving pattern. Dates, amounts and designations tell you the rhythm and the interest even when the notes are empty, which is the same reading described in spotting a donor about to lapse.

Making the knowledge outlive the person

The durable fix is not a better exit checklist. It is that the context stops living in one head in the first place, which is a discipline question before it is a software one. Contact reports written the same day, notes in the system rather than the notebook, correspondence through organizational addresses, and a moves management rhythm that makes recording part of the work instead of an administrative afterthought. An organization that does those four things loses far less when somebody leaves, and it does not need to buy anything.

Where a tool earns its place is when the team is carrying more relationships than that discipline can cover by hand. Gratefully is built directly on this problem: it reads the CRM, documents and email into one model of what the organization collectively knows about each donor, answers questions about it with the source record cited, and generates handover dossiers for every active relationship rather than only the ones somebody remembered to write up. Its own framing is institutional memory, and on this specific job it is the clearest fit we have reviewed. It is free for one person and $4,788 a year for a five seat team.

It is the wrong purchase in three situations, and they are common. If the CRM does not hold two or more years of real history, there is nothing for it to read, and the answer is to fix the records first. If the organization has one fundraiser and 150 donors, a shared drive and the handover template cover it completely. And if contact reports are not being written at all, a tool that preserves what was recorded will faithfully preserve nothing: it reads what exists, it does not invent the history nobody captured. That last one is the honest test, and it is worth applying before any purchase in this category.

What to do this quarter

• Work out your own concentration. Line 5 of Schedule A divided by line 4 on your last return, which takes a minute and tells you how much rides on a few relationships.
• Name the top 20 relationships and who holds each one. If one person holds most of them, that is the risk, whatever the org chart says.
• Write one brief. Not twenty. Pick the largest relationship and have the person who holds it complete the handover document this month, while they are still here.
• Check the sent folder policy. If donor correspondence runs through personal accounts or a departing person’s mailbox is deleted at exit, fix that before the next resignation.
• Look at pay. The strongest measured predictor of tenure in the 2022 study was salary, which is less satisfying than a culture intervention and more actionable than most of them.

Sources and method

The tenure figures are from Shaker, Rooney, Nathan, Bergdoll and Tempel, Turnover intention and job tenure of U.S. fundraisers, Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing, 2022, with a sample of 1,663, and from UnderDeveloped, CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, 2013, with more than 2,700 respondents. The 2013 study is old and its authors say so; it is cited here because it is the source the sector’s turnover claims usually trace back to, and because its headline finding is specific and checkable.

The concentration figures are our own analysis of the IRS SOI annual extract of Form 990 returns for processing year 2024, restricted to 501(c)(3) organizations with at least $25,000 of expenses, using Schedule A Part II lines 4, 5 and 6. The method, the limits and the analysis script are on the donor concentration page. We could not find any study measuring the revenue lost to a fundraiser’s departure, and nothing on this page should be read as claiming one.

This is reference information, not legal or tax advice. Rules vary by state and change over time. For a decision that carries real consequences, check the current text at irs.gov or your state registry, and talk to a nonprofit attorney or CPA.