Donor Handover Document Template
A per donor form the departing fundraiser completes: giving history, relationship stage, live conversations, soft commitments, risk flags and the next three actions. Free Word download. Median tenure in a fundraising job is two years, and most organizations have no handover process at all.
When a fundraiser leaves, the gifts stay in the database and the reasons leave with the person. The database records that a donor gave $25,000 in March. It rarely records that they gave it because their late husband was treated in your clinic, that they do not want to be thanked publicly, and that they said in a car park in October that they were thinking about their will.
That is the knowledge this form captures. It is deliberately uncomfortable to fill in, because the honest lesson of completing it for forty donors is that almost all of it should have been in the record already.
Why this matters more than it appears to
The figure repeated across the sector is that fundraisers leave every 16 months. It is not supported by the research and quoting it does the argument no favours.
The peer reviewed position comes from a study of 1,663 US fundraisers by Shaker, Rooney, Nathan, Bergdoll and Tempel at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. They found mean tenure in the current job of 3.6 years and a median of 2 years, with 20 percent intending to leave their organization within the year and 7 percent intending to leave fundraising altogether.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Mean tenure, current job | 3.6 years |
| Median tenure, current job | 2 years |
| Mean tenure across all fundraising jobs | 3.9 years |
| Intending to leave their organization within a year | 20% |
| Intending to leave fundraising within a year | 7% |
| National median tenure, all US workers | 4.3 years |
Two years is the median, and a major gift relationship routinely takes longer than that to mature. That is the whole problem in one sentence. The people holding the relationships turn over faster than the relationships develop, and in most organizations nothing at all is done to bridge the gap.
What the form covers
Ten sections, one form per donor. The download is a Word file you can edit.
| Section | What goes in it | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Donor and portfolio | Names, CRM ID, outgoing and incoming owner | So the record can be found and reassigned |
| 2. Giving history | First, largest and most recent gift, pattern, gaps | The shape of the giving, and what caused the changes |
| 3. Relationship stage | Where it actually is, who introduced them, who knows them | Pipeline reports are optimistic. This is not the pipeline report. |
| 4. In progress now | Live and paused conversations, anything they await from us | The section most likely to lose money if left blank |
| 5. Soft commitments | Verbal intent, planned giving hints, conditions | Never in the CRM, and frequently worth six figures |
| 6. How to deal with them | Preferences, style, interests, what causes offence | Two years of trial and error, written down |
| 7. Risk flags | Complaints, unexplained decline, single point of failure | A handover saying everything is fine is not a handover |
| 8. Next three actions | Specific, dated, owned | Continue stewardship is not an action |
| 9. Anything else | Free text | The thing that does not fit the form is often the thing that matters |
| 10. Sign off | Completed, reviewed, introduced, entered, reassigned | Makes it a process rather than a document |
The section people skip, and should not
Section 7 asks whether the relationship depends entirely on the departing person. It is the single most useful question on the form and the one most likely to be answered dishonestly, because answering yes feels like an admission.
It is not. For a good fundraiser doing relationship work properly, the answer is yes for a meaningful share of the portfolio, and that is the nature of the job. What matters is what you do about it, which is a personal introduction before the person leaves rather than an email afterwards. A donor who hears about the change from the person they trust behaves very differently from one who receives a note from a stranger.
The handover is one half of a pair. The other is a live pipeline showing where each prospect stands and what was meant to happen next, which is what makes a handover a summary rather than an archaeology exercise. See moves management and the free tracker.
When to do this
The wrong answer is during the notice period, which is what almost everyone does. Someone with two weeks left, a new job to prepare for and no remaining stake in the outcome is not going to write forty careful documents.
| Timing | What it produces |
|---|---|
| During the notice period only | Rushed forms for the top few donors, nothing for the rest |
| Annually for the whole portfolio | A real record, and a natural review of every relationship |
| Rolling, a few each month | The most sustainable version, and it never becomes a project |
| At every stage change | Best of all, and only realistic if it is genuinely brief |
Treat the annual pass as the baseline and the notice period as a top up. An organization that does the annual pass has already solved this, and the departure becomes an administrative event rather than a loss.
What this really tells you
If completing section 4 and section 5 requires the departing person to remember things nobody else could have known, your record keeping has been failing quietly for years and the handover form is the first time anyone has noticed.
That is worth knowing and it is worth fixing at the source. The fix is unglamorous: a contact report after every substantive conversation, entered within a day, in the CRM rather than in someone’s inbox. Organizations that do this find the handover form takes ten minutes per donor, because it is mostly a summary of what is already recorded.
Where software helps, and where it does not
A newer group of tools reads your CRM, your documents and your email and generates a handover document of this shape automatically, with each claim cited back to the record it came from. Gratefully calls these handover dossiers and produces them on demand, and the same underlying knowledge layer answers questions about a donor without anyone searching for the file. We cover that category, what it costs and who it suits in AI tools for nonprofit fundraising.
Be clear about what that does and does not solve. It removes the effort of assembling the document, which is real and is the reason most handovers never get written. It cannot recover a conversation nobody recorded. Software reads what is there. If the contact reports were never written, an automated dossier will be as thin as a manual one, and considerably more confident about it.
The sequence that works is the record keeping first, then the form, then tooling if the volume justifies it. Reversing that order is how organizations end up paying for fast access to gaps.
Using the template
Download it, delete the sections that do not apply to how you work, and add anything specific to your organization. It is a Word file with no restrictions on it.
Two practical notes. Store completed forms where the incoming officer can actually find them, which usually means attached to the CRM record rather than in a shared drive folder nobody opens. And treat the content as confidential personnel and donor information, because it contains candid assessments and sensitive detail about real people.
Download this template
Free, no email address, no signup. The full text is on this page as well, so you can read it before you download it.
Questions people ask
What is a donor handover document?
A written record of everything the departing relationship owner knows about a donor that is not already captured in the database. Giving history in summary, where the relationship actually stands, conversations in progress, informal commitments, personal preferences, risk flags, and the next few actions with dates.
It exists because a CRM records transactions well and context badly. The gift amount is in the system. The reason for the gift, the thing the donor asked you never to do, and the remark about their will usually are not.
One form per donor, completed by the person leaving and reviewed with the person taking over.
How often do fundraisers actually leave?
Less often than the sector claims. The widely repeated figure of 16 months is not supported by the peer reviewed research.
A study of 1,663 US fundraisers by Shaker and colleagues at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found mean tenure in the current job of 3.6 years with a median of 2 years, and mean tenure across all fundraising jobs of 3.9 years. Twenty percent intended to leave their organization within the year and 7 percent intended to leave fundraising entirely.
The problem is real without exaggeration. A median of two years against relationships that take longer than that to mature means the people turn over faster than the work completes.
When should we complete handover documents?
Not during the notice period, which is when almost everyone does it and why it rarely works. Someone with two weeks left and a new job to prepare for will produce a rushed form for the top three donors and nothing for the rest.
Do a full portfolio pass annually, then a rolling few each month, and treat the notice period as a top up rather than the whole exercise. The annual pass doubles as a genuine review of every relationship, which is worth doing regardless of whether anyone is leaving.
Who should complete the handover form?
The departing relationship owner writes it, and their manager or the incoming officer reviews it with them in person before the departure date. The review matters as much as the form, because the questions the incoming person asks are usually the ones the form did not think to ask.
Write it for a stranger. The person reading it has never met the donor and will not be able to ring you afterwards, so assumed knowledge and internal shorthand make it useless.
What should we do about donors who only know the person leaving?
Arrange a personal introduction before that person goes, not an email afterwards. This is the single highest value action in the whole handover and it is the one most often skipped because it feels awkward.
A donor who hears about the change from the person they trust, ideally in a meeting or a call, behaves very differently from one who receives a note from someone they have never met. Where the relationship is significant, involve a board member or the executive director in the introduction so the donor is connected to the organization rather than to another individual.
Flag these donors in section 7 of the form and schedule the introductions first, while there is still time.
Can software generate a donor handover document?
Yes, and it is a genuine use for the technology. Tools that read your CRM, documents and email can assemble a dossier of this shape on demand, with claims cited back to the record they came from. Gratefully produces these as a named feature.
The limit is absolute and worth stating clearly: software reads what is there. It cannot recover a conversation nobody recorded. If your contact reports were never written, an automated dossier will be exactly as thin as a manual one and rather more confident about it.
Fix the record keeping first, use the form, and add tooling if the volume justifies it.
Where should completed handover forms be stored?
Attached to the donor record in your CRM wherever possible, because that is the one place the incoming officer will certainly look. A shared drive folder called Handovers is where these documents go to be forgotten.
Treat them as confidential. They contain candid assessments of real people, health and bereavement detail, and financial information, and they should be covered by the same access controls as the rest of your donor data.
Anything in the form that belongs in the permanent record should also be entered into the record itself. The form is a handover, not a filing system.
What if the departing person is leaving on bad terms?
Assume you will get less, and plan accordingly. Prioritise ruthlessly: the top donors, anything with a live conversation, and anyone flagged as a single point of failure. A thin form for the twenty relationships that matter is worth more than a demand for forty complete ones that never arrives.
Where you can, separate the handover from the exit process and have a colleague rather than the manager sit down and go through the portfolio verbally, taking notes themselves. People will often talk through what they will not write.
Then treat it as evidence for why the annual pass exists. Organizations that maintain records continuously are not exposed to this at all.
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.