Roger appears to be in an agitated — and agitating — mood.

Recently he’s written When Founders Leave, which talks about the progressive loss of ‘fire in the belly’ when nonprofits, especially advocacy groups, are taken over by ‘hired gun’ executives and development directors.

And a couple of weeks earlier, he wrote In Praise Of The Fundraising 6000, a title that belied Roger’s core message: “…our trade must rank right down there with DMV clerks, baggage handlers, and many nonprofit CEOs — those in trades who get by with under-performing, asking or answering few questions, and suffering little accountability and few consequences for poor performance.”

Clearly he thinks fundraisers could do better.

Two responses to these posts, both outside the ‘Comment’ channel on our blog, are especially noteworthy.

The first came from our friend Phil Wise, vice president of operations and development at The Carter Center.

Phil wrote: “As one of our Founders turns 90 next week it is so important to develop our culture so that risk taking remains a key element.  It must be in the DNA.  We have tried to build it into our operating principles with this statement: ‘The Center addresses difficult problems and recognizes the possibility of failure as an acceptable risk.’  We don’t start a project expecting to fail and try not to organize a firing squad if we do. And there are days it is difficult not to do so.”

Amen, Phil. How many organizations represented by Agitator readers would embrace this statement: “[My organization] recognizes the possibility of failure as an acceptable risk”?

Another friend of The Agitator, Jay Love at Bloomerang, wrote an article of his own, 10 Challenges Every Fundraiser Must Make To Themselves, inspired partly by Roger’s 6000 missive.

This is an important read. Jay draws upon the Underdeveloped report done by CompassPoint and the Haas Fund. Among the stats he cites from that under-scrutinized 2013 study:

That kind of turnover is crippling. And further, many of these respondents expect to leave the development field entirely. I suspect (hope) those don’t include many of our Agitator readers.

I urge you to read Jay’s article, but if you must cheat, here are the 10 challenges he believes each fundraiser must undertake: