She has a laptop, a revenue goal nobody asked her opinion on, half a database, and a board development committee that is extremely supportive — provided nobody asks them to pick up a phone and call a donor.

Her organization cut two positions last year. The work didn’t get cut. It landed on her, on the apparent theory that responsibility, unlike salary, reproduces freely in captivity. She is finding new donors, retaining old ones, upgrading current ones, reactivating lapsed ones, writing the appeals, running the events, patching the CRM, and explaining — again — why the major donor who’s heard from three different CEOs in eighteen months has stopped answering the phone.

Come December or January, someone will ask why she didn’t raise more money.

Happy Labor Day and welcome to fundraising in 2026. Seventy-two percent of nonprofit fundraisers, per the latest Social Impact Staff Retention study, are looking for another job, or keeping one eye on the door. This isn’t turnover, it’s a profession standing by the emergency exit, checking whether the alarm still works.  They haven’t stopped believing in the work; they believe in feeding people, teaching children, protecting rivers, defending rights, curing disease, keeping the small lamps of civilization lit. What they’ve stopped believing is that their employer knows the difference between devotion and an unlimited supply of cheap, over-worked labor.

They Love the Work

Picture  our composite fundraiser at 6:30 p.m.. A photo of her kids by the monitor. Coffee gone cold two hours ago. Three donor calls left to return, an appeal due at the printer by morning.   She knows the donors. Knows Mrs. Kaplan gives every December when her husband died in hospice care. She knows Mr. Rodriguez raised his gift the year his granddaughter got the scholarship. She knows which donor wants to hear from the executive director and which one would rather not. None of that is in the strategic plan. Some of it’s in the database. Most of it is in her head.   Then she leaves. More money, maybe. Maybe she wants to see her kids before bedtime for once. Maybe she’s tired of carrying the revenue without the staff, the budget, or the authority to raise it.

The organization posts the job. The donors get a cheerful email about an “exciting transition.” Three months later, someone new is on the phone asking Mrs. Kaplan questions the organization should already know the answers to. We call this turnover. The donor experiences it as a form of rude amnesia.

Donor Retention Begins With Fundraiser Retention

Many organizations spend lots worrying about donor retention — dashboards, benchmarks, consultants, charts in three colors tracking exactly how fast donors are leaving. Boards study these charts gravely and ask why donors aren’t more loyal, sometimes within a month of losing their third development director in five years. Apparently donors are supposed to form lifelong bonds with a rotating cast of strangers.   A donor tells her story to one fundraiser. That one leaves. She tells it to the next, who leaves too. By the third telling she suspects the organization isn’t listening — or doesn’t care enough to remember. Trust drops, giving grows cautious, and sometimes it stops. The organization concludes that donors are fickle.

That’s a convenient reason, but it’s also nonsense. Loyalty isn’t manufactured by software alone. It’s built by people who remember, who listen, who use that information when communicating again and again with donors (and hopefully put what they know in the CRM). Churn the people knowing how to build and hold those relationships and you churn the donor relationships.

The Veterans Haven’t Disappeared. They’ve Gotten Smarter.

There are roughly 140,900 professional fundraisers in the U.S., says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with 10,000 openings a year expected over the next 6 years. So, the people exist and plenty of them are experienced. They are also growing increasingly good at recognizing a burning building before entering it for a new job.  They know “entrepreneurial self-starter” can mean no staff. “Wears many hats” can mean every hat in the building. “Results-oriented culture” can mean an unrealistic fundraising goal invented by a board member with a calculator and a dream. “Some evenings and weekends” can mean the organization considers the fundraiser’s family a scheduling inconvenience.

Seventy-six percent of fundraisers with under 10 years in the field are eyeing the exits. So are 67% of those with more than 10. Some are drifting into consulting and coaching — not because they’ve stopped believing in fundraising, but because they’d like to practice it without an institution slowly grinding them down. They’re not leaving the work, they’re leaving the workplace.

The reasons aren’t a mystery: 60% cite too much responsibility with too little support, 53% percent cite pay and benefits, another 53% cite management that won’t back them up. Because the mission matters, she stays late. Because the need is urgent, she takes one more assignment. Because the budget is tight, she doesn’t ask for a raise. Management calls this a system that’s working — until the day she resigns, the institutional memory walks out with her, revenue drops, the search firm gets a call, and someone new inherits the same impossible job.

Try Something Radical

If nonprofits want loyal donors, they might start by becoming organizations capable of keeping loyal staff. Give her goals grounded in reality. Give her authority equal to her accountability. Give her enough people, enough time, enough tools. Let her work flexibly — this is a job built on breakfasts, dinners, weekend galas, and donors who don’t schedule their deaths or stock transfers between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. office hours. Ask the board to fundraise, not just monitor a dashboard of other people’s fundraising. Treat professional development as an institutional cost, not a hobby she funds herself.

Fundraisers are not interchangeable parts in a revenue machine. They are the keepers of the stories, the holders of the trust, the connective tissue between what a donor hopes for and what an organization can actually do about it. Lose them every eighteen months and something disappears that’s worth more than a name on an org chart.

No CRM on earth can tell you what it was.

Roger

P.S. — In honor of Labor Day, The Agitator is proud to unveil our bold, new retention initiative: any staff member who has survived 10 with us earns an extra half-hour for lunch. This full 60 minute lunchtime allotment must be taken on Labor Day itself, pending Kevin’s approval and completion of all scheduled research projects.. Please clock out first.