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Executive · typically years 15+Boards, Teams & LeadershipFree preview

Succession, Consulting & Your Next Chapter

Seasoned professionals owe the field a good handoff, and owe themselves a real plan. Succession, board service, consulting, and teaching.

Through the Faith-Based lens

Your own succession is only half the transition risk: clergy rotate on a schedule the development office rarely controls, and a departing pastor's relationships with major donors are often deeper than yours, so the introduction plan has to account for two departures, not one. Consulting work in this sector tends to cluster around capital campaigns for a specific parish or diocese, where trust built over a career of denominational relationships is the entire product you are selling.

Continuing education

1.25 points · non-fundraising

Leadership and Management

Learning objectives

  • State why succession is a fundraising problem, name the three things a good handoff protects, relationships, knowledge, and systems, and audit a program each year against the four markers of succession readiness.
  • Build a master transition document with the state of the program, relationship briefs for the top 20 to 40 donors, the knowledge that lives nowhere else, and systems documentation, and run the introduction plan on the six-month, three-month, and final-month timeline.
  • Decide whether independent consulting fits, using the honest self-assessment, a rate that covers the invisible costs, and the profession's line against percentage-based and contingency fees.
  • Choose the paths by which a seasoned fundraiser gives the craft back, mentoring, teaching, board service, and stewarding the profession, and explain why person-to-person transmission matters more in fundraising than in most fields.

Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.

Lessons

Each lesson opens on its own page. Complete written lessons are available now. Downloadable editions open as each one clears review, and video editions follow.

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