Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping Fundraisers
The average fundraiser tenure is 16 months. Build a team that stays: hiring for the real job, coaching the craft, and career paths that retain.
Through the International NGOs lens
Comparable-role benchmarking is genuinely harder here, since a role's closest market comparison may sit at a different organization entirely, domestic versus international, secular versus faith-based, which weakens the usual benchmarking practice. Scorecards should name cross-cultural and compliance fluency as explicit competencies, since a gift officer who is excellent with domestic donors can still struggle with institutional funder relationships that cross borders and regulatory regimes.
Continuing education
1.00 points
Leadership and Management
Learning objectives
- State what a fundraiser's departure costs across the search, the vacancy, the ramp, and the relationship damage, and name the retention levers a director fully controls: goals with arithmetic, coaching, recognition, and portfolio sanity.
- Write a job scorecard for a development seat with a one-sentence mission, three to five dated outcomes, craft and wiring competencies, and a realities paragraph, then interview against it with the discovery simulation, the ask test, and the live writing sample.
- Run a monthly 45-minute one-to-one that takes the fundraiser's agenda first, works one scorecard competency, and leaves the numbers for last, with joint visits and a quarterly written check around it.
- Build published pay bands, a three-track career lattice of mastery, scope, and craft leadership, and an annual stay conversation, while keeping compensation clear of percentage-based pay.
Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.
Lessons
- 18 min
Video lesson
Why fundraisers leave (the honest version)
VII Multiply · Leadership and Management
- 20 min
Template· DOCX
Job scorecards for development roles
III Discern · Leadership and Management
- 16 min
Field guide· PDF
The coaching cadence
VII Multiply · Leadership and Management
- 19 min
Field guide· PDF
Compensation and career path frameworks
VII Multiply · Leadership and Management
This is members-only material.
Members get every lesson, template, and worksheet in all eight tracks, plus the support to put them to work in your shop.
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