Revolutionise Annual Lecture 2022

The fundraising sector has long recognised the challenges associated with donor retention and loyalty, yet significantly less effort appears to have been applied to securing the loyalty of those who will steward the relationships with those donors – the fundraisers.

A recent Chronicle of Philanthropy survey found that 51% of the fundraisers surveyed expected to leave their jobs within the next two years, and around 30% said that they had recently left, or would be leaving the fundraising field altogether in the next two years.

This haemorrhaging of talent is not sustainable, not least because we are awash with fundraising vacancies. In the marketplace for fundraiser talent, demand currently outstrips supply with vacancies at smaller nonprofits proving particularly problematic to fill.

The difficulty of finding suitable replacements aside, the churn hurts nonprofits in other ways. Most notably is in the quality of relationships they are able to sustain with their donors. Short-handed teams also have less capacity to get work done and stress can be created by having to pick up a missing staff member’s workload. Similarly, senior management’s attention is distracted away from fundraising or fundraising management to the process of search/hiring and ultimately induction, onboarding, and training.

So, why do we have such a major fundraising staff retention issue, and what can we do to fix it?

In May 2022, Revolutionise partnered with the Institute of Sustainable Philanthropy to research what motivates fundraisers at work and thus how nonprofits can foster their retention. The research was led by Professor Adrian Sargeant and Dr Kathryn Edworthy and the response to the initial survey was huge – 2700 fundraisers from around the world shared their thoughts, giving us the biggest ever data sample looking into the identity, motivation and wellbeing of fundraisers at work.

We can’t wait to share what we’ve found with you!

And, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing at the Revolutionise Annual Lecture on Wednesday 30 November 2022. Tickets are priced at only £34.99 in order to cover the costs of the event – we want to ensure as many fundraisers and charities as possible are able to benefit from understanding the results of this research.

We hope to see you there!