Your Development Staff Are Burning Out (And Your Donors Can Feel It)
Your development director is sitting at her desk right now, answering emails she doesn't have the energy to answer, designing a piece of collateral that's about to get torn apart in a feedback meeting, and carrying all of the responsibility of a grant rejection that wasn't her fault.
She's not saying any of this out loud.
But she's thinking it. Every single day.
"I Don't Care About the Title Anymore"
There's a post making the rounds in a nonprofit circle right now. It was written by a burnt-out Development and Communications Director with almost two decades in the sector, two degrees, nearly 20 years of communications experience, 10 years in development, and she's making what other industries list as entry-level pay.
This is what we heard her say:
She's not asking for much. She just doesn't want to manage everyone else's expectations on top of her own. She doesn't want every piece of work she puts out to become a group critique. She doesn't want to absorb the responsibility of every rejected grant like it was her personal failure. She doesn't want to reach out to leadership for support and get deprioritized. And she really doesn't want to spend her days trying to build donor relationships that should have been built years before she ever walked through the door.
After reading that, I’ll bet you’ve had similar thoughts.
Because this isn't one disgruntled employee. This is the development director role, as it's been designed, normalized, and accepted across the nonprofit sector for decades.
This Is What Your Staff Are Thinking (But Not Saying)
When someone who genuinely loves mission-driven work, who describes herself as naturally outgoing, inherently friendly, a strong writer, responsible, gets to the point where she says "I am so fried by life and beat down by my current job that I'm destined to fail at anything new"... that's not a personal failure.
That's a structural one.
She didn't burn out because she wasn't tough enough or passionate enough. She burned out because the role asked her to be a director, a designer, a grant writer, a communications strategist, a donor relationship manager, and an emotional punching bag all at once, all the time, for not enough money.
And nobody is talking about this in board meetings: when your development staff feel this way, your donors feel it too.
Not in some vague sense. In real, tangible ways:
Thank-you calls that don't get made.
Donor stewardship that falls through the cracks.
Grant reports that go in at the last minute, or not at all.
Appeals that feel flat because the person writing them has nothing left to give.
Relationships that never get built because your director inherited a portfolio with no history, no notes, and no warm handoff.
The vibe of your organization lives in your staff. And right now, a lot of that vibe is exhausted, resentful, and holding on by a thread.
Every week we send nonprofit leaders our Harmony in Impact newsletter with time-saving tactics that can be implemented in minutes, decision frameworks that reduce overwhelm, and systems that create sustainability without sacrificing quality. Our approach: Less stress. More revenue. Better balance.
We've Normalized a Relationship That Isn't Working
And when she reaches out to her network for advice? She’s told, "Pull back. As if you're semi-retired. Do what's required." Advice to look out for her own wellbeing over risking it at work.
And her response is what we are seeing way too often, and we call it “quiet quitting”:
"I think that's what's messing me up. I feel like my passion and work ethic have dwindled so much, and I don't like carrying around this feeling of guilt and failure."
She pulled back to survive. And now she feels guilty for surviving.
This is what we've done to development professionals. We've built a system where burning out is inevitable, pulling back feels like failure, and staying means slowly losing the thing that made them great at the work in the first place. Their energy, creativity, genuine care for the mission.
And then we wonder why 30% of current fundraising professionals are likely to leave the field within the next 2 years, and 51% are likely to leave their current organization in the same 2 years according to the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Development director roles are often referred to as a “revolving door,” with the nonprofit sector experiencing some of the highest turnover rates in the workforce.
We owe them more than this.
The Development Coordinator Role Is Broken by Design
Let's be honest about what we've built.
The development coordinator role, or development and communications director, or whatever hybrid title we've slapped on it, is often a catch-all for everything fundraising-related that the Executive Director doesn't have time to do. Which is everything.
In many small nonprofits, this person is expected to:
Write and manage all grant applications.
Build and maintain donor relationships from scratch.
Design all communications and marketing materials.
Manage the database.
Run the events.
Report to leadership who don't fully understand what they do.
Do all of this for $80,000 a year.
And when it doesn't work, when grants get rejected, when donors lapse, when the annual fund falls short, that “failure” falls squarely on one person's shoulders.
That's not a job. That's an impossible situation dressed up as a job posting.
The woman who wrote that post? She's not the exception. She's the rule.
If you want the bigger picture on why small nonprofits keep hitting this wall — and what a different model actually looks like — this post is worth a read.
There's Another Way — And It Doesn't Start With Hiring
Here's a conversation I've been having more and more lately: an organization has one solid, committed fundraiser on staff. She's good at her job. But there's simply too much work for one person, and it's starting to show. The instinct is to hire someone junior to take things off her plate. But hiring doesn’t fix a broken system. It just gives the broken system a new person to chew through.
That junior hire comes with its own set of challenges: onboarding time, a learning curve, supervision, and the reality that a less experienced person may not actually reduce the load on your senior person. She ends up managing and doing.
What some organizations are finding works better is bringing in a fractional fundraiser as an experienced implementation partner, someone who can share the load without adding to it. Not a replacement for your fundraiser. Not a consultant who drops off a plan and disappears. Just a seasoned extra set of hands that knows what needs doing and gets it done.
Your fundraiser stays focused on what she does best. The work that's been piling up actually gets cleared. And nobody burns out trying to cover ground that one person was never meant to cover alone.
It's not the right fit for every organization and fractional fundraising works best when there's already some fundraising infrastructure in place. But if you have a capable fundraiser who's stretched too thin, and you're considering whether to hire junior support, it's worth the conversation.
What actually needs to change is how fundraising gets done in your organization, the structure, the systems, the strategy, and yes, the workload distribution.
Curious what that actually looks like day-to-day? Here's a closer look at how our team works.
What We Owe Our Development Staff
If you're an Executive Director reading this, I want to share this with you:
Your development staff member isn't disengaged because she doesn't care anymore. She's disengaged because she's been asked to care too much, for too long, with too little support.
You can't donor-steward your way out of internal dysfunction. You can't write an inspiring appeal when you feel unseen and underpaid. You can't build authentic relationships with major donors when you're running on empty and managing six other priorities before 10 AM.
The vibe of your organization starts from the inside. And right now, for a lot of small nonprofits, the inside is exhausted.
→ So let's stop designing development roles that eat people alive.
→ Let's stop calling burnout dedication.
→ Let's stop expecting one mid-level hire to carry what a fully resourced team should be sharing.
Because the families you serve deserve an organization that's firing on all cylinders, not one that's silently falling apart from the inside out.
If any of this felt true for you, I'd love to talk. Whether you're an ED wondering if there's a better way to structure your fundraising, or a development professional who just saw yourself in these words, reach out. There's a real conversation worth having here.
