Fall in Love with Fundraising Again

I love the first day of fall when you can feel the weather change.

Unfortunately, as a fundraiser, you know that extra crisp feeling also means a few other things: Year-end goals are climbing, your inbox keeps getting stuffed, and somewhere on a spreadsheet there is a number you have to reach. My guess is that there’s probably some distance between that number and where things actually stand right now.

All of this on top of a year that has already asked plenty of you.

If you’ve been driving home lately wondering whether you still have the heart for this work, don’t panic. You are not the only one sitting with that question this fall. 

Think back to why you started

There was a reason you chose this profession.

Maybe it was a person that your organization helped, and you got to watch it happen up close. Or a cause you couldn’t stop thinking about. Or a single conversation with a donor early on, when they told you why they gave, and their voice changed a little, and you realized you were standing in the middle of something that mattered to them as much as it mattered to you.

I’d bet you were excited to make the calls back then and proud to say what you did for a living. When a gift came in, you felt it.

Underneath all of it was a belief that connecting people to the things they love is good and meaningful work. It was true then, and it’s still true now.

Then the job got in the way

This is what has probably developed over your career.

You’ve got a caseload packed with names nobody ever qualified, so the donors who genuinely want a relationship with you get whatever hours are left at the end of the week.

You’re reaching out to people who never respond, with no reliable way to tell which ones were ever going to. You don’t know where to aim your focus anymore, which attaches a low hum of guilt to every hour you spend on anything.

The list goes on and on: You’ve got goals built on arbitrary math rather than on what the donors in front of you are actually ready to do. You’ve got pressure to solicit before a relationship is anywhere close to ready.

And don’t forget the gala, the appeal, the database cleanup, the thing nobody else had capacity for, which somehow became your job.

If you are leading a team, your version looks different and weighs just as much.

You’re handed a revenue target that has little connection to what your pipeline can actually support, only to have budget or grant cuts force you to rethink the plan halfway through the year.

Then someone on your team leaves, and suddenly a donor relationship walks out the door with them. You’re managing the people around you while still carrying your own donors, even though nobody ever really taught you how to manage in the first place.

Meanwhile, the organization is measuring activity because activity is easy to measure, and you’ve somehow become the person everyone brings their problems to, even when you’re not sure where to bring your own.

You’re not imagining how hard this year has been. In a 2026 survey from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, 69 percent of non-profits reported funding cuts from at least one source, and 46 percent of leaders said they were worried about possible closure.

Donor retention has slipped to an average of 42.9 percent, after years of slow decline. The average tenure of a development professional sits at roughly 18 months. And in study after study, fundraisers describe the same two things: enormous pressure to succeed and very little sense of being appreciated.

I share these numbers and figures because, regardless of how your year turned out, I know you have been trying to do relationship work inside systems that were not built to support relationships.

Your heart for this did not leave, but it needs to climb out from the rubble that’s been keeping it closed.

What actually helps

None of this is fixed by caring harder. It is fixed by structure, and by a handful of specific practices that give you back the part of the job you loved in the first place.

To help you fall in love with fundraising again, I've compiled some of my favorite resources that can help you today. Whether you're a leader or a fundraiser, there's something here for you.

If you lead a team...

Give your program an actual system. Not a philosophy, and not a set of expectations living in your head.

A repeatable process for fundraising that every person on your team understands. Once a system exists, your people stop guessing at what good looks like. Our Seven Keys to a Successful Major Gift Program guide walks through what has to be in place for your major gift program to work properly. 

Build your goal from the pipeline up. The single largest source of pressure in most development shops is a number that was never connected to what the donors can realistically do.

When you build the goal from the pipeline, the number becomes defensible, and you can push back on leadership with evidence instead of instinct.

Start with Understanding the Economics of the Major Gifts Pipeline and run your program through the Donor Pipeline Assessment.

Know what you are measuring and why. Most teams track activity because it’s countable. Measuring the things that actually predict revenue changes how your people spend their days, and it ends the guessing on both sides of the one-on-one. Evaluating and Rewarding Major Gift Officer Performance lays out the approach.

Protect your team's time—and then protect your own. Scope creep is a series of leadership decisions. Getting clear about who owns what is how you stop bleeding donor-facing hours, and it is how you stop quietly absorbing every unowned task yourself.

The Roles and Responsibilities Chart is a good place to start, along with Removing Obstacles to Major Gift Fundraising.

If you are on the front lines...

Qualify and tier your caseload. Not every donor belongs on it. Qualifying gives you formal permission to stop chasing people who were never going to engage, and tiering tells you where your best hours belong. For most fundraisers, this is the fastest relief available. See Qualifying Donors for Major Gift Caseloads and Tiering Donors to Create Focused Caseloads.

Keep your checkpoints. Planned, consistent touch points are what keep relationships warm without you holding the entire caseload in your head. Fewer donors slip, and you lose the background dread about everyone you have not called. Our Touch Point Planning Guide and the Donor Engagement Plan template give you both halves of that.

Build offers your donors genuinely want to fund. Asking feels awful when you are selling a budget line. It feels completely different when you know what this particular donor cares about and you can put a real, costed piece of program in front of her.

Work through Discovering Your Donor's Passions and Interests and Packaging Program into Donor Offers.

Make the ask without dreading it. Permission-Based Asking takes the pressure out by honoring your donor's right to say no at every step. The conversation turns into alignment rather than a pitch, which is much closer to the work you signed up for. Here is How to Use Permission-Based Asking with Donors.

Whether you lead or you’re out in front of donors, the heaviest thing about this job is often that you’re carrying it by yourself. There is no one to ask the small questions and no one who understands the specific shape of your week.

Our certification courses exist for that reason.

Fundraisers get the full system: qualifying, tiering, donor planning, touch points, offers, and asking, with the tools and templates already built. Structure that holds you up rather than one more thing to keep current.

Leaders get what almost nobody trained them for: setting realistic goals from the pipeline, deciding what to measure, coaching and evaluating your people well, and balancing a team with your own donor file.

Everyone gets live community calls, a cohort of people doing the same job you are doing, lifetime access to the material, and CFRE credits.

Why am I telling you this? Because our last cohort of the year begins October 19.

If this year has caused you to rethink your career in nonprofit fundraising, this is a good time to invest in your comeback. You can fall in love with this work again.

And you deserve the support that can help make it happen.

If you want to learn more about the training Veritus offers to help you and your team succeed in fundraising, you can click here to learn more.

Here for you,

Jeff