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Hey you, it's Rhea Wong. If you're listening to Nonprofit Load On, I'm pretty sure that you'd love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning you get updates on the newest podcast episodes. And then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only and fundraising inspo because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone. On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free. So what are you waiting for? Head over to riawong.com now to sign up Foreign. Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey podcast listeners, it's Ria Wong with you once again. So this must be non profit Lowdown. Today's episode is about something that I have been noticing over and over again. It is a phenomenon that really bums me out. And it is this when good fundraisers burn out. And it's not for the reason that you think so. I've been in this sector now for over 20 years and I've noticed that good development folks, and not even good ones, development folks in general tend to burn out after 18 months. Now we have two questions to ask ourselves. Is it because that is the general expected timeline for is that just status quo? Or maybe there's something that's happening in the water that is making it so development folks do not stick around for the long term. It's almost like that parable, if you see a bunch of dead fish floating, is it the fish or is there something that's happening in the water upstream? I'm going to argue that we have a water problem, not a fish problem. So typically when I see development directors burning out, it's not because they lack passion and it's not because donors are too hard to reach. And she is certainly not burned out because she doesn't care about the mission. Typically. Here's the real talk. Development directors are burned out because they are being asked to be the system, and your organization let that happen. So today we are having a very direct conversation about retention, burnout, and the invisible cost of doing things the way we've always done it. So if you're a nonprofit leader who's tired of watching your best people walk out the door, or if you are a fundraiser who feels like you were carrying the entire organization's revenue in your head and on your back, this episode is for you. So let's get into it. So let me paint a picture for you. Tell me if this resonates. You have a development officer. Let's just call her Sarah. Now, Sarah is amazing. She knows every donor's giving history. She knows their motivations, she knows, she knows their kids names. She knows exactly where each donor is in their thinking about their next gift. But here's the problem. She carries all of that in her head. Why? Because there's nowhere for it to live. She prioritizes her outreach on instinct because there's no actual qualification process to guide her. She gets measured on dollars raised at year end because that is literally the only number anyone in leadership bothers to track. Here's the thing. Sarah is not the problem. The absence of a system is the problem. So when you don't have an operating model, someone has to fill the gap. And usually it is the most capable person on the team. I know you've seen it in your own work. Maybe you are yourself that person. Someone who is asked to be the hero to make up for gaps in the organization. And we pat them on the back and we say, oh, they're so all in. They're really, they really took one for the team. But I just don't think that we can build a sustainable organization on individual heroics and people who spread themselves thin and people who lay themselves on the sword in order to save the organization. So let's get back to Sarah. She is the hero here. She's building her own tracking spreadsheet. Maybe there's a CRM, but it's not used on a regular basis. She develops her own personal rituals for follow up and through years of trial and error, she figures out which donors are actually ready for a conversation and which ones are just a dead end. That knowledge is entirely in her head. It's not living anywhere in the CRM. And when she burns out and leaves, and trust me, she will, the organization does not just lose a person, it loses the entire infrastructure that lived in her head. If that feels familiar to you, I urge you to listen more. One of the fastest ways to burn out your best people is by confusing busy with advancing revenue. The problem is that right now a lot of organizations are just counting calls and asks. They look at the CRM and say, well, Sarah made 40 calls this week. She's doing great. But the traditional model makes that so much worse. Think about how we build prospect lists right now. We do a wealth screen and we send fundraisers after people who have money but haven't necessarily indicated any actual interest in giving to us. Two thirds of those outreach efforts go absolutely nowhere. And it is not because the fundraiser failed. It is because the list was never qualified in the first place. I remember when I first started fundraising and I was handed a list of prospects. Again, these were not people who had ever demonstrated interest in giving. All we knew was that they had money. Guess how successful that list was. You already know. I got nothing. So in the situation with Sarah, our fundraiser, guess who absorbs that wasted effort as part of a personal failure? The fundraiser does. She was given a bad list and held accountable for a list that wasn't meant to produce in the first place. The organization just calls it part of the job. And for Sarah, it feels icky, it feels terrible to do. And the best part is this is entirely fixable. So why do these kinds of things keep happening? I have seen it in the last 20 years of being in the nonprofit field, but I think a lot of us have been operating in this world, have been operating in this way for decades. If we know it burns people out, why do we keep doing it? The answer is the black hole of gravity in the nonprofit sector. It is the overwhelming pull of the phrase, that's how we've always done it. What we know is that organizations naturally resist new ways of operating because building a real system requires effort, it requires change, it requires discomfort. Honestly, it is easier to just keep handing a messy spreadsheet to a new hire than it is to stop, look at the leaks in your pipeline, and build a real engagement fundraising operating system. But I want you to remember this. You do not rise to the level of your revenue goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And right now, if you're being honest with yourself, your systems are just a collection of old habits. And this collection of old habits are burning out and exhausting your best people. So let's talk about what happens when your best people walk out the door. What is the real cost of turnover? Now, when leadership calculates turnover, they usually look at the salary gap and the hiring timeline. But the math there is incomplete. The real cost is the donor relationships that go cold during that gap. It is the mid pipeline prospect who finally gets a call from a new hire who clearly does not. It's the major gifts that were weeks away from closing when everything just stopped. And when you lose that momentum, it is hard to get it started again. And particularly when you lose trust with your donor, it is hard, if not impossible, to get back. And the thing is, these donors do not call you to tell you that they've moved on. They just quietly redirect their giving to another organization and you find out a year later. Or you never find out at all. Often we're looking at lagging indicators. And we don't know that a gift has gone cold until it's too late. And let's say you hire someone new. This new person does not inherit a system. She inherits a spreadsheet that has not been updated in four months and a CRM full of incomplete notes. So. So she has to spend six months rediscovering what her predecessor spent six years learning. The organization loses years of relationship investment every single time the cycle repeats, and it keeps repeating because the structural conditions that cause the first burnout are still in place. We need to build systems in order to protect our revenue and protect our fundraisers. Now, I know that the instinct for a lot of leaders is to say, well, we just need to hire someone more resilient, or we just need to hire someone more talented, or we just need to hire someone who's more passionate. That is the wrong move. No fundraiser is talented enough to compensate indefinitely for missing infrastructure. Let me say that again because I feel like that's so important. No fundraiser, no matter how talented they are, is going to be talented enough to compensate indefinitely for missing infrastructure. Now, the question is not whether to find someone tougher. The question is why the organization keeps requiring toughness as a substitute for a functional operating model. Systems protect good fundraisers. They do not replace them. When you have a well designed system, it changes what a fundraiser has to carry. So imagine a world where donors tell the organization about their motivations, their readiness, and their interest through surveys and engagement signals. That data drives the prioritization. When a fundraiser picks up the phone in that system, she already knows that this person has the right timing. She knows they have shared why they care, and she knows that they have signaled interest in a deeper conversation. So she's doing a fundamentally different job. She's not chasing coffee. She's having a qualified conversation with someone who's raised their hands. And I can give you a million examples of how this works in practice. I have been so honored to work with, at this point, dozens of nonprofit organizations. And I'll just pick one example of Amy, who runs an organization, one of my current clients, Amy, who used this strategy to engage in a conversation with someone who's. She'd been trying to get on her radar forever. Through this one feedback loop, she was able to not only get a call with this person, but also learned that this person had a donor advice fund and they are now in the midst of drafting a proposal. All because she was able to discern the signals and understand what the right next step was. Because Amy and people like Amy have a system. The progress gets measured by whether donors are actually advancing through a defined process. So Amy's success is not based on how many activities she's logging. And when a fundraiser does eventually move on, the pipeline is documented. There is a process that is repeatable, scalable and understood by everybody. So the successor does not start over. She steps into a working operation. Now, building a real fundraising operating model is not a technology purpose. I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked what CRM people should buy. This CRM is not the answer. A CRM is in service to a strategy and a system that you already built. It is not the answer. It is a tool. When we talk about a system, it is a decision. It means accepting that we've always done it this way is a choice with consequences. And those consequences are being paid by the people doing the work. So if you're listening to this and any of this is resonating with you, you're standing at a fork in the road. So path one is your default. You do nothing, revenue is going to stay unpredictable, your growth will get delayed, and you will keep burning through talented people because you're forcing them to be the infrastructure. Path two is building the system. It means measuring what actually predicts major gift outcomes. How fast are donors moving through the process? Where are they stalling? Is outreach landing with the right people at the right time? It means building feedback loops that let donors tell you what you need to know, rather than hoping the right information surfaces in the right conversation at the right moment. None of this requires a huge budget, but it does require the decision to stop treating good fundraisers as infrastructure and start giving them actual infrastructure to work within. That's what retention looks like. It's not a better compensation package. It is a system worth working inside of. And this is fixable if you are tired of your team carrying the system in your heads. If you're tired of seeing your best fundraisers walk out the door. If you're tired of leaving revenue on the table, the donors that you've been cultivating don't receive communication when someone walks out the door and you want to choose path two, I want you to join me for my upcoming webinar. It's called Stop flying. Fix your leaky fundraising system. In this webinar, we're going to walk through the exact six part audit to find the leaks in your pipeline. And I'll show you how to build an operating system that actually works and protects your best people. You can register below in the show notes. I want you to stop guessing and start building. And for God's sake, please stop losing all of your best fundraisers. I hope to see you there. Hey fundraisers. Looking to nail those big fundraising asks? Check out my Big Ask gift program@riawong.com bag. Say goodbye to uncertainty and hello to confidence with my program. Get expert strategies and personalized support to secure those game changing donations. Don't let fear hold you back. Join me and take your fundraising to new heights. We're enrolling now@riawong.com bag. That's riawong.com bag. So if you like big asks and you cannot lie, I'll see you in the program.