In a Field Plagued by Burnout, Can This Consulting Firm Change the Culture of Fundraising?

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The industry of people offering advice for fundraisers may rival the profession itself. Between consultants (on and offline), books, blog posts and the volume of opinions offered by nonprofessionals — including nonprofit leadership, board members, and donors — there’s definitely a glut of sources for fundraisers looking for someone to tell them how to do their jobs. 

In spite of (or because of) all that advice, the job remains a difficult one, and the field is plagued by high turnover and open positions. One 2022 study, for example, found that nearly half, or 46%, of U.S. and U.K. fundraisers were planning to leave their current positions in two years; 9% planned to get out of the field altogether. Another 2022 study, this one from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, found that 20% of U.S. fundraisers planned to quit their current jobs, and 7% planned to get out of fundraising within the next year.

At first glance, ChangeRaisers may seem to be offering more of the same sort of industry advice, but a deeper look reveals key differences. First, the firm aims well beyond increasing nonprofits’ immediate bottom lines. Instead, ChangeRaisers seeks to transform “the culture of nonprofit fundraising” to help them retain their fundraising talent and build strong programs for the long term. And second, the organizations they work with aren’t the ones that contract with or pay for ChangeRaisers’ services: funders contract with the company to shepherd a cohort of their grantees through one of its two programs, depending on their current fundraising capacity. 

“I left and it broke my heart”

ChangeRaisers was founded in 2019 by Laura Ferretti, MBA, whose experience in the field includes more than 20 years as a solo consultant after working as a director of development, and Amita Swadhin, MPA, a nonprofit leader and community organizer who has also worked in the sector for roughly two decades. The two met when Swadhin moved from New York to L.A. in 2012 and was offered a position leading a local chapter of a larger organization; the chapter had been without an executive director for 18 months, and the only remaining board member was the brand-new chair. To help Swadhin start making the contacts they would need to succeed, the organization’s outgoing chair introduced them to Ferretti, who became Swadhin’s fundraising coach.

For her part, Ferretti got her start in higher ed fundraising before moving to a mentoring and scholarship nonprofit. In four and a half years, she said, her organization’s fundraising shop had tripled in size, both in terms of staff and money raised. Then the nonprofit’s leadership decided on an ambitious new plan without consulting their fundraising staff: They wanted to double again within five years. At this point, Ferretti said, she wanted to start a family and to change her role for better work-life balance so she could focus on building the organization’s major gift program instead of fundraising herself while also managing the operation. 

“And my boss just looked at me and said, 'Eh, no. What else you got?,’” she said. “And I left and it broke my heart. I'm not alone. I'm sharing that because this is a story of so many other people in the field.”

Ferretti pivoted to consulting, and said that she soon realized that the issues that caused her to leave her development job are rampant in the sector. Those issues seem to be driving high rates of turnover among fundraisers — a real concern in a field that frequently relies on personal connections for success. 

When Ferretti and Swadhin founded ChangeRaisers, they put the issue of turnover among fundraising professionals front and center in their mission statement: “To scale social change, nonprofits must retain fundraisers. And to retain fundraisers, the culture of nonprofit fundraising must shift.” Those shifts include understanding that fundraising is a form of community organizing, including fundraising staff in overall strategic planning, and getting everyone from the executive director and board members to program leaders involved in raising money.

Asking program leaders to get involved in fundraising may seem like a big lift. Nonprofits often experience a schism between those on the program side and those raising money to pay the bills, with fundraising often viewed as a kind of grunt work that happens separately from core advocacy or services. This can lead to resentment and burnout among development professionals, but also weaker fundraising. The key, Swadhin said, is to realize that “people on the program side have really big visions. They have a clear understanding of what their community needs.” So during coaching, Swadhin and Ferretti take program people through an exercise of putting a price tag on the things that the program officers wish they could have. 

“You're not making them do it (fundraising); you're not imposing it on them,” Swadhin said. “You're getting their buy-in, because you're asking them what their vision is: If they had XYZ amount of dollars, what would they do with it? Most program directors can answer that. Most program directors are thinking beyond just what the current budget will allow to be funded.” 

Initial success

The ChangeRaisers approach seems to be attracting notice and achieving success. Funders have sent more than 100 staff and board members from 35 social change nonprofits to take part in one of the firm’s two programs; in one instance, the $38 million, public-private Ready to Rise Initiative sent 30 of its 49 grantees to ChangeRaisers. 

It’s too soon to measure whether or not the company’s approach leads to lower turnover among fundraising staff, but the case studies on its website seem to indicate definite short-term financial benefits. Social Justice Partners LA, (SJPLA) for example, grew its staff from four to nine full-time positions and more than doubled its income, from $700,000 to $1.5 million, within two years of completing ChangeRaisers’ training, according to the consultant’s website. 

Ferletti and Swadhin currently work with nonprofits ranging in size from startups to organizations with $30 million budgets, and with missions that include direct service, advocacy and movement-building. Their focus is on community-based organizations, said Ferletti, “public charities that are not serving their donors,” like private schools, museums or religious organizations. They also have a passion for working with nonprofits that serve marginalized communities.

“All of the organizations we really had in mind when we built this program directly impact marginalized communities that have survived historical and ongoing systemic violence,” Swadhin said, though the leadership of the nonprofits they serve “runs the gamut” from people who have more societal privileges than the population they serve to others that are “founded by and for, and pretty much run by, 100% marginalized community members from board to staff.” 

Time will tell whether ChangeRaisers’ approach will have long-term effects on the nonprofits the firm works with. At the same time, learning about its efforts was heartening on a few levels. The first is the fact that funders are footing the bill. This is a welcome development in a landscape where, all too often, funders want to see their grantees spend less on fundraising even when that work is crucial to an organization’s success. Further, given the dire landscape for retention of nonprofit workers overall, any organization with a reasonable approach to mitigating the burnout and frustration of specific professions within the sector is something to be applauded.