Your Fundraiser Is the Strategy

The most important indicators of your advancement shop’s success don't live on any of your dashboards, but they predict all of your outcomes.

I want to paint a common picture for you: There’s a donor that a gift officer on your team has been meaning to follow up with for two weeks, and this morning, for the third time, she talked herself out of making the call. She probably said something to herself like, “Not now. He’s probably slammed. I should probably wait until after the event.” Once she convinced herself not to make the call, she reorganized her prospect list, focusing on an activity that made her feel busy and productive even though she didn’t do the most important thing to drive her fundraising outcomes.

For years I’ve watched people call behavior like this a discipline problem or excuse it by just saying that people have too many things to do and they can’t get to it all. Don’t get me wrong, people definitely have too many things to do, but what I’ve learned after coaching a hundred thousand fundraisers is that our volume of tasks isn’t actually what determines what we prioritize.

The reason that the fundraiser prioritized her data organization is because her nervous system was trying to protect her from doing the more vulnerable task of reaching out to the donor. In fact, it was a nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do, which is to read a situation as a threat that involves any type of risk and to try to pull the person away from it.

Understanding this difference is really important because otherwise we treat behavior as either a character flaw or somebody not being the right fit for fundraising, and we try to solve for this in ineffective ways.

Before I go on, I want to be really clear that this is not about shaming fundraisers for their behavior. As I’ve talked about very publicly before, I was the gift officer that I’m describing here. I would fundraise in a scattered, spray-fire way that kept me looking and feeling very busy without moving the needle forward on my fundraising results. Sometimes that would materialize in delaying outreach to donors, and sometimes it would show up in how I would lead a donor meeting (i.e. I’d unconsciously prioritize my comfort in the meeting instead of fundraising effectiveness).

Without recognizing the role that the brain and body of the fundraiser play in fundraising outcomes, is one of the biggest ways that we sabotage our success. Donor behavior is a response behavior, and it is primarily a response to fundraiser behavior, not just the actions that they complete but how they complete those actions.

We track dollars raised and visits completed and pipeline generated and retention, and every one of those is a lagging number, a response to something that already happened, and the thing it’s responding to is almost always something a fundraiser did or didn’t do. Which means we’ve been staring at the scoreboard all this time without ever once looking at the athlete.

Why the body keeps score before the CRM does

For five years I have been interviewing leading scientists and psychologists to take what they know and translate it into the lived reality of what it actually feels like to be a frontline fundraiser. The research continues to remind me that our nervous system’s entire job is to keep us safe. So when asking for money registers as a threat (and for most of us at some point it does) that system activates, and sometimes it looks like fight and sometimes it looks like flight, but in this work it very often looks like freeze, which is the procrastination and the over-preparing and the intellectualizing and the reorganizing of a prospect list that isn’t the call you were supposed to make.

When I surveyed fundraisers about what they actually do when they feel stressed about asking for money, 75% of them told me they go do a task that isn’t fundraising, and if you have ever cleaned out your inbox instead of picking up the phone then you already know that pull in your body. The stress doesn’t just make the relationship harder to build, it stops the action from happening at all, and because avoidance never shows up as a line item on any report, it becomes the most expensive thing in your shop that nobody ever names.

But the part that matters most is what chronic stress does to the exact capacities this job runs on. Researchers like Deb Dana have shown that a chronically stressed nervous system is biologically less able to connect and to decide and to empathize, which is worth sitting with for a second, because the always-on, quota-carrying, do-more-with-less state that our sector has quietly decided is just what the job feels like is the SAME state that switches off the relationship-building we are asking these people to go do.

I watched this play out in a real conversation once, when a donor told me he felt like a fundraiser hadn’t listened to him, and I told him that in my experience that usually isn’t about not caring, it’s that when we’re stressed we genuinely cannot listen the same way, and my honest guess was that the fundraiser was so excited about the opportunity and so nervous about getting it right that the nervousness came out sideways and landed on him as distraction. That is not a character flaw. That is a brain under threat doing triage on its own higher functions, right in the middle of the meeting that mattered.

The good news is that these responses are learned, which means they can be re-learned as well. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work shows that our brains construct our emotions in the moment by predicting the present from the past, so a donor who feels dangerous feels that way because of a pattern we built, and anything we built we can build differently with practice. That is the entire reason my team and I created Practivated, to give fundraisers a place to actually rehearse the hard conversation before they are sitting in it. But you cannot practice your way out of a problem you are still insisting is a personality defect.

I wrote What the Fundraising in 2024 but it’s even more important in 2026

None of the pressure I’ve described is new to 2026, but this is the year somebody turned the volume all the way up. If you work in advancement you already know the list without me writing it down, because you’re living inside it: federal research dollars under threat, endowments in the political crosshairs, public trust in higher education taking hit after hit after hit, hiring freezes that make already-lean teams leaner, alumni participation sliding a little further every year. And every single one of those pressures eventually travels down the org chart and lands on the same gift officers we are asking to walk into rooms and build real relationships with human beings.

This is the loop that keeps me up, because it’s so quiet you can be deep inside it before you notice. Higher stress produces more avoidance, and more avoidance produces weaker donor connection, and weaker connection produces softer results, and softer results produce more pressure, which produces more stress, and around it goes. A whole sector full of people acting with genuinely good intentions can end up optimizing for the exact internal state that guarantees the outcome they’re trying to avoid.

You can see what it costs us most clearly in the people themselves. Half of nonprofits, 50.2% to be precise, name stress and burnout as a key driver of the workforce shortage, and in advancement that is not a wellness footnote, because when a burned-out gift officer finally walks out the door the donor relationships tend to leave with her, often right in the middle of a campaign. Turnover, when you look at it honestly, is a fundraising problem wearing an HR costume.

And underneath all of it the fundamentals keep getting harder, because giving has been narrowing for years now, with the share of Americans who give falling from roughly 66% in 2000 to less than half today, a slide that started long before any of this year’s particular crises showed up. Fewer donors, carried by more stressed fundraisers, is not a situation any of us are going to tactic our way out of.

What this asks of us as leaders

If the fundraiser really is the leading indicator, then the most important question a leader can ask quietly changes shape, because it stops being “how do we get more out of our fundraisers” and becomes something far more useful, which is “what is the actual inner experience of the person we’re asking to do this hard thing, and how do we resource it.” A few places that question can take you:

Measure the thing that comes first. I say this constantly, that you shouldn’t tell me what you care about, you should show me what you track, because when the only things on the dashboard are lagging outputs we end up learning about our problems long after they’ve already cost us the gift. Build in a regular, low-lift read on your team’s capacity and regulation and treat it as the early-warning system it actually is.

Normalize regulation before the high-stakes ask. Because the freeze response is learned it is also trainable, and a few genuine minutes of practice and regulation before a major solicitation is not the soft part of the work, it’s the difference between a gift officer who is fully present in the room and one who is quietly performing her way through it and hoping nobody notices.

Protect trust as the real currency. Under pressure the instinct is almost always to push harder, and almost every time the science is pointing in the other direction, because vulnerability is what actually generates trust, with Paul Zak’s research even tracing the oxytocin underneath it, and that matters enormously when 83% of people say a nonprofit has to earn their trust before they’ll give. Fundraising was never the persuasion game we were trained to think it was. It’s an offer, made by one regulated human being to another, to become part of something that matters.

Where this goes

Everything else on that list at the top, the funding threats and the political climate and the alumni numbers, is largely out of your hands. The fundraiser is not. The person you’re asking to carry all of this is the one place you can actually put your energy and see it change everything.

I know that’s possible because I’ve lived it, in my own body first and then alongside thousands of fundraisers since. The person who used to throw up before every major donor meeting is the same person writing this to you now. What changed for me wasn’t that I got tougher or found a better script. It’s that I stopped treating my own nervous system like the thing that was broken.

So I want to leave you with this question: What would change in your shop if you resourced the fundraiser first? How would your lagging indicators change if you focused on the leading indicators that influence those outcomes?

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References

The research referenced above, in order of appearance:

The 75% avoidance figure and the leading-indicator framework (fundraiser behavior as the leading indicator of fundraising success) come from my 2023 fundraiser survey and are detailed in Mallory Erickson, What the Fundraising (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2024).

Chronic stress and our capacity to connect, decide, and empathize — Dana, Deb. 2018. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

How the brain constructs emotions — Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2018. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Mariner Books. See also Lisa Feldman Barrett, “How Emotions Are Made and Why It Matters for Fundraisers,” What the Fundraising podcast, August 24, 2021, https://malloryerickson.com/podcast/how-emotions-are-made-why-it-matters-for-fundraisers-with-dr-lisa-feldman-barrett/.

Half of nonprofits (50.2%) naming stress and burnout as a driver of the workforce shortage — National Council of Nonprofits. 2023. “2023 Nonprofit Workforce Survey Results: Communities Suffer as the Nonprofit Workforce Shortage Crisis Continues.” https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/files/media/documents/2023/2023-nonprofit-workforce-survey-results.pdf.

The decline in giving (roughly 66% of Americans in 2000 to less than half today) — Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. 2023. “New Report Examines Differences in Charitable Giving Patterns, Practices Among Communities of Color.” Lilly Family School of Philanthropy News, November 14,

https://philanthropy.iupui.edu/

. See also Fundraising Effectiveness Project. 2023. Quarterly Fundraising Report: Q3 2023. https://data.givingtuesday.org/fep-report/.

Vulnerability, trust, and oxytocin — Zak, Paul J. 2017. “The Neuroscience of Trust.” Harvard Business Review, January–February.

The 83% who say a nonprofit must earn their trust before they give — Independent Sector. 2021. “Trust in Civil Society: Understanding the Factors Driving Trust in Nonprofits and Philanthropy.” https://independentsector.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/trust-report-2021-8421.pdf.

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Mallory Erickson is the author of What the Fundraising and the founder of Practivated. She’s serving as Speaking Engagement’s inaugural Faculty-in-Residence this fall.