Development Team

A nonprofit organization’s development team consists of paid staff and/or volunteers. It is led by the person charged with the responsibility for meeting contributed income needs for the organization. All but the smallest nonprofits will likely have a professional development director. The larger the nonprofit, the more likely it is to have additional fundraising professionals on staff.

All nonprofits have volunteer leadership—at the very least a board of directors or trustees. Any nonprofit in need of contributed income should have a board-led development committee. The members of that committee and any other volunteers involved in fundraising are part of the organization’s development team.

From time to time, a nonprofit organization may engage the services of consultants and other vendors to assist in fundraising efforts. They too are members of the development team.

How an organization recruits and supports development team members—staff, volunteers, and consultants/vendors—is crucial to its overall development effort. Whether members of the development team are well equipped to carry out their roles, committed to doing so, and enjoy the active support of the board will make all the difference between success and failure.

Articles about the Development Team

We Call It Development
But What Is It Really

When setting up a new development shop or restructuring an existing  one, the last thing you should be worrying about is—well—development! The modern development department succeeds not because an organization has had an epiphany about the need to raise money, but...

read more

How Large Should A Development Staff Be?

The core of the question, in any of those settings, is a search for an "ideal" or industry standard. Such an animal doesn't exist. There are just too many variables for an across-the-board approach to organizing a development office, especially in terms of how many...

read more

Finance vs. Development?

Mixing Oil and Water and Making it Work in a Non-Profit Organization The receiving and the handling of donations made to non-profit organizations are simple to do, but very often poorly done. When that happens, a vital block is taken out of the foundation we strive to...

read more

Development Director Job Interview Questionnaire

Introduction The interview form presented below is designed to elicit as much pertinent information as possible and as desired or required in the most advanced of interviews. However, for the vast majority of non-profit organizations, it is meant to be a guide to the...

read more

What’s a Good Director of Development Worth?

Non-profits with resources sufficient to engage professionals in key staff positions seem to find it relatively easy to determine salaries for heads of marketing, finance, and human resources, among others. Development directors however are another story. Why is that?...

read more

Positioning Grant Writers For Success

Unrealistic Expectations, Pay Practices That Grantors Often See As Tainting The Funding Process, And Poor Planning And Follow Through, Can Doom The Best To Failure Some of the most heated discussion in the nonprofit world centers on grant writing. Why? Because so much...

read more

How to Recruit Your Volunteer Fund-Raising Team

Volunteers are the lifeblood of a development operation, and trustees are the most important volunteers of all. The trustees approve an organization's budget and they must accept personal responsibility for raising called-for contributed income. They are expected to...

read more

Beginning a Career in Non-Profit Fund-Raising

"How Do I Get Started In Fund-Raising?" This question has been posed to me countless times in my nearly thirty-year career as a development professional. And, it is a query I now observe scores of times via the various internet non-profit-related News Groups. If this...

read more