Why a culture of philanthropy has to come before the hire

Here’s what we hear from nonprofit leaders all the time: “We just need a better development director.” Or: “If our board would just hand over their contacts, our fundraising would be fine.” Or our favorite: “We know we need to ask individuals for money; we just haven’t gotten around to building that out yet.”

The impulse behind each of these is understandable but wrong. Each one is a treatment plan built on the wrong diagnosis. Replacing your development director won’t fix it. Neither will replacing your board, building the major gifts program you don’t have, or finally cleaning the donor database no one has touched since 2017. The real problem is that your organization doesn’t have a culture of philanthropy, and it is our firm conviction that until it does, none of those other fixes will hold.

This matters most for individual and community giving. A grants program can run on a competent manager and a well-kept calendar; money that comes from people runs on relationships, and relationships cannot be assigned to a single job description.

The One-Person Bet

When organizations decide they’re serious about individual giving, their first move is predictable: hire someone to do it. A development director, a major gifts officer, a fund development consultant brought in to build the program. And then they wait. It is the waiting, not the hire, that leaves every relationship the organization has with a donor resting on one person.

What that looks like varies. In a small shop, the hire is a generalist who is also keeping the grants calendar moving, planning the events, and writing the annual appeal, so the strategic conversations that would actually grow the donor base are the first thing to slide. In a larger one, a major gifts officer has a narrower brief and a fair chance of working a portfolio well. A consultant can do excellent work inside a defined scope of engagement. In every version, though, the relationships belong to the person rather than to the institution, and when that person leaves or the engagement ends, the organization discovers how little of what was built stayed behind.

We’ve worked with organizations where the development director is doing all this alone, with no meaningful engagement from leadership and a board that believes fundraising is “staff’s job.” We’ve never seen it work. And when that person eventually burns out and leaves, the organization starts the cycle over again, wondering why it can’t seem to keep good development staff. They’re not alone in this. In the 2026 Social Impact Staff Retention survey, 72 percent of people in fundraising roles said they were looking for a new job or would be within the year.

Sometimes the problem really is the person. You’ll occasionally hire someone who oversells and can’t deliver. Far more often, though, it isn’t the person. It’s the conditions they were hired into. For three years running, the most common reason nonprofit employees have given that survey for looking elsewhere is having too much responsibility and not enough support to get it all done. In 2026 it was 60 percent, with unsupportive leadership close behind at 53. Its authors conclude that the strongest levers for keeping people are cultural and managerial rather than financial.

What a Culture of Philanthropy Actually Means

The phrase culture of philanthropy gets used constantly, usually vaguely, and often to mean nothing more than “fundraising is everyone’s job.” That’s not wrong, but it’s also not specific enough to act on. A culture of philanthropy means your organization has internalized a set of beliefs that make asking for support feel natural, not transactional. It means your leaders are personally cultivating relationships with donors rather than delegating that work to staff. It means your board members understand that opening doors and making introductions is part of what they accepted when they took a board seat. It means your program staff can tell a compelling story about the work in 60 seconds, because they know those stories are what move their communities to give.

It also means you stop treating a gift as the start of the relationship. Volunteers, advocates, clients, and event guests are already engaged with your mission, and in a culture of philanthropy, giving is one expression of that engagement rather than the opening move.

Most critically, it means your organization has stopped treating philanthropy as a necessary evil and started treating it as an expression of your people’s belief in the mission, and of their confidence that the community shares it.

How Organizations Get This Wrong

In our experience, organizations fail at building a culture of philanthropy in one of two ways.

Avoidance

These are the organizations that are genuinely uncomfortable with individual fundraising. The discomfort shows up as leaders who feel that asking for money is somehow beneath the mission, or boards recruited with vague assurances that “we don’t really do a lot of fundraising here.” To be fair, most nonprofit leaders weren’t trained as fundraisers. They were trained to do the work. However, avoidance has a cost. These organizations are chronically under-resourced. In health and human services, where revenue tends to be concentrated in government contracts and institutional grants, that leaves no cushion when a contract is not renewed or a funding formula changes.

Oversimplification

These organizations aren’t uncomfortable with fundraising; they’re just convinced it’s simpler than it is. They think a good event or a strong annual appeal is equivalent to a fundraising program. They think hiring a development director settles the question, because that person will just do it all themselves. They think donor relationships can be managed by one or two people. What they’re missing is the infrastructure, leaders who model it, a board that is actually aligned, and staff who can tell the story. These are the things that turn a reluctant, awkward ask into a warm conversation between two people who share a commitment to the same cause.

Where to Start

If you recognize your organization in either of those descriptions, the good news is that culture change is possible. It’s not fast, and it’s not a program you can bolt onto an existing structure. It begins with an honest diagnosis of where you actually are. Ask yourself: Is our CEO personally comfortable asking someone to make a meaningful gift? Can every staff member articulate why community investment in the work matters? Does our board understand and embrace its role in opening doors? Does anyone besides the development director have a real relationship with our twenty largest donors?

The gaps between where you are and where you need to be are your strategy. The culture must come first. Everything else is tactics.