LFG — Leadership. Fundraising. Growth.
Finance departments get audited by law. Development departments never do. The result is compounding dysfunction that erodes revenue for years before anyone diagnoses it. We run the audit your development shop has never had.
Most fundraising departments are never systematically assessed. Problems compound:
These are not independent problems. They are symptoms of the same operational failure: a department that has never been audited like finance, HR, or IT.
Poor data leads to weak reporting leads to blind decisions. No process documentation means turnover destroys institutional knowledge. Undiagnosed cost inefficiency erodes margins, worsens salary constraints, and accelerates the departure of your best people.
This is not a fundraising plan review. It is an enterprise-grade operational assessment covering ten dimensions:
Three to five year trending by channel, segment, and donor lifecycle stage.
Cost to raise a dollar benchmarked against peers. Industry gold standard is $0.20 per dollar raised for integrated programs; distressed departments exceed $0.36 (AFP).
Acquisition, retention, upgrade, and reactivation rates by channel and cohort.
Pipeline visibility: can your team answer basic questions like active monthly donor count, retention rate by acquisition source, and pipeline value at each stage in under five minutes?
Roles, reporting lines, workload distribution, and vacancy impact.
19 to 21% annual turnover in nonprofits versus 12% in other sectors (National Council of Nonprofits). Root causes: too much work with too little support (59%), limited growth opportunities (54%), unsupportive management (52%).
Data reliability, integration gaps, user adoption, and reporting capability.
If your CRM cannot produce a reliable retention report by acquisition channel without manual manipulation, your infrastructure is failing.
Documented processes versus ad-hoc operations across solicitation, stewardship, gift processing, and reporting.
Process maturity determines whether your department survives turnover or reinvents itself every 16 months.
How development coordinates with finance, programs, marketing, and the executive team.
Misalignment between development and finance is the single most common source of organizational friction in nonprofits over $10M.
Quantitative scorecard across all ten dimensions.
Benchmark comparison against peer organizations by size and sector.
Identified gaps ranked by revenue impact.
What to fix first based on revenue recovery potential.
What to fix next based on capacity and timeline.
What to stop doing because it's consuming resources without return.
90-day action plan for the highest-impact changes.
12-month strategic roadmap for systemic improvements.
Clear owners, timelines, and success metrics for every recommendation.
Fractional CDO or COO leadership to implement recommendations.
Ongoing advisory to keep the transformation on track.
If you have never had your development department systematically assessed, you are operating blind. 95% of nonprofit leaders report concern about staff burnout and nearly half report difficulty filling vacancies (Center for Effective Philanthropy 2024). The problems are real. The diagnosis is overdue.
A fundraising plan tells you what to raise and how. An audit tells you why your current operation is underperforming. We assess systems, processes, team structure, data infrastructure, and cross-functional alignment, not just goals and strategies. Plans sit on shelves. Audits diagnose what is actually broken.
Four to six weeks for the assessment phase. We review data, interview staff and leadership, evaluate systems, and benchmark against peers. The deliverable is a prioritized roadmap with clear next steps, not a 100-page report nobody reads.
Engagements start at $15,000 for organizations under $10M in revenue and scale with complexity. For organizations managing $25M or more in development operations, expect $25,000 to $50,000. This reflects the depth required to audit enterprise-scale operations, the same rigor we applied managing $50M in development at Greenpeace USA.
Book a call to discuss what an enterprise-grade audit would reveal about your fundraising operation.
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