What Is Fractional Fundraising? A Look at Working with a Fractional Fundraiser
So you're considering hiring a fractional fundraiser — here's what that actually looks like, from the first call to the work itself.
There’s a problem I keep seeing with small nonprofit teams. They’re ready to hire a senior-level fundraiser but they don’t have a senior-level budget. So, they either try to hire someone with less experience and hope for the best or they keep doing what they’ve always done until they have the budget to hire someone.
What a lot of organizations don’t realize is that there is a middle ground.
Enter: fractional fundraising.
What is Fractional Fundraising?
Fractional fundraising is a solution for nonprofits that need senior-level fundraising expertise embedded within their organization, without paying a full-time salary. There are many different types of fractional fundraising roles: Fractional Development Directors, Fractional Grant Writers, Fractional Fundraising Copywriters, etc.
The premise is simple – your organization brings in an experienced fundraising professional on a part-time, ongoing basis without paying for a full-time salary. For organizations without full-time fundraising staff or with very small teams, fractional fundraising is an excellent way to bring on someone experienced. Or, for organizations that have never had full-time fundraising staff, this can be a great way to add fundraising capacity to your organization without the full investment into a full-time hire. Fractional fundraising also offers a way to add capacity to your team – take grant writing for example, most organizations don’t need a full-time grant writer, but bringing someone on in a fractional sense can add much-needed capacity to your organization.
For a lot of small and mid-sized nonprofits, that's exactly the gap. You don't need — or can't yet justify — a full-time nonprofit development director. But you do need someone who's done this before, who can look at your fundraising program and tell you what's actually working, what's quietly draining everyone's energy, and what to do about it.
But fractional fundraising isn’t only for small organizations. It’s also a great way for larger organizations to add capacity in a specific area, say fundraising copywriting or planned giving.
The single most common question I get about how I work with nonprofits is, “What does this actually look like?” So I wanted to pull back the curtain and walk you through what it’s like to work with me, from the moment you fill out my contact form to when we wrap up our engagement together.
When Should Your Organization Consider a Fractional Fundraiser?
I truly believe that most organizations could benefit from fractional fundraising, especially in a short-term capacity, but these are some signs that tend to signal fractional fundraising makes sense for your organization to pursue:
You're ready for senior-level fundraising expertise but don't have a senior-level budget — and you'd rather not hire someone less experienced and hope for the best, or wait years for the budget to catch up.
You're not ready to hire a full-time Development Director, but your organization is growing – and your Executive Director can no longer do it all.
You've never had full-time fundraising staff, and you want to add real capacity before committing to a full hire.
You just lost a member of your fundraising team and you want to be intentional before you rush to fill that position. (Nonprofit turnover rate in development jobs is famously brutal, and most of the time it's not about the person. It's about the role being set up to fail. For more on that, check out my free Hiring Guide.)
You have a development team (or a team of one), but they're stretched thin and don’t have the time to build the strategy and systems your organization needs.
You're heading into a moment of growth or transition — a new strategic plan, a capital campaign, a major donor push — and you need a thought partner who's built this kind of plan before.
If any of that sounds familiar, you're already most of the way to understanding whether this is a fit for you.
What It Looks Like to Bring on Fractional Fundraising Support
So you’ve decided that it’s time to bring on a fractional fundraiser. Here’s what it’s like to work with me.
After you reach out, we’ll set up a discovery call.
This is the part I want to spend a little extra time on, because it's the most important step and a lot of organizations don’t understand what the call is really about.
A discovery call isn't a sales call where I'm trying to convince you to hire me. It's a fit conversation. I want to know what's actually going on in your organization — not just the polished version, but the real one. What's working. What's not. What you've already tried. What "success" would even look like to you in six months.
And I'm listening for fit just as much as you are. I work with organizations with budgets between $1M and $10M that have been around for at least three years. These organizations have real infrastructure but have hit a wall, usually because the person responsible for developing a fundraising strategy is too stretched to actually build one.
I'm also listening for something harder to name: whether you're ready to actually do this work with me. The engagements that go well are the ones where there's real partnership — where you show up to working sessions, make decisions when decisions need to be made, and treat me as someone embedded in the work rather than a vendor you've outsourced a problem to.
By the end of the call, you should have a clear sense of whether I'm the right partner, and I should too. If this isn’t the best fit, I have an amazing network of consultants I’m happy to refer you to.
The Proposal and Contract
If we're a fit, I'll send over a proposal that reflects what we actually talked about, not a generic package. It outlines the engagement length (most of my work is structured as a six-month partnership, organized into phases), the investment, and a phased timeline of what we’ll cover throughout our time together.
My engagements run as a flat monthly retainer rather than an hourly rate. Hourly billing limits my availability to support your organization when and where you most need it. At the beginning of an engagement, the work is much more hands-on as I get to know your team. Once we’ve been working together for a few weeks, I’m able to work with more independence, allowing you to focus on what you need to while I get into the work.
Once you sign and the first month's retainer is in, we're officially working together.
Kickoff
Before our first real working session, I'll ask you for a handful of things, because the more I understand about where you actually stand, the faster we can move once we start:
Your current donor data and giving history — even if it's messy. Especially if it's messy.
Any existing strategic plan, board materials, or fundraising goals already in motion.
A sense of who's doing what on your team right now, even informally. I'm not asking for an org chart; I'm asking who actually owns what.
Access to your database, donation processing platform, and email platform.
A lot of organizations get caught up in getting this presentation-ready. It’s ok to hand me the real, slightly chaotic version. That's honestly more useful than the cleaned-up one.
The Phases of Work
Every engagement looks a little different because every organization is different, but my engagements tend to follow a phased structure.
Phase One: Assessing your Fundraising and Team Structure
This is where I get oriented. A real fundraising assessment means reviewing your donor data, giving history, donor segments, and revenue trends to get a true baseline — not just what you think is happening, but what the data says is happening. Those aren't always the same thing.
I also look at your nonprofit development team structure, not the org chart – but who is spending time on what, where the pressure points are, and whether the way responsibilities are currently split is setting people up to succeed or quietly setting them up to burn out. If your organization is looking to hire someone in the near future, this is where I start to think about what that role should actually look like and how they’ll fit within the existing team structure.
In this phase, I also take a hard look at your numbers – not just your revenue, but how each revenue stream has performed historically. I build baseline revenue projections that show what’s possible over the next few years based on how your organization is doing now. And, over the course of the engagement, we build a plan to actually get you there.
By the end of this phase, you get an assessment with prioritized recommendations — a shared understanding of where things stand and where we're headed next. This is the part of fundraising work that often gets overlooked, but it’s honestly the most critical. You can’t build a fundraising plan unless you know where you’ve been and what’s possible. The sustainable plan stems directly from this work.
Phase Two: Building the Strategy and the Donor Pipeline
This is where the actual strategy gets built. If you've ever tried to figure out how to write a fundraising plan on your own, you know the hard part isn't the document – it's making sure the plan reflects what your organization can realistically execute, not just what looks good on paper.
It’s also about building something that doesn’t just sit on a shelf.
What this looks like in practice depends on where your organization is starting from. For some, it means designing and launching an individual giving program — building a stewardship framework, mapping existing donor relationships with leadership and the board, and segmenting your donor base so outreach to lapsed donors looks different from outreach to monthly giving prospects.
For others, it means building the donor communications infrastructure that's been missing: a real case for support, donor-facing collateral, letter-of-inquiry templates for institutional funders. If a recurring giving program isn't in place yet, this is also where we design the structure and messaging to get one started — or tighten up the one you already have. And if there's board involvement in fundraising, this is often where I help structure that too, mapping board networks and giving members specific, defined roles in donor outreach.
One of the biggest concerns people have with hiring a fundraising strategist is that the engagement will be all strategy and no implementation. That isn’t how I work. I get right into the work alongside your team.
By the end of this phase, you're not just holding a strategy document. You have structured portfolios, a clear cultivation approach, and outreach infrastructure your team can actually run with.
Phase Three: Build for Sustainability
The last phase is about making sure the work outlives the engagement. In this phase, I usually develop multi-year revenue projections, a prioritized donor and prospect list with a realistic cultivation timeline, and a clear set of recommended priorities for what comes next.
It also means putting into motion what got built in phase two — launching the monthly giving program or lapsed donor re-engagement campaign with a real timeline and messaging behind it, not just a framework sitting in a folder — and going back to the data to review progress against the baseline from phase one. If a major gift strategy wasn't ready to build in phase two, this is where we take an honest look at whether it's ready to emerge now, or whether that's still a year or two out. If your board has a defined role, this is also where that gets formalized, with specific responsibilities, talking points, and materials.
This is the phase where a lot of consulting relationships quietly fall apart — the consultant hands over a plan and disappears, and six months later nothing's been implemented because no one had the bandwidth or clarity to run with it. I built this phase specifically so that doesn't happen to you.
I work with your team to help them integrate the fundraising plan directly into their work — when they'll be calling donors, writing appeals, etc. — and I document the processes and systems we built along the way, so your team isn't left guessing once the engagement ends.
What It Requires From You
Throughout all three phases, the actual rhythm of working together looks like regular working sessions — usually every other week — where we review progress, pressure-test the strategy, and make real decisions together. Between sessions, I’m available by email for questions, feedback, and whatever comes up in the in-between moments.
What this requires from you is trust in the process and a willingness to show up prepared to our working sessions. I’m not who you hire to implement a set of deliverables and walk away. I’m who you hire when you need a thought partner who is going to work alongside your team to add capacity and strategic thinking. I know what it’s like to be the one handed a strategy you had no say in implementing and expected to just make it work. That’s why we do this together.
Is Fractional Fundraising Right for Your Organization?
If you're nodding along to most of this; if you've got real programming and a real budget but your fundraising strategy hasn't caught up, if nonprofit turnover on your development team has you wanting to build something more stable before you hire your next development director, if you've never had fundraising staff at all and want to test the waters before a full hire, or if you're a larger organization that just needs more depth in one specific area — then yes, this is definitely right for your organization.
If you're looking for someone to just run your fundraising full-time without you needing to be involved, or you want a strategy handed to you with zero collaborative input; if you’re looking for someone to manage or want to keep doing what you’ve always done, this kind of engagement probably isn't the right fit — and that's useful information too. Fractionals take direction and work collaboratively, but they aren’t there to be given a list of tasks to execute on.
If any of this sounds like where your organization is right now, the next step is the same one every client of mine has taken: a discovery call. Reach out and let's talk about what fractional fundraising could look like for you.
