Fundraiser Burnout: What New Research Says Nonprofit Leaders Need to Change
Fundraiser burnout is chronic workplace stress lasting three months or longer, showing up as energy depletion, growing cynicism, and declining effectiveness. New doctoral research finds it stems from under-resourced systems and unmanaged conflict, not a lack of self-care. Recovery is possible, and most fundraisers who burn out do recover.
SANTA CLARITA — Twenty-five nonprofit leaders gathered at 18410 Sierra Highway on Wednesday morning to hear a researcher explain why their fundraisers keep leaving, and why telling those fundraisers to rest more has never worked.
Amanda Sattler, PhilD, CFRE, presented The Case for Decreasing Fundraiser Burnout: What the Research Reveals from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in a workshop hosted by Do Good SCV in partnership with the City of Santa Clarita and the AFP San Fernando Valley Chapter. Sattler spent 24 years in nonprofit fundraising, 15 at Junior Achievement and 8 at Covenant House California, before leaving the work in 2023 on her doctor's orders. She then completed a doctorate in philanthropic leadership at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and built her dissertation around the question that ended her own career.
She opened by taking something off the table.
"If you are experiencing burnout right now, it is not a permanent condition," Sattler told the room. "It's a season that you find yourself in. I've been there twice myself, and I'm not there now. So there's hope."
Her central claim is that fundraiser burnout is a resourcing signal rather than a wellness problem, and that treating it as the latter has cost the sector both people and revenue. Fundraisers sit upstream of every other resource in a nonprofit, so what happens to them travels downstream to everyone else.
"The resources we raise give the rest of the humans in the building in mission delivery a fighting chance," she said.
What the Study Found
Sattler interviewed 20 nonprofit leaders, 10 CEOs and 10 fundraising leaders who reported to them, at organizations ranging from $500,000 to $250 million in annual budget. She paired the roles deliberately, since the CEO functions as the chief fundraiser whether or not the job description says so.
Nineteen of the 20 had lived through a season of profound burnout. Sixteen of those 19 had recovered by the time she interviewed them.
The same patterns turned up regardless of budget size.
She also put average fundraiser tenure at 16 months, the figure that traces back to the UnderDeveloped study from CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. Major gift relationships take longer than 16 months to mature, which turns a staffing statistic into a revenue one.
You cannot self-care your way out of a resourcing problem.
Burnout Hides Behind Good Numbers
Sattler calls it mission-masked burnout. Fundraisers are high performers who believe in the work, and that belief hides the damage, sometimes from the fundraiser herself.
She used her own collapse as the example.
At Covenant House, serving 200 young people across seven California sites, she landed a partnership with Hanes to supply all the underwear those sites needed. She sent a Google form asking program directors for sizes and quantities. Nobody filled it out. She texted. Nothing. She had a team member call. Still nothing. Two days before her gala, the chief program officer walked into her office and said they needed underwear.
Sattler has yelled five times in her life. Four of those, someone was in danger.
This was the fifth.
That night she drove to TJ Maxx, then Target, then Ross, and bought every pair off the shelves with her own money because she felt guilty about it. Then she apologized to everyone.
"I was not my best self in that moment," she said. "But they didn't notice anything was wrong until that."
She was still hitting goal. Still smiling at donors. The numbers gave everyone around her permission to assume she was fine.
A Bad Week Is Not Burnout
The word gets thrown around after every gala, so Sattler drew the clinical line.
The World Health Organization classifies burn-out as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, defined by three things: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about the job, and reduced professional efficacy. Chronic means three months or longer.
Post-event exhaustion is not burnout. A brutal December is not burnout. Four months of dreading your inbox and resenting people you used to like is burnout.
Sattler added a second distinction that reframed the room. Burnout and engagement are not opposite ends of one line. They flip inside the same week. A fundraiser can leave a donor meeting elated about a major gift she cultivated for 18 months, walk back into the building, and get yelled at about a missing microwave in the lobby. Both are true on the same Tuesday.
That is why fundraisers talk themselves out of the diagnosis. The good days are real, so the bad pattern never gets a name.
"All I Heard Was People Putting It Back on Me"
When Sattler was breaking in 2018 and 2019, the advice she got was rest more, sleep more, take better care of herself.
"All I heard was people putting it back on me," she said. "This is your problem to deal with."
She was emphatic that self-leadership still matters. Individuals have agency, boundaries they can set, requests they can make. What she rejected was the idea that it is sufficient.
"No matter how good you are, it's humanly impossible to do this work alone," she said.
The national data points the same direction. In Candid's fall 2024 survey of nonprofit employees, 67% said they were looking for new jobs or would be within a year, and only 32% planned to stay in the sector at all. The top reason was excessive workload and insufficient support at 59%, followed by limited advancement at 54% and unsupportive leadership at 52%. Inadequate compensation ranked fourth at 50%.
Workload and leadership both outranked money.
Sattler found the same thing in her interviews. Compensation came up constantly and was almost never the actual reason someone left. It was the last straw on an existing pile. If a fundraiser loves the job and feels respected, a few thousand dollars will not move her. If everything else is already broken, a denied raise walks her out the door.
Locally the math is harder. Sattler noted that 95 to 97% of Santa Clarita nonprofits have no full-time fundraiser at all, which means the executive director is wearing that hat. Shared leadership is the only version available.
Forty-one people registered for Wednesday's workshop. Twenty-five made it.
Sixteen nonprofit leaders signed up for 90 minutes on burnout and could not get out of the building to attend.
The Relationship That Decides Everything
The strongest predictor in the study was the relationship between the executive director and the fundraising leader.
What fundraisers said they needed was not praise. They wanted to be treated as a thought partner, to have their expertise in philanthropy valued, and to work for someone who respected fundraising as a discipline rather than tolerating it as a necessary evil. One participant told Sattler: "The times I felt most respected by my CEO are when I've been valued for my expertise, accomplishments, and experience. Not just treated as someone who fell into a role that anyone could do."
The gap is measurable. Nonprofit Quarterly's analysis of the UnderDeveloped data found 53% of executives described the relationship with their development director as strong, while only 41% of development directors agreed. The bosses think it is going better than the fundraisers do.
Sattler credits her own CEO at Covenant House with the years she got back. After her hospitalization in 2019 she told him she could not continue. He would not accept it, and offered to sit with her one hour every week until they had talked it all the way through. She had to find the courage to say the hard things. He had to sit there without cutting her off.
They had what she called gnarly talks. She stayed three more years.
When he left for the international office, she was handed an interim who blocked her from the board and did not understand the work. Her health fell apart. She left shortly after.
"When he was wrestling with me, we worked hard, we raised a lot of money, but he had my back, and that made all the difference," she said.
The Finding She Was Not Looking For
Conflict management surfaced on its own when Sattler analyzed her data, and it drew the clearest line between the two outcomes.
"Where there was avoided or ineffectively managed conflict, it escalated the scarcity pathway toward stress, to burnout, to turnover," she said. "Where conflict was safe and could be engaged in a healthy way, sustainability and engagement ensued."
She tracked roughly 100 working partnerships across her 20 participants, since most had worked at several organizations over careers of 15 to 20 years. Unresolved conflict was followed by turnover almost every time.
The conflicts fundraisers carry arrive from four directions: internal, when you are not the person you want to be; relational, with peers and direct reports; organizational, with boards and funders over roles and authority; and then the background hum of working in a field the world wishes did not have to exist.
Her test for whether it is safe to raise something is simple. If a supervisor has shown up for you before, give them the benefit of the doubt and have the conversation. They may fumble the first attempt. Go on the ride with them anyway.
If you do not believe your supervisor cares about you, Sattler said, that is your answer. She named it directly and did not soften it.
What It Costs, and What Protects You
One organization in the study grew from $10 million to $50 million during COVID and churned through fundraising leadership the entire time, because nobody funded the infrastructure under the growth. Sattler interviewed both the departing fundraiser and the CEO.
Once the camera was off, the CEO said: "I know I've starved the resource engine."
She estimated that losing that one fundraiser cost several million dollars in revenue the following year. Sattler's read was that 80% of that organization's 30 to 40 fundraisers were burned out and preparing to leave.
"The whole thing can fall down like a house of cards," she said.
The contrast came from the one participant of 20 who had never burned out. Sattler walked him through her framework and agreed with his own assessment. His dark moments never became seasons.
"In my darkest moments, I had people around me who knew that I respected them and they supported me," he told her. "I took care of them and they took care of me. And that's what kept us all going."
His team's average tenure was 17 years. His organization raised more money than any other in the study.
"This is not airy-fairy stuff," Sattler said. "That human-centered stewardship. The average tenure on his team was 17 years. And when you do that, you have exponentially more fundraising returns."
The other consistent buffer was peer community. Fundraisers who had people outside their own organization, people who had done the job and could hear them without flinching, stayed in the work longer. Sattler was clear it does not have to be a chapter meeting. A church group, a walking lunch, one mentor.
She still talks every other Friday with the woman who holds her old job at Covenant House. That woman called recently and said, "I lost my mind over underpants last week too."
Start Here This Week
If you are the one burning out
Name one boundary you will reinforce this week, and tell one person so it is real
Ask for the conversation with your supervisor, and frame it around the mission rather than your exhaustion
Find one fundraiser outside your organization and put a recurring walk or lunch on the calendar
The framing matters more than it should. Sattler tried "I'm exhausted" and got nowhere. What worked was this: "I love this work. It's not sustainable and I need more resources so we can meet our goals and keep this mission going." Same problem, and the second version handed her CEO something he could solve.
If you lead a fundraiser
Name the specific mismatch before fixing anything, whether it is workload, fairness, values, control, recognition, or community
Apply no addition without subtraction, so every new responsibility arrives with something removed
Decide whether you believe fundraising is a discipline, because your fundraiser can already tell
A pizza party does not fix a workload problem. Different mismatches need different repairs, and the wrong repair reads as an insult.
Sattler said she went looking for this research for one reason.
"I care deeply about fundraisers and I don't want the decision to be made for you."
Session Materials
Sattler's full presentation and the participant workbook are available to anyone who could not make it.
The Sustainable Fundraising Leader, the full 47-slide presentation
Participant Workbook
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