Is Your Fundraising Working, or Just Wearing You Out?

How to Measure Fundraising Success Beyond Dollars Raised

What does it really mean for fundraising to be “working”?

Most fundraisers are trained to answer that question by looking at external metrics: dollars raised, donor retention, number of asks, meetings held, emails sent. And while those numbers matter, they don’t tell the whole story.

In this episode of The Brave & Balanced Fundraiser, Erin McQuade-Wright invites you to look at fundraising success through a wider lens—one that includes not just outcomes, but internal cost. How are you sleeping? Are you able to rest when you’re off work? What’s happening in your nervous system as you move through donor conversations, deadlines, and expectations?

You’ll explore the difference between external metrics and internal metrics, how chronic stress and anxiety affect fundraising performance, and why a regulated nervous system is not a “nice to have,” but a professional asset. This episode is for fundraisers who are technically successful—and quietly exhausted—and who suspect there might be a more sustainable way to do this work.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your fundraising is working… or just wearing you out, this conversation is for you.

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Transcript

Erin McQuade-Wright 1:33

Welcome to the Brave and Balanced Fundraiser, the podcast I wish I'd had during my 15 years as a professional fundraiser. I'm your host, Erin McQuade Wright. This is your space to breathe, realign, and reconnect with a part of you that chose this work for a reason. Together we'll explore tools and practices that help you show up less stressed and spread thin and more grounded, brave, and on purpose. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Welcome back. If you're listening today while driving, walking, or making dinner, just taking a quiet moment to be with yourself, i'm really glad you're here. This podcast is for fundraisers who care deeply about their work and who are also tired of feeling like the cost of that work is landing on their own bodies, their own nervous systems, their own lives. If you've ever felt you love the mission, but you feel exhausted by the job. Or if your body has started talking to you and saying like, this is not sustainable. You are exactly who this space is for. And today's episode is not about fixing yourself or doing more. It's an invitation to look at your work with a little more honesty and a little more compassion. Today I wanna explore a question that sounds simple on the surface, but has much more depth than we usually give it. The question is, this: is your fundraising working? And on the surface, most of us think we already know how to answer that. We look at external metrics. How much money did we raise? Did we reach our goals? How many donors gave? How many new donors did we acquire? How many donors did we retain? How many donor meetings did we hold? Or how many events did we have? Bless you. If that's you.'cause I know events take a lot, right? What did the event net? Not what was the gross, but what did it net? Did we actually meet our goal and did we cover our expenses? Is there enough justification to continue to have this event? That's a big question in fundraising circles. So these metrics are familiar, they're accountable and they're what we're evaluated on. And to be clear, you know, they matter. External metrics absolutely have a place in fundraising, but here's what they don't tell us. They don't tell us what it's costing, the person doing this work, and if this person is going to be able to do that job for another year. Right. The average tenure for a fundraiser is 16 to 24 months. Super high turnover. So what I'm doing in this episode and in this podcast more broadly, is shining a light on the person doing the work because I believe that if we're able to retain our professional fundraisers and have realistic expectations for the work that they can do, that that fundraiser is going to be more happy, more present, more available for the work. The donor is going to be more happy, more engaged'cause they are able to actually build a relationship with the organization through the fundraising staff. The organization is gonna be happier because they're not churning through and having the heightened expenses of bringing on new fundraiser after new fundraiser and retraining and reintroducing to donors each time. I think it has the potential. To have a trickle down effect that's actually going to be helpful for the entire nonprofit ecosystem. And so what we're starting with is the internal metrics of you, the fundraiser. So how are you sleeping? Are you taking time to move your body in ways that feel supportive? Are you checking email when you're technically off work? Are you able to rest without guilt? What is the quality of your relationships at work and at home? What does your nervous system feel like most days? Are you regulated, able to rest to, to sleep well and digest, or are you constantly on edge feeling like you are waking up with a, an alert feeling in your body like your heartbeat is coming out of your chest are you practicing ways to come back into balance? Or are you living in a low grade state of anxiety that spills into your personal life? So today when I'm asking, is your fundraising working? These are the metrics I'm curious about for you, and here's the uncomfortable truth, you can be meeting your fundraising goals and still be quietly unraveling and I'm raising my hand for this part, like this was me. I know this through lived experience and through the chaos that was happening in my body as I was raising millions of dollars simultaneously. You can be successful on paper and depleted in your body. You can love the mission and resent the job, and many fundraisers are incredibly competent and deeply exhausted, and I think this plays into what we see over and over again in terms of the average tenure of a fundraiser being 16 to 24 months. That's not normal. Even in the nonprofit sector, that is a much higher rate of churn. And when pressure lives on the outside and we're checking boxes like deadlines, numbers, expectations, goals, that pressure moves inward work, stress doesn't stay neatly at work. It follows you at home. It shows up in your sleep, in your relationships, and your health. I was meeting with my book club today, which has nothing to do with fundraising, but we were talking about the different types of jobs where you can leave it at work when you go home. You know, a lot of these are physical labor types of jobs, but my husband is a nurse. He's got that kind of job. It can be really stressful and he's working a lot of hours, but when he leaves work, that work does not follow him. It doesn't come home with him. There's not a whole bunch of emails that he has to attend to and people reaching out with after hours requests, right? That's the kind of job that you can leave at work. So what, how do you approach fundraising? Because I've had fundraising jobs that are the kind of job you can leave at work. And I've also had fundraising jobs that are the kind of job that follows you at home, where you get emails from your supervisor into the evening, into the weekends. Sometimes in my career in fundraising, I had a strong boundary where I would say, Hey, if it's okay with you, I, I'd like to, to set the culture in my team that I don't respond to or send emails outside of work hours. Great, Erin, that works. Let's do that. And I've also had jobs that felt so deeply unsafe during the workday that there was a feeling of, yeah, better, not better, not ignore an email that could come back on you. And I unfortunately was not the kind of leader that prohibited my team from doing that kind of work. So even sometimes when I would say, Hey, we don't, we don't answer emails after a certain hour, I would have staff members that were doing that because they had a fear that if they weren't responsive to a donor, that they would lose their job. It wasn't true, and I would point blank tell them it's not true that your job is threatened if you don't answer emails at all hours, but, if we feel in our nervous system like we're not safe, then it can make a whole lot of sense that we have to answer right now, we have to be responsive in the moment we have to not let an email sit for five minutes before it gets responded to that kind of equation can make sense in our head if we don't feel safe. And over time the nervous system learns a story. I'm always behind. This isn't safe. I can't rest. I can't afford to rest. And here's where this matters for fundraising itself. Even when you're saying the right things, your body is communicating something too. And donors don't just hear your words. They feel your presence. And if you have this chaotic energy of. Things are really bad. I need to, I need to go, go, go, go, go. Raise this money. That can be really off-putting. You can be really off putting to be around for a donor, for a colleague, we feel that energy in each other and on a nervous system level. Humans co-regulate with each other. Our nervous systems co-regulate. And a dysregulated nervous system in you doesn't create ease or openness in me. It creates subtle pressure, and this is all happening below the level of our conscious awareness. So it can sound on a conscious level like, I don't know, there's just something about that person that I don't like. Their energy is off. I'd rather hang out with other people. But on the other hand, if a fundraiser has a more regulated nervous system and tends to be more present, they can be more creative, they can be more resilient because they've done the work of regulating their nervous system, and that fundraiser doesn't make the donors know means something about their own worth. They're more willing to make the next ask. It's just a calmer environment. And ironically, and this is important, working from that internal balance often leads to better external results because calm fundraisers see more possibilities. They can make more asks, they can recover faster from rejection.'cause they're not making it mean anything about themselves. And they can sustain their effort over time because they're not getting their sense of wellbeing from whether they reached the goal or not, or whether the donor said yes or not. So when we ask whether fundraising is working, I think we need to ask two questions at once: Is it working externally and is it working internally?'cause if you're killing it at work, raising all the money. But you're depleting your adrenals. Guess what? It's not working. If your numbers look good, but your nervous system is fried, that's information. It's feedback. If your metrics are strong, but your life feels small and tense, that's information too. Nothing is wrong with you, but your body is giving you data. And you get to choose what to do with it. And for a lot of years what I did with it was steamroll it. Go right over it. I don't see you. I don't hear you. Fingers in my ears. La la, la, la, la, la, la. Nope. I refuse to listen. And that's okay. You just play that out and see how it works. It didn't work well for me. It built more stress, more tension, more pressure, and made me less fun to be around for sure at work and at home. Made me sleep worse, made it harder for me to recover from a cold or COVID, right? So as we close today, I wanna leave you with a few takeaways that you can simply sit with. There's no action plan required. First, external success doesn't tell the whole story. Numbers matter, but they don't measure sustainability or wellbeing. Second, your body is part of the system. Sleep, stress, rest and regulation are not personal failures. They are signals and they're essential for you to have sustainability in the field of fundraising. Third, a regulated nervous system is a professional asset. Presence, steadiness and emotional resilience directly affect your effectiveness as a fundraiser. Fourth, fundraising that truly works supports your life, not just your goals. If success comes at the cost of your health and relationships, it's worth reexamining that definition of working. And fifth awareness comes before change. Simply noticing how your internal metrics line up is a perfect first step. If this episode resonated with you, I hope it offered you permission to be honest with yourself and maybe a little kinder too. You don't have to burn yourself out to prove your dedication. You don't have to sacrifice your wellbeing to be effective. Fundraising can work externally and internally, and that's what we explore here on the Brave and Balanced Fundraiser. Thank you for spending this time with me and take good care of yourself. I'll see you next time.