Stop trying to find one person to do it all. See how a fractional approach allows you to engage multiple experts to manage development, technology, and operations, freeing you to focus on what matters most.
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In Nonprofit Leaders’ Top Concerns Entering 2025, the Urban Institute confirmed what we are experiencing: nonprofits are struggling to meet the growing demand for services.
In its 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Report, the consulting firm Forvis Mazars found that 77% of nonprofits surveyed were coping with increased demand for programs and services, while 65% felt “hampered by staffing shortages.”
It’s a crisis of capacity that lands squarely on the need for an affordable and flexible, yet competent and reliable, approach to staffing.
In this article, we’ll cover why it’s more urgent than ever for nonprofit leaders to reimagine staffing models and consider options like fractional staffing to fill gaps and build capacity.
Consider the typical nonprofit organizational chart – executive director, program manager, communications coordinator, development director, administrative assistant, etc.
These are roles that we have become accustomed to seeing in our nonprofits. They form a familiar staffing model centered on recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and retaining full-time employees.
Now, imagine each of those roles broken into a set of skills and areas of expertise.
For example, “development director” likely represents annual giving programs, major giving, legacy giving, fundraising events, and stewardship.
Depending on an organization’s existing staff resources, fractional team members could be engaged to address all or just one or a few of those areas, for as much and as long as an organization needs.
Fractional team members can support an entire functional area or be integrated into a larger team that includes employees and even other contract workers.
In other words, a fractional approach isn’t an either/or proposition. It is one of the best “both-and” solutions to the nonprofit staffing conundrum.
Fractional staffing is an extraordinarily efficient, flexible, and budget-friendly strategy to build your nonprofit team.
Earmarking resources to hire a full-time nonprofit professional can present a huge financial lift for an organization.
Considering the high cost of hiring, estimated by the Society for Human Resource Management to be as high as three or even four times the salary of the position, the pressure to find the right fit the first time is immense.
Nonprofit fractional team building strips away the limitations of traditional hiring practices. Fractional expertise makes it possible to engage high-level professionals in multiple functional areas for exactly the amount of time and duration you need – no more, no less.
No more wasting your budget; instead, pinpoint your hard-won resources toward a variety of critical needs, from nonprofit technology and systems to development and communications.
Hiring presents many challenges – including finding someone to fill many needed functions.
How do you decide which area of expertise is most critical when you have so many gaps to fill? That very question warrants seemingly endless discussion. Is it possible to find one professional with the capacity to work wonders across several functional areas? Unlikely.
But reality shows that hiring one person to wear too many hats puts you on a fast track to lackluster results, board disappointment, staff burnout – and the need to get back on the very expensive recruiting train to search for a replacement.
Fractional staffing allows you to engage with the targeted expertise you need exactly when you need it.
Nonprofit fractional team building is highly flexible, too.
The processes involved in onboarding or offboarding are incredibly easy. You can have an experienced nonprofit professional up and adding value to your organization within days. When your needs change, your flexible team can be adjusted with little, if any, disruption.
This flexibility matters when you’re faced with capacity constraints and need someone to step in right away.
I can see how, to the unfamiliar eye, nonprofit fractional staffing might look a lot like a consulting arrangement. After all, high-level expertise is a huge advantage in using a fractional approach. The difference, however, is monumental.
Nonprofit fractional team members are prepared to implement your strategies. They execute.
Consultants are a fantastic resource, using their experience and guidance to shine a light on new paths to success, re-energizing your leadership, and helping your team set an ambitious course for the future.
What they often don’t do is help you get the job done. When you assemble a fractional team, you aren’t just filling knowledge gaps – you’re filling workforce gaps as well.
Nonprofit fractional team members are also prepared to help your nonprofit scale up. The flexibility and expertise of your nonprofit fractional team give you the breathing room to build a stronger in-house team – something most consultants don’t necessarily do.
Fractional team members are a valuable resource to help your employees develop their own skills, implement nonprofit best practices, and make good use of systems and strategies designed to support your work over the long haul.
With a fractional approach, you can have both budget relief and enough staffing.
Fractional team building is an opportunity to engage the expertise and manpower you need at a price point that you can afford. As your needs change – even within the context of a single year – your team can adapt to fill the gaps at hand.
This is a great question because fractional staffing works in whatever configuration you need it to!
Here’s an example. To run a successful fundraising program, you need both fundraising skills and administrative skills. Fractional staffing gives you both.
When you pair a strategic Fractional Development Officer with an execution-focused Nonprofit Virtual Assistant (NPVA®) from The More than Giving Co., your fractional development officer executes the plan they develop, while the NPVA handles the details — and you, the executive director, focus on the relationships.
This is how you get senior-level expertise for less than the cost of one junior hire. This often requires board approval, and we’re happy to help you make the financial case.
A fractional development officer can get a diversified fundraising program off the ground. A nonprofit technology expert can help you optimize your systems, including fundraising platforms like Donorbox, in this digital age.
Communications and marketing specialists can help you develop compelling content while navigating outreach via email and social media. Our specially trained Nonprofit Virtual Assistants (NPVAs®) can keep mailings, events, data management – and overflowing email inboxes – on track.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but even so, are you beginning to see how a nonprofit fractional professional could enhance your organization’s operations?
Take a look at this chart for a clear-cut comparison of nonprofit fractional staffing vs. traditional staffing:
As a nonprofit leader, you know what your organization needs to go from surviving to thriving, and frankly, the formula hasn’t changed: knowledge and people power are as crucial to success as they ever were.
What must change, given the environment we currently operate in, is the solution we lean on to fulfill our missions. You and your colleagues in the sector deserve a new approach to team building, and a nonprofit fractional staffing strategy is the key to shifting from just making do to making strides as a sustainable organization.
What do you have to gain from fractional staffing?
Everything. Nonprofit fractional staffing is about as low-risk, high-reward a strategy available today to staff your organization. Wherever your nonprofit is on the spectrum – large, small, expanding, contracting – a fractional professional can help.
Learn more about The More than Giving Co.’s Nonprofit Virtual Assistants and fractional staffing here.
And for comprehensive fundraising tools to help your team reach your goals, sign up for Donorbox and start fundraising in under 15 minutes.
Vicki Burkhart is the founder and CEO of The More Than Giving Co., a nonprofit fractional
staffing firm providing nonprofits with affordable, on-demand staffing solutions to supplement
the bandwidth and skillsets of their current team. Our Nonprofit Systems Optimization (NPSO)
professionals possess the nonprofit technology expertise necessary to ensure that your
organization has the right technology, and the staff to operate it.
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