Fundraiser Productivity: Do Less, Raise More

By Amanda L. Cole

In most fundraising shops, the calendar is packed — but the results don’t always match the activity. Reports get written. Events get planned. Meetings fill the day. But it’s harder to say what actually moved a donor.

That disconnect — between visible effort and real impact — was at the center of the session, “How Top Fundraisers Work Differently (And How You Can Too),” at AFP ICON 2026 with Alice Ferris, ACFRE, CFRE, partner at GoalBusters Consulting and Chad Barger, ACFRE, CFRE, owner and chief strategist at Productive Fundraising. Top fundraisers, they argued, don’t win by doing more. They win by protecting their capacity, eliminating low-value work, and building systems they can sustain.

“In fundraising, we do a lot of stuff,” Barger said. “We’re not really sure if it’s the right stuff.”

Start With What’s Actually Broken

To be productive, fundraisers need time, energy, and attention — and when one is missing, the work breaks down.

“I'm usually [lacking] attention,” Barger said. “[I have] pretty good self care, have OK time, but sometimes I just sit down and I just can't get it done.”

“For me, it's usually energy because I'm constantly on the little hamster wheel, and I am very bad about taking time for rest and re-energizing,” Ferris added.

1. Time — Control Your Capacity

The first shift top fundraisers make is treating their capacity as finite. Ferris recommends a simple one-week time audit to understand where your time actually goes.

Personally, Ferris learned how often she had played Gardenscapes on her phone.

“And so I uninstalled it, and it was amazing how many hours I got back,” she said.

For others, Barger said, the usual outcome is how much time is spent in meetings.

The fix isn’t complicated. Every meeting should have a decision to make. If it doesn’t, speak up.

“If you see this happening, simply say, ‘It looks like we need a little bit more information here,” he said. “‘Something's missing. We don't have it. We need to make this decision. Who’s going to do what by when to ensure that when we meet again, we can move it forward?’”

From there, top fundraisers schedule donor work like it matters — because it does. Time blocking has helped Ferris write development assessment reports for 20 public radio stations that had lost federal funding. Otherwise, she admits, she wouldn’t have waited until the day they were due.

“Does that mean I bumped some meetings? Yes, it did,” she said. “Does it mean that there were things that I didn't take on because the time was blocked out? Absolutely.”

2. Attention — Eliminate Pseudo-Fundraising Boondoggles

The second shift is harder, but top fundraisers can let go of work that looks productive but isn’t.

Barger calls it “pseudo-fundraising,” borrowing from Cal Newport’s concept of pseudo-productivity — “the illusion of progress through visible but ineffective effort.”

In nonprofit terms, that includes:

Committee meetings that exist because they always have
Reports no one reads
Databases full of unqualified “prospects”
Plans that sit on a shelf
Events that barely break even

“I call them boondoggles,” Barger said. “... To do work of little or no practical value merely to keep or look busy. We don't want to do this, but sometimes we fall into this trap.”

Part of the issue is structural. The unrealistic expectation that nonprofits should do everything. But that’s not how results work. Pareto’s Principle is 20% of the work yields 80% of the results. The other 80% of the work is pseudo-fundraising boondoggles, Barger said.

“You need to know what this is at your nonprofit,” he said. “You need to do the analysis. What works? What raises the bulk of the dollars here? And then have those conversations internally of, ‘How do we focus more on these activities that really move the needle, and less on these things that are basically busy work?’”

Barger noted three areas — spanning events, stewardship, and major gifts — where simplicity consistently outperforms complexity.

Events

Donors don’t want another gala.

“They do not say, ‘I want to get all dressed up and go to the hotel ballroom that I go to 10 other events each year for and eat the same chicken dinner, white rice with mystery sauce,’” Barger said. “[That’s] not high on their list, but what do we do? And how do we expect to meet new donors? Oh, they're going to come to our big event,” Barger said.

What they do want is smaller, more personal experiences. Think backyard gatherings, living-room conversations, or small hosted events, which are easier to run since a board member or major donor hosts and often covers the bill.

“There's some kind of programming, some kind of food,” he said. “In the middle, we talked a little bit about the nonprofit. The host says why they support the nonprofit, and we leave it at that, and we follow up with them afterwards. They work really well.”

Stewardship

Most nonprofits stop at the thank-you.

“You have two responsibilities after a donor makes a gift: Thank them and report back,” Barger said. “Ninety percent of nonprofits only do one. … Ninety percent of donors say they would give again and give more if they got a specific impact report on what you did with [their] money. This would fix retention, but we don't take the time.”

Simple touches can go further than polished collateral. His cycle: a personalized gift acknowledgement letter (preferably hand signed), a personal video that shares impact, an impact postcard to close the loop, and then the next ask.

“We've heard of the fundraising law of seven,” he said. “[Donors] want to hear from us seven times between asks. If you're doing these four plus all the general stuff, you're going to get to that seven.”

Major Gifts

You don’t need a complex system. His major gift plan, which even works for small nonprofits, includes identifying the organization’s top 20 current donors and top 20 prospects, assigning them to someone, ensuring they receive “meaningful engagement” quarterly, and soliciting when the timing is right.

The shift from visits to meaningful engagements is happening across the sector, he said. A driving force is the difficulty to set up donor visits since the pandemic.

“It's a five-minute conversation when you bump into them in the coffee shop,” Barger said. “Maybe you happen to know which coffee shop they go to on the way to work, and you happen to be there. … [It’s a] 10-minute phone call just to check in. [An] email exchange — it's more than two sentences, it's back and forth, talking about your mission. They're all meaningful.”

But Ferris cautioned this advice doesn’t mean focusing only on major gifts. Small-dollar donors are a critical part of the puzzle and no longer giving at the levels they used to, according to sector trends.

“If you have 1,000 donors that give $100, and then you have another organization that has one donor that gives $100,000 and both of you lose one donor — who would you rather be?” she said. “So it is about doing the analysis of what are those efforts that are actually making an impact on your organization?”

3. Energy — Design for Sustainability, Not Heroics

The final shift is about how work is structured over time. Fundraisers often rely on bursts of effort — year-end pushes, campaign sprints — followed by burnout. Ferris argued for a different model: shorter planning cycles built around human behavior.

Start with developing annual or what she called “big rock” goals that must happen that year, but then break each into quarterly goals to help you reach the big rock goals.

“We have a spike of activity when things are novel, and we have a spike of activity when we’re hitting a deadline,” Ferris said. “So the idea of the 12-week year is that if we can shorten the period, we can have additional spikes of activity.”

Each week, top fundraisers select tasks that move a big rock and put them on your calendar, but make you daily undertaking realistic.

“And it's not 16 things,” she said. “It's one to three things because that's one of the other things we tend to do, is that we have a bias as humans to think that we can do more than we can actually do. … So if we give ourselves finish lines that we can actually hit, it's far more motivating, and we become more productive.”

But there is also flexibility in this model. Give yourself grace during busy weeks by putting these goals on the back burner, protecting your capacity to avoid burnout, and assessing your progress when needed.

“The 12-week year is not a magic number. It's not sacred. If you decide eight weeks into this now you've pretty much done the things that you were going to do for that quarter, reset early. If you get to the end of the quarter and you're like, ‘I have not made progress as much as I would like on these things,’ extend the quarter.”

Life‑Work Harmony, Not Balance

Fundraisers can’t control the economy or every board decision, but they can control how they allocate their attention and energy. That’s the part of the job where top fundraisers really do work differently.

“Balance can be a noun or it can also be a verb,” she said. “So we are encouraging you to think about balance as a verb, where it’s something that’s active and needs to be maintained and handled at all times.”

Instead of striving for work-life balance, Barger suggested reframing it to work-life harmony.

In a big campaign week, the work side will dominate; the following week needs to tilt back toward rest and family if you want to stay in the field. In the end, decide what deserves your capacity — then protect it. Focus on high‑impact activities. And remember that sustainable, consistent systems outperform heroic intensity.

“It's OK if they're not in balance — it can tilt. The week of my major fundraising event, I'm definitely on the work side. That's the 60-, 70- hour week. That next week needs the tilt the other way. … So they can go back and forth, not perfectly balanced, but harmony — that can be lasting.”