Skip to Main Content

What to Do In Your First 90 Days as a New Development Director

11 min read
January 24, 2025
Abby Jarvis

You nailed the interview. Signed the offer letter. It’s your first day as a new development director… now what?

If you’re starting a new role as a nonprofit development director, here are some important items to add to your to-do list.

First 30 Days as a New Development Director: Meet Your Team and Learn the Basics

Getting yourself oriented to your new organization and the people you’ll be working with is your primary during your first 30 days. Here are some items you’ll want to prioritize.

Understand Your Organization

You probably got a solid introduction to your new organization during the interview process, and now it’s time to take that to the next level.

Start by digging into your organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan. You’ll also want to review your bylaws before your first board meeting!

Then, get familiar with current programs, services, and more specific details about the specific community you serve. That will be handy as you work through the most important item here—meeting with other staff members to learn about their roles, their goals, and how they all work together.

Start these meetings with some simple questions, like:

  • What do you do?
  • What fundraising activities, methods, and strategies do you think are working well?
  • What isn’t working well? How would you improve it?
  • How have you and other development staff worked together in the past?
  • How can I help you?

These are just some ideas, of course—the main thing to remember is that you’re learning and building relationships. Ask questions that will help you achieve those goals!

Introduce Yourself to Other Important Figures

You’ve probably already met the board—if you haven’t, now’s the time to do so. If you have, schedule one-to-one meetings with key board members to review important material and ask questions. 

Any questions you ask here should help you understand your organization’s broader goals, past and future activities, and place in your broader community. This is also an excellent opportunity to start talking with your board about how they’ll support your fundraising efforts!

If appropriate, introduce yourself to other important people with whom you’ll be working. Examples of people you’ll want to meet include accountants, consultants, partner organizations, community sponsors, and other key figures.

Audit Current Fundraising Efforts

This step goes beyond your budget and delves into important nonprofit KPIs that will give you a picture of your organization’s health. Analyze important metrics like your donor acquisition and retention rates, recurring revenue, donor lifetime, etc.

If you can, get granular here! What’s your donor retention rate for different campaigns? What percentage of your members upgrade their memberships every year? How long does the average volunteer stay involved with your work?

These insights will be useful to you as you assess upcoming events and appeals. Can you improve retention by reimagining the donor experience in your next campaign? Can you rework your next fundraising letter to appeal more to your supporters’ motivations? 

Engage Your Greater Community

Now that you’ve met with the organization’s staff and board members, it’s time to introduce yourself to your broader community. This includes a few different groups—volunteers, donors, members, clients, and other types of supporters are all going to be interested in a new leader at the nonprofit they love. You have a few options for doing this: try introducing yourself through an email, a newsletter update, a social media video, or on other channels. You may even want to use several different outlets!

As you introduce yourself to your community, make a concerted effort to start building relationships with some of your most engaged supporters. Other people working at your organization will help you understand who to talk with! Focus on connecting with major donors, key volunteers, loyal donors, and other important figures through calls, personal emails, or even coffee meetings.

While you’re at it, try and identify lapsed and at-risk supporters and plan how you’ll re-engage them. These are important groups of people that may give you insight into how you can improve your organization’s outreach and retention efforts.

Evaluate Your Budget

Take some time to review and understand your organization’s financial records, revenue sources, and fundraising goals. While you’re doing this, take some time to understand where and how your predecessor spent their development budget, what worked well, and what can be improved. Did specific tactics, like buying ads or planning events, perform well? 

After you’ve established past performance, review your organization’s current development goals and progress toward those goals. Do you need to adjust your strategies? Based on past performance, can you amend the current fundraising plan to be more effective? Do you have any spare budget (wouldn’t that be something!) that you can put to good use?

Evaluate Your Fundraising Tech Stack

First things first: make sure you have the appropriate login credentials and permissions for your fundraising tools and programs. This includes everything from your online fundraising platform to your CRM to your event management tools

Once you’ve got access to everything, you’ll be able to conduct a high-level overview of those platforms. Review any and all tools your organization uses for fundraising, community management, volunteer management and scheduling, communications, events, etc. 

While you’re looking around, ask yourself if you can simplify anything. Are you paying for redundant tools? Can any of your tools integrate with each other so you can manage your data more easily? Does one of your platforms include tools or features you’re not using to the fullest extent yet? You may notice lots of ways to make your day-to-day job a little easier!

The goal of bringing together different tools, capabilities, and features into a single, integrated system sits at the core of what we do at Neon One. So if you’re looking for ways to make your day-to-day job easier—whether you work in donor management, fundraising, memberships, event planning, performing arts, or volunteer coordinating—we’ve got the platform to make that happen.

You can learn more about Neon One here. Or you can register up for a quick-and-easy, 30-minute group demo of the tool that serves as the hub for our entire system: Neon CRM. We look forward to hearing from you!

See Neon CRM in Action!

In just 30 minutes, you’ll learn how Neon CRM empowers nonprofit organizations across the US and Canada to manage donors, members, volunteers, grants, and fundraising campaigns!

Join an Upcoming Group Session

Days 31–60 as a New Development Director: Strategizing and Building Relationships

You spent the first 30 days learning about your organization and its inner workings, getting acquainted with your new community, and investigating past fundraising performance. Now it’s time to put all that research to work!

Develop a Draft Fundraising Plan

You’ve just done a ton of research into your organization’s fundraising history, what’s worked and hasn’t worked, budgets, channel performance, and fundraising KPIs. Now, use that research to set goals for fundraising, supporter acquisition and retention, your recurring program, and other relevant activities.

Once you’ve got your goals, you can put together a plan for how you’ll reach them. This is the time to create or revise existing fundraising strategies and tactics based on what you’ve learned about your organization and your community.

Audit Your Database and Other Tools

Remember all those logins you gathered in the first few days in your position? Keep them handy! Now that you’re familiar with your nonprofit database and other tools, it’s time to audit your current situation. You’ll want to review: 

  • Different supporter segments you’ll use for fundraising, engagement, and community outreach
  • Data entry practices and other processes your organization has in place to keep your donor data in good shape
  • Any duplicates or inaccurate records
  • Any outdated or unutilized lists, forms, workflows, or other settings and assets
  • Any user accounts that should be deactivated or deleted

While you’re there, familiarize yourself with your tools’ reporting tools and build any necessary reports or dashboards you’ll use in your work.

Build Internal Partnerships

In your first month, you met everyone at your organization and got a feel for their role, how they work with you and other development staff, and how you can work together in the future. Take it to the next level by having deeper conversations with the people you’ll be working with most closely. Now’s the time to form any teams or committees you’ll need to execute your fundraising and communications plans!

During these conversations, answer questions about new fundraising tactics or goals, review any new processes, and generally get on the same page about your future plans. 

Days 61–90 as a New Development Director: Taking Action

First, learning, then planning. Now’s time for the good stuff—putting it all into action. 

Launch Quick Wins

You’ve done a lot of work and intentionally established good relationships with the people in your community. Now, build momentum (and excitement!) with an easy win. This doesn’t need to be anything momentous. Even small improvements, like refreshing your thank-you letters or refreshing your online donation form, can make a huge difference.

Here’s an idea that can both build enthusiasm and help you reach your goals: do a small test run of a small donor retention initiative! Try something like sending a brief survey to repeat donors or mailing handwritten thank-you cards to new supporters. 

And get others involved! This is a great way to boost donor retention, build connections, and get your staff involved in something that will put a smile on their face.

Refine Your Development Plan

Review your progress toward your goals and adjust your approach and long-term development plan accordingly. Do you need to adjust your campaign plan? Should you tweak your timelines? Are the milestones you’ve planned to hit reasonable?

Make any necessary changes, then finalize and present a detailed plan to your board. Discuss your development roadmap, implement any necessary last-minute changes, and get the board’s buy-in.

Deepen Board Engagement

Now that you’ve got your board on… board (there’s got to be a better way to say that) and built some enthusiasm with a couple of quick wins, it’s time to get them involved in fundraising.

Fundraising is a shared responsibility, but board members may be apprehensive about actually jumping in and getting involved. There are a few steps you can take to help them overcome any nervousness they might have around fundraising.

First, share impact stories and key talking points with your board. This will accomplish two things: it will get them excited about fundraising, and it will give them useful information they can share with their friends and family. Asking for support will be easier if they can share stories about how and why a donation will make a difference!

Host a mini development training for board members to help them understand how they can engage their networks, learn some simple best practices, and get comfortable with raising money for your organization. This is a great opportunity to share the different ways they can help: they can host DIY fundraisers for you, sell event tickets, introduce you to potential major donors, and even take smaller steps like sharing your posts and appeals on their social media channels.

The goal here is to give your board members specific examples of how they can support your fundraising activities. At the end of the mini-summit, ask them to commit to one or two different activities. 

Set Long-term Goals

Even if it’s early in the year, it’s never too early to begin planning for your next fiscal year. Focus on setting reasonable goals and strengthening areas where previous strategies have been weak. If you’ve historically struggled with donor retention, for example, one of your long-term goals may be to improve your retention rate by 8%. If one of your events is popular with your community but doesn’t raise much more than you spend, one of your goals may be to raise 15% more without increasing your event budget.

As you’re planning, get your board, staff, and any relevant volunteers up to speed on your long-term goals and talk about which people will be responsible for making them reality. Establish regular check-ins for everyone to share their progress, troubleshoot issues, and adjust tactics if needed.

You’re Going to Do an Amazing Job

Listen. We know that starting a role as a new development director can be intimidating. There’s a lot to do, a lot to learn, and a lot of relationships to build. You’re going to be great.

Want a steady supply of other useful content like this? Check out our monthly newsletter! We’ll send you practical articles like this, links to interesting nonprofit news, invitations to practical webinars, and other helpful content.

Our Newsletter is Great, and We Only Send it Once a Month — We Promise

Want help generating ideas, honing your strategies, and keeping up on the latest trends? Our monthly nonprofit newsletter has it all—without blowing up your inbox.

Sign me up!

Join the discussion in our Slack channel on connected fundraising

Looking to become a more connected nonprofit leader?

Join 73,000+ of your peers getting industry news, tips, and resources straight to their inbox.