Network—even when you don’t have to.
When I started my career in fundraising, I only ever talked to my colleagues. Luckily, I worked for a large organization, so that meant getting to know varied and interesting people. But it wasn’t until I started looking for new opportunities for professional connection that I realized how much I’d been missing.
These days, the best part of any day is time spent with someone from our amazing community. Whether I’m talking to someone I’ve just met or someone I’ve known for years, I learn something new. I get insights into what’s been working on-the-ground. I pick up new ideas to test. I get peace-of-mind that I’m not the only one experiencing challenges. And I get reenergized about just how much potential we have to create a more just and healthy world.
If you’re someone who’s talked to me lately, you know just how passionate I’ve become that everyone should be doing this, not just your friendly neighborhood consultants.
Building community across our sector is not just a nice-to-have; it’s essential.
Build your network for you.
Let’s start with you as a human and professional. Regardless of your role, stage in your career, or next career goals, you should be spending time with peers outside your organization every month.
Fill up your cup. This work can be difficult, practically and emotionally. Sometimes when we’re steeped in it, we can feel isolated, overwhelmed, and even hopeless. Spending time with people who are walking in your shoes is a powerful antidote. I guarantee, no matter what you are going through, someone in our community is going through it too—and someone has come out on the other side with ideas. Whatever you hope for, someone else out there hopes for it too.
Learn from peers. Through my conversations with hundreds of fundraisers, I keep seeing more of our sector’s generosity. Few of us learned fundraising through academics. We figured it out as we did the work, learning from others who showed us the way. Those impulses—to keep learning and keep sharing—continue today, even as our field has made its way into university curricula. Working out a corporate benefits matrix? Stuck on a CRM report? Wondering how to approach a local funder? Phone a friend who works at another nonprofit. You’ll be surprised just how much people will share—and how much easier your job will become.
Hone your relationship-building skills. In addition to learning new skills through peer advice, networking builds your skills through practice as well. By deciding who to reach out to, writing that email, sparking that conversation, asking those questions, and keeping in touch, you are not just thinking about fundraising; you are doing it. You can use peer-to-peer networking to practice skills (e.g., preparing for conversations with intentionality, asking great questions, sending prompt follow ups) and build confidence (e.g., reaching out and asking for meetings with strangers, getting conversations started, moving beyond the small talk to lasting connection).
Open doors for your career. Lastly, and most obviously, when you build relationships across our sector, you create pathways for your own growth and development. That could look like meeting a mentor, gaining perspectives that help you grow in your current role, or getting connected to your next role.
Here are a few tips:
Don’t wait until you are job searching! Network all the time.
Conferences and events are great. 1:1 conversations are better. Make time for both.
Keep track of your list of nonprofit friends. That could be in your LinkedIn, your contacts, or (a fundraising favorite…) a spreadsheet.
Within that, maintain a shortlist of people that you want to be sure to keep in touch with over the years. Be intentional about how you do that.
Set goals, just like you would for your fundraising. How many meetings do you want to have per month? What do you want to learn?
Don’t overthink it. The best way to start is to start. Pick one former colleague, one interesting person you met at a conference, one fundraiser you’ve been admiring from afar—and reach out.
Build your network for your mission.
The best part about building your network is that it benefits more than you. In an age where so many forces are trying to divide us, networking forges the trust in community that we need to move toward solutions.
Besides everyone-should-network-always, the other hill I will die on is that nonprofits are not in competition with each other. Fundraising is not about redividing a fixed pie of philanthropic resources. It is a collective endeavor in resource mobilization to build market share for the practice of investing in the future of our society and world. There is no law of nature that requires charitable giving to stay around 2% of GDP. Working together, we can grow the pie.
With that in mind, don’t just network with people who work in ‘non-competitor’ sectors. Go find your peers within your mission area. Working to protect the environment? Great. Your peers in the space are your allies. Together, you are amplifying the message of this important work and the nonprofit sector as a change agent. What can you learn from each other?
Forging relationships within your cause area will likely surprise you. To be sure, humans will human, and ‘politics’ will emerge. But more often than not, you’ll gain new perspective on the role of your organization within an ecosystem of people working toward the same end—and even bigger ideas about the potential for impact. You may uncover ways to collaborate and create even more impact.
Build your network to create hope.
More than anything, by building connections across our sector, we dismantle the narratives that have defined it since inception: that we get the leftover resources to do the work that governments and companies can’t or won’t do; that we are begging for resources; and that if we have too many resources, something must be wrong.
Around the world, including in the U.S., nonprofits have unleashed the power of community to create change. We can’t solve all the problems, but we can be the tip of the spear: the catalyst that moves hope from idea to practice to reality.
So many of our conversations about 2025 were about loss and scarcity: the funds that were cut, the programs that were dismantled, and the organizations that may need to shutter.
In 2026, let’s talk about the reverse: what we are gaining and what we are building, the donors that stepped up, the new friends we found when we got our message out there, and the impact we created when we figured out new ways to generate revenue. Let’s talk about how, despite appearances, the U.S. remains an overwhelmingly resource-abundant place—with a deep tradition of generosity across all our geographies and cultures.
In community, let’s remind each other of the abundance we have and that we, as fundraisers, can mobilize it for what matters.
