Jesse Lane, thank you for taking the time to share what's happening inside SG. You were refreshingly candid — and what stands out most is the tension you named directly: your team is stretched thin, you're navigating significant staff transition, and your branding isn't doing the heavy lifting it should. That combination is more connected than it might seem at first glance. What follows is a diagnostic built around your specific situation, not nonprofit organizations in general. Let's get into it.
Jesse Lane founder of goodmakerU, has a message to walk you through your report to let you know whats here, and how to use it.
With more than five staff departures and a team you yourself describe as stretched by busyness, SG is showing clear signs of an organization where the people doing the work are running on fumes. You flagged both the inability to pay people competitively and the gap in key hires as active pain points — and those two things together create a cycle that's hard to break without a deliberate strategy. When compensation lags and seats stay empty, the people who remain absorb more than they should, morale quietly erodes, and the organization becomes increasingly dependent on a shrinking core. The staff transition you mentioned in your open answer isn't just a logistical headache — it's a signal that SG is at a staffing inflection point. Until the team situation stabilizes, every other growth initiative runs at reduced capacity.
A donor retention rate in the 11–20% range is one of the most urgent numbers in this entire diagnostic. The nonprofit industry median sits around 43–45%, and SG is operating well below that — which means for every ten donors who gave last year, eight or nine didn't come back. That's not a fundraising volume problem, it's a stewardship and relationship problem. Your fundraising efforts not producing enough to fund the vision is a pain point you named explicitly, and this retention gap is a major reason why. When you're constantly refilling the donor pool from scratch, you're running a much more expensive and exhausting acquisition machine than you need to be. Given your team is already maxed out, the bandwidth required to properly steward and retain donors just isn't there — which means this problem compounds itself quietly every single year.
SG has real scale behind it — a $5M+ budget, 50 to 200 staff, more than a decade of history. You're not a scrappy startup figuring things out. But you've hit a ceiling, and the evidence points to why: your brand clarity is soft ('it's okay but could be clearer' is a telling self-assessment), your fundraising isn't keeping pace with the vision, and you've prioritized a brand refresh as a top goal. An organization at your size and stage should have a brand that works hard on your behalf — opening doors, building trust with prospective donors before anyone from SG ever picks up the phone. Right now, it sounds like the brand is neutral at best. Pair that with the program growth and key hires you want to make, and you have a ready-to-scale organization that's being held back by infrastructure and identity, not potential.
Here's the chain reaction playing out at SG right now: a depleted, understaffed team means donor stewardship is falling through the cracks — and that directly feeds your 11–20% retention rate. When donors give once and disappear, your fundraising machine has to work twice as hard to stand still, which keeps budgets tight and prevents competitive compensation, which drives turnover, which depletes the team further. Meanwhile, a brand that 'could be clearer' means SG isn't converting casual awareness into committed donors the way it should, so the top of that funnel is narrower than it needs to be. These three blockers aren't independent problems — they're the same problem wearing three different faces. Stabilize the team, shore up donor relationships, sharpen the brand, and the whole system starts moving in the right direction together.
Get your team and your board in on this conversation. Reports like this one work best when the whole organization can tackle issues together.
