4 Underlooked Reasons to Hire an Interim Director of Development

Time and stability. Those are usually the first two reasons an Executive Director considers interim fundraising leadership – and they're both good ones.

Your development director is gone, or leaving soon. The search is going to take 10-12 weeks minimum. You need someone to keep things moving in the meantime.

But after the last few years of interim work, I can tell you: time and stability are rarely what organizations value most by the end of the engagement.

Here's what actually surprises people.

Clarity on Who You Actually Need to Hire

Most organizations repost the old job description. Sometimes it's three years old. Sometimes it's five.

Your organization has changed. Your fundraising program has changed. What you needed then and what you need now are probably not the same thing.

An interim brings outside eyes to a situation you're too close to see clearly. What's actually holding your fundraising back – systems, strategy, team dynamics, something else? What skills does your next hire really need to move things forward? What would set them up to stay?

Those are hard questions to answer from the inside. They're much easier when someone has spent 90 days working directly in your program.

Teaching While Executing

At year-end with one client, I pulled a long list of donors who hadn't yet renewed and a smart, capable fundraising manager who'd never been trusted or trained to hold one-on-one donor conversations. I could have picked up the phone and made those calls myself.

I didn't.

Instead we built a script together, talked through how conversations might go, and she started with the donors she felt most comfortable with. I watched her confidence grow in real time. Donors engaged. Gifts came in. And when I left, she had a skill – and relationships – that stayed with her.

That's capacity building in action. Learning that happens in the work.

Your development coordinator learns how to pull the data you need (and why). Your manager gets comfortable identifying who to reach out to and what to say. As an Executive Director – who keeps saying you're 'not really a fundraiser' – you start to realize you're more of one than you thought.

By design, an interim isn't there to do the fundraising for you. They're there to build the team's capacity and confidence to do it, and then make a hand off.

One of Your Best Recruitment Tools

Hiring an interim sends a message to final candidates before they ever walk in the door. It says: this organization doesn't hide problems. They invest in fundraising. They take the work seriously.

Good candidates are interviewing you as much as you're interviewing them. When an organization shows up to interviews and truly understands the strengths, challenges, and gaps – and shares them transparently with candidates? That’s not scaring the right hire. You’re finding the one who’s really ready for it.

“I could hug you,” was the comment from a new director of development after she read the state of fundraising report and accepted the role.

Interim support doesn't just help you find the right hire. It helps the right hire say yes – and stay.

Relief

It's the word I heard a colleague use to describe the look on the faces of leaders who choose to bring in outside support.

She's right. I've seen it too.

The handoff of the running list – the appeal that needs to go out, the pipeline that needs managing, the team that needs direction, the board questions that need answers. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying a fundraising program without the right leadership in place. Interim support lifts that.

Someone is tracking deadlines, keeping the team accountable, thinking through strategy, and making sure nothing critical falls through the cracks. That's not a small thing when you're also trying to run an organization and hire the right person.

And it's not just the Executive Director who feels it. The team does too. They get direction. They stop absorbing work that was never supposed to be theirs. That matters – for morale, and for keeping the people you have.

Not every organization in transition needs interim leadership. But more do than realize it – especially when there's been high turnover in the role, when the leader who left had been there for years, or when the Executive Director knows they can't run a thoughtful search and lead fundraising at the same time without something breaking.

But what about the cost? Interim support is typically comparable to the salary already in your budget for the role.

Or disruption? This is what interim partnerships are designed for. Experienced support, short-term by design, there to stabilize not shake things up.

You don’t have to navigate this transition alone. Interested in how an interim partnership can help? Reach out to Katie@BuiltToRaise.com

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Katie Mendez is the founder of Built to Raise (est. 2023), a consulting practice grounded in nearly 15 years of in-house nonprofit fundraising experience. A coach and partner to organizational leaders, she provides fundraising leadership when it's needed most — stepping in as interim director of development and working alongside teams that are ready to build a stronger program.