Why your fundraising role has been open for four months

It is one of the most common conversations we have with charities. A Director of Fundraising, four months into a search for a Senior Corporate Partnerships Manager, asking a question that usually arrives slightly apologetically: is it us, or is the market just impossible right now?

It is almost never entirely one or the other. But it is much more often “us” than most organisations expect, and that is genuinely good news, because the things that stall a fundraising search are mostly fixable in an afternoon.

Here is what we typically find when a role has been live for four months.

The salary band was set two years ago

This is the most common single cause, and the one organisations are most reluctant to look at.

A band gets agreed, the role gets advertised, the search doesn’t work, and the band gets carried forward unchanged into the next attempt. Meanwhile the market has moved underneath it.

Merrifield Consultants’ 2026 Salary & Benefits Guide, built on survey data from more than 500 charity and membership professionals, found that churn risk rises sharply once a salary sits 10-15% below market alignment. That is a smaller gap than most organisations assume, and it is easy to drift into over two budget cycles without anyone making a conscious decision to do it.

The tell is not that a role attracts no applications. It is that applications arrive from people a level below the one the job description was written for, and not from the people the organisation actually wants. When a longlist keeps coming back under-qualified, the market is saying something specific about the number, not about the quality of candidates available.

It is also worth checking the comparator is right. Job title alone is a poor benchmark. A Specialist Fundraising Manager in a London charity with income under £1m benchmarks at £35,000-£48,000 in our data; the same title in a £5m-£20m organisation sits at £43,000-£60,000. Organisational income, scope and decision-making authority move the number far more than the words on the job description do.

Sometimes the answer genuinely is that the money isn’t there. That is a legitimate constraint, and it is workable. But it needs to be met with a change to the role rather than a repeat of the same advert, which leads to the next point.

The role is actually two roles

Corporate partnerships and trusts. Major donors and events. Fundraising and marketing. Income generation and line management of a team of four, for £42,000.

Briefs get broadened when budgets are tight, usually with good intentions: if we can only fund one hire, let’s make it count. The problem is that the person who can genuinely do both halves well is rare, senior, and priced accordingly. So the search is looking for a unicorn at a mid-level salary, and every candidate who applies is strong on one half and light on the other.

Four months in, this is worth testing honestly. Which half of the role generates the income? Could the other half be split out, delayed, covered on a temporary basis, or absorbed elsewhere? A narrower role at the same salary will nearly always fill faster than a broad one, and it will usually perform better once filled.

The advert was written for the trustees

Charity job adverts have a particular failure mode. They are written to satisfy everyone internally who has a view on how the organisation should present itself, and by the time that process finishes, the advert describes the organisation beautifully and the job barely at all.

Candidates want to know four things. What will I actually be doing day to day? What does success look like in year one? Who will I report to, and what does the team look like? What does it pay?

If those four answers aren’t clearly visible in the first half of the advert, strong candidates move on. They are not short of options, and they will not email to ask.

The highest-impact fix here is publishing the salary. Some organisations still advertise “competitive” or “dependent on experience”, and it costs them more applications than anything else on the page. It also disproportionately deters exactly the candidates most sector EDI commitments are designed to attract.

The process is too long for the seniority of the role

A four-stage process with a written task, a panel, a presentation and a values interview is defensible for a Director. For a £45,000 manager it is not, and it loses people.

The arithmetic is simple. Every additional week in a process is a week in which a candidate can accept something else. Where one organisation’s first-to-offer timeline is six weeks and another’s is two, they are not competing on the quality of the role. One of them is simply arriving after the decision has been made.

There is also a governance point specific to the not-for-profit sector. Where senior appointments need committee or board sign-off, the calendar of that committee effectively becomes part of the recruitment timeline. If it meets monthly, that needs to be known at the start of the search and built around, not discovered at offer stage.

You are recruiting for the person who left

This one is subtle, and it stalls more searches than most organisations realise.

The job description is a lightly edited version of the last post-holder’s, which was itself written for the organisation as it was three years ago. The role has drifted since then. The income mix has changed. The team around it is different. But the advert describes a job that no longer quite exists, so the applications that arrive are for a job the organisation no longer quite needs.

Four months of no traction is a good moment to ask what this role would look like if it were designed today, from scratch, against the current income strategy.

What good looks like instead

When a stalled search gets fixed, it is usually some combination of a handful of small things:

• The salary is checked against current market data and either moved or explicitly compensated for elsewhere
• The brief is narrowed to the part of the role that generates the value
• The advert leads with the job rather than the organisation, and publishes the salary
• The process is cut to two stages, with dates already in diaries
• Someone is proactively approaching people who are not currently looking, rather than waiting for applications

That last point matters more in fundraising than in most functions. The strongest corporate partnerships and philanthropy people are usually not on job boards. They are doing well where they are, and they move when someone credible puts a genuinely interesting proposition in front of them. A search that relies entirely on advertising is fishing in a small part of the pond.

If you are in month four right now

The worst outcome is quietly running the same search for another four months, then hiring under duress in month eight because the fundraising target has not moved and something has to give. Appointments made under that kind of pressure are the ones most likely to have unravelled by the following year.

It is also rarely the cheaper option. Once you add repeated advertising, interim cover, the internal time spent on interview rounds that go nowhere, and the income not raised while the seat is empty, an extra £5,000-£10,000 on the band usually turns out to have been the economical decision. Underpaying a premium role tends to move cost around rather than remove it.

Merrifield Consultants works with charities and membership bodies across London and the Home Counties, and a fair proportion of the searches we take on have already been open a while. Often we can tell within a single conversation whether the issue is the band, the brief, the advert or the process.

If you have a role that has been open longer than it should be, get in touch with 0our Fundraising team and we will help you work out which of the five it is.