Gratefully - Press & Partnership Kit

Nonprofit development teams suffer from a structural form of organizational forgetting. The sector usually frames this as a turnover crisis, and the widely repeated figure of a 16 month average tenure does not hold up: research from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, surveying 1,663 US fundraisers, found a mean current job tenure of 3.6 years with a median of 2 years. The problem is not how often people leave. It is that when they do, what they knew leaves with them. What transfers is a giving history and a few notes, while the reasoning behind a twenty year relationship is lost. Separately, the Social Impact Staff Retention Report 2026, surveying 412 social sector staff in autumn 2025, found 71% are looking or will be looking for a new job, so the churn pressure is real even where tenure is longer than the sector assumes.

The downstream impact shows up in retention. The sector now reports a 54% annual donor lapse rate (Fundraising Effectiveness Project 2024), and acquiring a new donor costs roughly seven times more than retaining an existing one (Neon One 2025). The economics of fundraising hinge on continuity - and continuity is exactly what staff turnover destroys.

CRMs were not designed to fix this. They are excellent transactional systems of record for gifts, contacts, and campaigns, but they do not capture or query the unstructured layer where institutional memory actually lives - the staff notes, the email threads, the handover documents, the board minutes. Gratefully is built specifically to be the institutional memory layer that sits alongside the CRM, ingesting both structured and unstructured content into a single queryable knowledge graph with source-cited answers.