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Outsourced Teams

An outsourced development team that holds your fundraising through leadership transition — rebuilding the systems, portfolio, and team, and leaving your organization stronger than we found it.

Practice
Outsourced Teams
Scope
Interim, embedded, advisory
Engagement
6–18 months, retainer
Outsourced fundraising team — NPI Strategies

Overview

Not advisors. Practitioners.

The call usually comes at a transition point — a departing Director of Development, a board asking hard pipeline questions, a major grant ending. NPI steps in and runs the development function while you stabilize, hire, and rebuild.

That means portfolio management, proposal writing, board reporting, and donor meetings — not a recommendations deck. We audit the donor base first: retention rates, pipeline health, CRM hygiene, gift acknowledgment lag. Then we rebuild the systems that make strategy executable, and operate them alongside your team until ownership transfers cleanly to permanent staff.

The organizations that get the most from an embedded engagement are those willing to treat us as an extension of leadership, not as external consultants. When that relationship holds, the results are durable: restructured major-gift portfolios that produce multi-year retention gains, donor pipelines that survive leadership turnover, and development infrastructure that the next Director of Development can actually inherit.

Organizations call us when

  • A Director of Development just resigned or announced they are leaving
  • A major grant is ending and the board is asking hard revenue questions
  • The donor base has not grown in two or three years and no one knows why
  • A new CEO inherited a development function they have never seen work well

At a glance

Engagements built to end.

3:1
Average ROI across 240+ client engagements
$175M+
Raised for clients over 30 years
6–18mo
Typical engagement window, diagnosis to handoff
100%
Of engagements leave an operating development function in place

How we work

Four disciplines, every engagement.

  1. Diagnose the function

    Donor base analysis, pipeline health, retention rates, and staff capacity — the inputs that tell us what is actually broken versus what is underperforming.

  2. Rebuild the systems

    CRM hygiene, moves management, gift acknowledgment, and reporting cadence — the infrastructure that makes strategy executable.

  3. Run the work

    We operate as interim or embedded development leadership. Not a deck — the daily practice of portfolio management, proposal writing, and donor meetings.

  4. Transfer ownership

    Every engagement is designed to end. We hire, train, and hand off to a permanent team — or we stay in an advisory role as you scale.

In the field

This service, in practice.

All case studies →
Ronald McDonald House New York
Featured · Healthcare · Family Services

CEO-led

A multi-year partnership that moved strategy into philanthropic revenue.

When the leadership of Ronald McDonald House New York set out to expand the services they offer families of children in treatment, they brought NPI Strategies in to translate that vision into a fundable plan — and then to help secure the gifts that would make it real.

Read Ronald McDonald House New York’s story
The NPI team worked to understand my strategic vision, securing the funding needed to make it happen while achieving significant results.

Ruth C. Browne, SD, MPP, MPH

President & CEO, Ronald McDonald House New York

Questions

Common questions.

What does an interim development engagement look like?
We operate as your Director or VP of Development — portfolio management, proposal writing, board reporting, donor meetings. Typically 2–4 days per week, on-site or hybrid, for 6–18 months.
Will you help us hire a permanent director?
Yes. We write the job description, screen candidates, join finals interviews, and onboard the hire. Most engagements end with a warm handoff, not a cold departure.
How do you measure the 3:1 ROI claim?
Philanthropic revenue attributable to the engagement, measured against total fees paid, over the engagement window plus 12 months. We publish the methodology on request.
Do you work with organizations that have never had a development function?
Yes — that is often where the highest leverage is. We build the function from zero: CRM selection, first annual appeal, first major-gift portfolio.
What does this cost?
Monthly retainers scaled to scope and on-site days. We share a fee range on the first call once we understand what you actually need.

Start a conversation

Tell us what just changed.

A 30-minute call with a senior advisor. Most engagements start in a transition moment — we'll help you see the next six months clearly.

Book a 30-minute call