So, Your Communications Director Hates Your Development Director…

If you’ve been following this series, we’ve already talked about what happens when your board hates your development director and when your finance director hates your development director. Now it’s time to talk about another nonprofit relationship with an incredible amount of potential for both partnership and friction: communications and development.

On paper, these two functions should be some of the closest partners in the organization. Both are responsible for helping people outside your walls understand why your work matters. Both think about audiences, messages, stories, engagement, and action. Communications gets people to know who you are and care about what you do. Development takes some of those relationships and creates opportunities for people to invest in the work. You cannot sustainably raise money without both.

And yet, communications and development can drive each other absolutely nuts.

The communications director wants to send the newsletter. Development has an appeal scheduled. Communications wants the homepage focused on the organization’s newest campaign. Development wants the donate button somewhere a human being can actually find it. Communications wants social media to build awareness and engagement. Development wants to know why the organization just posted twelve times about an issue without once telling the people who clearly care about that issue that they can financially support the work. Then somebody decides the organization should hold an event, and suddenly nobody knows who owns the guest list, the invitations, the sponsors, the messaging, the run of show, or the follow-up.

The frustrating part is that neither function is unnecessary, and neither one should simply win these arguments. Communications and development are different disciplines with different objectives, but their work is deeply interdependent. When they compete for ownership instead of understanding where their responsibilities intersect, the organization loses.

So, your communications director hates your development director.

Let’s talk about why.

Awareness Is Part of Fundraising

Let’s start with something that development professionals sometimes need to acknowledge more explicitly: communications makes fundraising possible. People cannot donate to organizations they do not know exist.

Before someone becomes a donor, they usually have to encounter the organization somewhere. Maybe they read an article. Maybe a friend shared something on social media. Maybe they attended an event. Maybe they heard the CEO speak. Maybe they signed a petition, downloaded a resource, subscribed to a newsletter, watched a video, or saw the organization’s name appear repeatedly in conversations they cared about.

That awareness has value even when it does not produce an immediate gift.

Development professionals can become so focused on conversion that we undervalue everything that happens before conversion. If someone encounters your organization for the first time today, reads three articles over the next six months, follows you on Instagram, subscribes to your newsletter, attends a webinar, and finally makes a $100 gift next year, which department gets credit for that donor?

The question itself is kind of ridiculous.

The organization got a donor.

Communications helped create the awareness and engagement that made the relationship possible. Development helped create the pathway that turned engagement into philanthropy. Trying to determine which department “owns” that person misses the point.

Good communications expands the universe of people development can eventually engage. That is fundraising infrastructure.

BUT Awareness Doesn’t Pay the Bills

There is an opposite mistake, too.

An organization can have a beautiful brand, enormous social media reach, a fantastic newsletter, impressive media coverage, and thousands of engaged followers and still struggle to raise money.

Attention is not automatically philanthropy. At some point, someone has to ask.

This is where development sometimes looks at communications and thinks: You have spent years building this audience. Why are we so afraid to ask them to support us?

That frustration is legitimate.

There are communications professionals who worry that fundraising will somehow cheapen the brand. They don’t want too many appeals. They don’t want donation language in social posts. They don’t want the donate button to be too prominent. They don’t want every story to end with a call to action because it feels transactional.

I understand the instinct. Nobody wants an organization’s communications to become one endless telethon.

But if you work for a nonprofit that depends on philanthropy, fundraising is not an embarrassing thing the organization occasionally has to sneak into its communications calendar.

Fundraising is part of how the mission happens.

Asking people to financially support work they believe in is not an interruption of the mission. It is an invitation to participate in it.

Communications should protect the organization’s voice and audience relationships. Development should respect that expertise. But protecting the audience cannot mean protecting people from ever being asked to give.

The Great Email Calendar War

Few things expose communications-development tension faster than email.

Communications has a newsletter scheduled for Thursday. Development has an appeal planned for Tuesday. There’s an important organizational announcement that needs to go out on Wednesday. The CEO wants to send something Friday. Everyone is convinced their email is the important email.

Communications worries the organization is emailing too much. Development worries that every fundraising message is the first thing sacrificed whenever the calendar gets crowded.

Both concerns can be valid.

Donor fatigue is real, but so is organizational timidity. Many nonprofits are far more afraid of asking than their donors are of being asked. Meanwhile, development teams are frequently expected to meet ambitious individual-giving goals while being given remarkably little access to one of the organization’s most valuable fundraising assets: its own audience.

This should not be settled email by email through whoever argues most convincingly in the weekly staff meeting.

Build a shared communications calendar. Put newsletters, appeals, campaigns, advocacy actions, major announcements, events, reports, stewardship messages, and other significant communications onto the same calendar. Identify the periods when fundraising needs greater frequency. Identify moments when major organizational news needs priority. Look for opportunities to coordinate rather than compete.

And remember that not everyone needs to receive everything.

Your major donor does not necessarily need the same email cadence as someone who signed up for your newsletter yesterday. Your monthly donor may need different stewardship than a subscriber who has never given. Segmentation can resolve a surprising number of arguments that organizations mistakenly treat as calendar problems.

The goal should not be for communications to win more email slots or development to win more email slots. The goal is to move people through a relationship with the organization.

Stop Fighting Over Social Media

Social media creates a similar problem.

Communications often thinks in terms of reach, engagement, audience growth, message discipline, and brand. Development thinks in terms of donor acquisition, conversion, cultivation, stewardship, and revenue.

Again, those are different disciplines. They should be.

Not every post needs a donate button. Please don’t turn every piece of breaking news into “THIS IS WHY WE NEED YOUR $25 TODAY.” Sometimes the right communications objective is education. Sometimes it is awareness. Sometimes it is community building, thought leadership, or simply showing people what the organization is doing.

But development should have an intentional place in the social strategy.

If you have spent a month showing followers why an issue matters, there should probably be a point when you tell them how they can help sustain the work.

Show impact. Thank donors. Introduce supporters to the people behind the mission. Explain what philanthropy makes possible. Promote giving days. Share campaign milestones. Celebrate generosity. Invite people into the work.

Fundraising content does not have to feel like advertising if communications and development build it together. In fact, some of the best fundraising communications barely feel like fundraising at all. They tell a compelling story, make the organization’s role clear, give the audience a reason to care, and offer a natural next step.

Sometimes that next step is: give.

That word should not terrify anyone.

Yes, the Donate Button Should Be Easy to Find

I cannot believe nonprofits still argue about this, but we do.

Your donate button should be obvious.

Someone who arrives at your website ready to give should not have to solve a scavenger hunt. They should not have to open three menus, scroll to the footer, click “Get Involved,” select “Ways to Help,” and finally discover that somewhere on the next page is a link called “Support Our Work.”

Call it Donate. Put it somewhere people can see it.

This is one of those moments when communications sometimes prioritizes aesthetic cleanliness while development prioritizes conversion. Both matter, but if design makes one of the organization’s most important actions difficult to complete, the design is not doing its job.

That does not mean the entire website needs to scream GIVE US MONEY. It means philanthropy should be treated as a normal, visible way people engage with the organization.

The website belongs to the organization, not to communications or development. It should serve the organization’s goals, and for a philanthropy-supported nonprofit, raising money is one of them.

And Then Somebody Says, “We’re Having an Event”

Goddess help us.

Events are where vague departmental boundaries come home to roost.

Who develops the event concept? Who owns registration? Who writes invitations? Who designs them? Who manages the guest list? Who handles sponsors? Who manages donor outreach? Who creates signage? Who handles media? Who develops the run of show? Who briefs speakers? Who manages photography? Who writes remarks? Who handles follow-up? Who enters attendee information into the CRM?

If your answer is “communications and development,” you have not answered the question.

Events frequently require both departments, but shared responsibility does not mean undefined responsibility.

Before event planning begins, decide what the event is actually for. A fundraising gala and a public-awareness event may look similar from the outside but have completely different objectives. A donor cultivation reception is not the same thing as a press event. An organizational launch may have fundraising opportunities without fundraising being its primary purpose.

Once you know the objective, assign an owner and define responsibilities.

Development might own donor strategy, sponsorships, prospect identification, solicitation, table strategy, donor stewardship, and post-event cultivation. Communications might own brand, messaging, promotional materials, media, digital promotion, photography, and public-facing content. Some responsibilities will vary depending on the organization and the event.

What matters is deciding before everyone starts doing the same work, or assumes someone else is doing it.

Stop Making Development Beg for Stories

One of the most common development complaints about communications is access to content.

Development needs stories constantly. Major donors want to understand impact. Foundations want examples. Appeals need human stories. Proposals need evidence. Stewardship needs updates. Corporate partners want content demonstrating what their investment accomplished.

Communications is often sitting on exactly that material.

Meanwhile, communications may be frustrated because development keeps appearing with a frantic request for a story forty-eight hours before a deadline.

Neither system works.

Build a content infrastructure: Create a shared story bank. Collect approved quotes, impact stories, photographs, statistics, testimonials, videos, media coverage, and other reusable assets. Record permissions and restrictions. Tag content by program, issue, geography, audience, and whatever else makes sense for your organization.

Then both departments can use the organization’s strongest material without repeatedly recreating it.

Development also needs to involve communications earlier. If you know you have an annual appeal every November, communications should not learn about it on November 3. If a major foundation proposal will require a sophisticated case statement, don’t send communications a message asking for “some better language” the morning it is due.

Collaboration works considerably better when it isn’t an emergency.

Who Decides How We Talk About Our Work?

This can become one of the more substantive disagreements between communications and development.

Communications is usually responsible for organizational voice, brand, positioning, and external messaging. Development adapts and aligns that messaging for donors and funders.

Those are related responsibilities, but they are not identical.

A foundation program officer does not necessarily need the same explanation of your organization that appears on your homepage. A major donor considering a $500,000 investment may need considerably more specificity about strategy, outcomes, organizational capacity, and financial sustainability than someone reading an Instagram caption.

Development needs room to speak to philanthropic audiences in ways that make sense for philanthropy.

At the same time, development cannot invent a parallel organization because it thinks a particular framing will appeal to a funder. The mission should not change depending on who has the checkbook. Neither should fundamental organizational values, commitments, or identity.

This is where communications can be an invaluable partner.

The question should be: How do we express who we genuinely are in a way that makes sense to this particular audience?

That is different from forcing every audience to receive identical language, and it is very different from changing who you are to chase money.

Communications Is Not Development’s Design Department

Development directors can be guilty of this one. I know I have been: “Can you make this pretty?”

Please don’t. Communications is not the department where development sends finished ideas to receive fonts and graphics.

If communications expertise matters, we should bring communications into the work while there are still meaningful decisions to make. Talk about the audience. Talk about the objective. Talk about the message. Talk about what you want someone to feel, understand, or do after encountering the piece. Then let communications professionals do their jobs.

The same respect needs to flow in the other direction. Development is not simply the department that adds a donation link after communications finishes the campaign. Fundraising strategy is a discipline. Donor behavior matters. Conversion matters. Segmentation matters. Stewardship matters. The donor journey matters.

If the objective includes raising money, development needs to be involved while the strategy is being built, not invited in at the end to write the ask.

Development & Communications Do Not Need to Become the Same Department

There is enormous overlap, but they are not the same function, and there should also be a certain level of productive tension.

Communications should sometimes tell development, “If we send another appeal tomorrow, we’re going to undermine the broader campaign we’re building.”

Development should sometimes tell communications, “We have spent six weeks creating engagement around this issue and have given people absolutely no opportunity to financially support the work.”

Then they should look at the objective, look at the data, and make the decision together.

The goal is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to stop treating disagreement as territorial warfare.

The Audience Does Not Care About Your Org Chart

This may be the most important point.

The person receiving your email does not know that communications wrote the newsletter and development wrote the appeal. The donor visiting your website does not care which department controls the homepage. The person attending your event does not know which team built the run of show. The foundation officer reading your annual report does not care whether communications or development selected the impact story.

From the outside, there is only the organization.

When communications and development operate as competing kingdoms, audiences feel the consequences even if they cannot identify the cause. Messaging becomes inconsistent. Appeals feel disconnected from everything else the organization says. Donors receive repetitive or contradictory emails. Stories get told differently in different places. Opportunities for engagement appear without pathways to giving, while fundraising asks appear without enough context to make anyone care.

When the functions work well together, the opposite happens.

Communications introduces people to the mission. It gives them reasons to pay attention and reasons to care. Development creates opportunities for some of those people to deepen their relationship through philanthropy. Communications helps tell the story of what that philanthropy makes possible. Development brings donor insight back into the organization. Together, they keep the relationship moving.

Awareness creates the possibility of fundraising. Fundraising turns some of that awareness into resources. Those resources make more mission possible. More mission creates more stories worth telling.

That is not two departments competing for an email calendar. That is an ecosystem.

Your communications director does not need to become a fundraiser. Your development director does not need to become a communications professional. They should bring different expertise, different instincts, and sometimes different opinions to the table.

But they need to understand something fundamental about each other’s work: communications gives people reasons to know and care about your organization; development gives them opportunities to invest in it.

A nonprofit that does only the first may be very well known and very broke. A nonprofit that tries to do only the second will eventually run out of people to ask.

You need both.