As part of our focus this month on avoiding fundraiser burnout and succeeding long-term, we had the pleasure of chatting with Beth Zimmerman, Founder and Executive Director of Pets for Patriots, on what keeps her fresh and focused on the success of her organization's mission.

For more on ensuring long-term success as a fundraiser, watch our free webinar, How to Raise More Money Without Burning Out, with special guest presenter Beth Kanter.

Nonprofit fundraisers are magical creatures. Through a mixture of science and art, they conjure connections between individuals’ better desires and nonprofit missions to spark change in the world. Magical, I tell ya.

Fundraisers are also a passionate, determined breed. Studies show that fundraisers work an average of five to twelve hours of overtime each week. Again. And again. And again. Those hours get longer as the days get shorter when the holidays approach. And, year after year, the job gets yet more challenging as program beneficiaries’ needs grow and nonprofit budgets increase.

Magical, passionate and determined, though they may be, nonprofit fundraisers are often bright stars that burnout fast. The average tenure for a fundraiser is just 16 months. This fact is not only deeply felt by the individual fundraisers but by the nonprofit sector as a whole. High turnover rates combine with struggles in finding qualified candidates to result in long-term vacancies in development positions. Those empty development desks present serious challenges to nonprofits and their missions.

#GivingTuesday takes place on November 28th this year and wise nonprofits are already planning strategies to leverage this massive day of giving. For 2017, six key factors are conspiring to make this the perfect year for peer-to-peer fundraising - the act of your supporters asking their own community for donations on your behalf - to be a powerful addition for your nonprofit’s strategy.

Here’s why:

2016 was a high watermark for donations to nonprofits with a massive flood of dollars given in the final weeks of the year. This torrent of generosity was attributed to a number of expected factors: an economy continuing its recovery, the natural spike in donations at the end of the year, and a strong #GivingTuesday response. What was not widely expected was the outcome of the presidential election and the many in the body politic who chose to reach for their wallets to voice their protest of the incoming administration of President Donald Trump.

Any fundraising professional is familiar with the dramatic scale of #GivingTuesday. $177,000,000 raised online from 1,640,000 individual gifts in 2016 alone. All on one day. 24 mere hours. And that one day, branded just five short years ago, is now the de facto start of the end-of-year giving season.