How to Resolve Conflict Between Marketing and Fundraising Teams

If you’ve ever felt caught in the crossfire between your marketing and fundraising teams, you’re not alone. In small nonprofit teams especially, these two crucial functions often find themselves at odds—marketing building broad awareness while fundraising pushes for direct revenue. But here’s the truth: when these teams work together instead of competing, nonprofits see dramatic improvements in donor retention and revenue growth. Let’s explore practical strategies to turn potential rivals into powerful allies.

Understanding Why the Tension Exists

Before fixing the problem, we need to diagnose it. Conflicts between marketing and fundraising typically stem from three core issues:

Misaligned goals create the most friction. Marketing teams chase impressions, website traffic, and social media engagement, while fundraising focuses laser-sharp on donor conversions and retention rates. These differing metrics mean teams literally measure success differently, leading to fundamentally different priorities.

Resource competition intensifies the divide. With limited budgets forcing teams to compete for staff time, tools, and dollars, siloed efforts become self-protective rather than collaborative.

Communication breakdowns amplify everything else. Marketing’s broad awareness campaigns can clash with fundraising’s personalized donor appeals. Without coordination, you end up with supporters receiving conflicting messages—or worse, duplicate emails that damage credibility.

Here’s a sobering stat: donor retention averaged just 45% in 2024, down 2.6% from prior years, often linked to uncoordinated team efforts (Fundraising Effectiveness Project). When your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing, donors notice—and leave.

Creating Clarity Through Defined Roles

The antidote to overlap? Crystal-clear responsibilities and shared objectives.

Establish distinct ownership: marketing handles brand awareness, content creation, and inbound lead generation. Fundraising owns donor cultivation, relationship building, and the actual ask. No gray areas means no territorial disputes.

But don’t stop there. Co-create shared OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that both teams contribute to achieving. Think “grow donor database by 20%” or “increase average gift size through coordinated campaigns.” When everyone wins or loses together, collaboration becomes self-interest.

Protip: Launch quarterly with a “mission alignment workshop.” Review organizational goals first, then visually map each team’s contributions on a shared board. This simple exercise prevents departmental tunnel vision and keeps everyone focused on mission impact.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

This framework fosters mutual accountability while respecting each team’s expertise.

Building Bridges Through Communication

Structure breeds consistency. Schedule bi-weekly cross-team meetings to share updates, surface challenges early, and celebrate wins together. These aren’t optional—make them sacred calendar time.

Meetings alone won’t cut it, though. Cross-train your staff to build genuine empathy. Have marketers shadow donor calls to understand fundraising’s relationship-building intensity. Invite fundraisers into content brainstorms to appreciate the creative process. When people understand each other’s daily realities, petty conflicts evaporate.

Technology can accelerate this. Tools like shared Slack channels or integrated platforms provide real-time visibility. Speaking of which, Funraise data shows nonprofits using integrated analytics tools achieve 12% higher donor retention year-over-year (Funraise), proving that shared insights prevent siloed decision-making.

Consider these specific tactics:

• rotate meeting leadership between teams to equalize voices and prevent dominance,
• create “real talk” sessions specifically for candid issue resolution without judgment,
• establish a shared dashboard where both teams access the same donor data simultaneously.

When information flows freely, trust follows.

Supercharge Results with Joint Campaigns

Now for the fun part—leveraging each team’s unique strengths for multiplied impact.

Pair marketing’s storytelling prowess with fundraising’s donor insights to create campaigns that sing. For example, marketing produces compelling impact videos showcasing your mission, which fundraising then uses as the foundation for personalized appeals. The content works harder because it serves multiple strategic purposes.

Timing matters enormously. Marketing warms leads with awareness content first, creating familiarity and trust. Fundraising then closes with targeted asks to supporters already primed to give.

Protip: Try a “team swap day” where marketers run a mini-fundraiser and fundraisers create social content. This unconventional approach sparks innovation, breaks down barriers, and often generates surprisingly fresh ideas that neither team would’ve conceived in isolation.

The results speak for themselves: Funraise users grow online revenue 73% year-over-year on average, 3x industry benchmarks (Funraise), often through collaborative channels like peer-to-peer campaigns and recurring giving programs that require both teams firing on all cylinders.

AI-Powered Collaboration: Your Ready-to-Use Prompt

Want to jumpstart better collaboration using AI? Copy and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or explore our custom tools and calculators designed specifically for nonprofits:

I work at a [NONPROFIT TYPE] with [TEAM SIZE] staff members. Our marketing and fundraising teams are experiencing conflict around [SPECIFIC ISSUE - e.g., 'email send schedules' or 'campaign ownership']. We have [RESOURCE CONSTRAINT - e.g., 'limited budget' or 'only 2 staff covering both functions']. Create a 30-day action plan with weekly milestones to improve collaboration between these teams, including specific meeting agendas, shared KPIs to track, and communication protocols tailored to our size and constraint.

Just fill in the bracketed variables with your specifics and let AI generate a customized roadmap. It’s like having a nonprofit consultant in your pocket.

Measuring Success Together

What gets measured gets managed—and celebrated. Track joint KPIs that matter to both teams: donor acquisition cost, lifetime value, and retention rates via shared dashboards. These metrics tell the complete story that siloed data can’t.

Make wins visible. Publicly credit team successes in all-hands meetings or board reports. When marketing’s awareness campaign directly feeds fundraising’s major gift pipeline, shout it from the rooftops.

For context, new donor retention industry-wide hovers around 19% (Fundraising Effectiveness Project)—meaning most first-time donors never give again. When marketing and fundraising align to create cohesive supporter journeys, you can dramatically exceed this dismal benchmark.

Modern tools make unified measurement possible. Funraise’s integrated platform, for instance, enables data-driven decisions that boost recurring revenue 1.5x (Sisense case study) by giving both teams access to the same donor intelligence. And with Funraise’s free tier, even small nonprofits can start breaking down data silos today without financial commitment.

Protip: Report holistically in donor meetings and board presentations—focus on mission impact achieved through teamwork, not departmental statistics. This subtle shift in framing reinforces organizational unity over territorial thinking.

Creating Lasting Cultural Change

Quick fixes fade. Sustainable collaboration requires cultural shifts.

Appoint a “collaboration champion” (rotating annually) whose explicit role includes championing joint initiatives and mediating conflicts before they escalate. This person isn’t a manager—they’re a bridge-builder with organizational permission to push for unity.

For tougher disputes, bring in neutral facilitators. Sometimes internal politics require external perspective to untangle productively.

Embed collaboration into your DNA by hiring for it. Seek candidates who value cross-functional work and have demonstrated collaborative success previously.

Protip: Gamify the process by awarding “Mission MVP” badges for outstanding joint contributions, redeemable for team perks like lunch on the ED or extra PTO hours. Friendly competition toward shared goals beats destructive competition any day.

The Bottom Line

Resolving marketing-fundraising conflicts isn’t just operational housekeeping—it’s mission-critical for sustainable growth, especially in resource-strapped nonprofits where every team member’s efforts must count double.

Start small: pick one strategy from this article and implement it this month. Maybe it’s scheduling that first cross-team meeting, or finally integrating your donor data through a platform like Funraise (seriously, the free tier is perfect for testing this).

Because when marketing and fundraising work as allies instead of adversaries, everybody wins—especially the communities you serve.