How to Start a Career in Nonprofit Fundraising Analytics in 2026

There's a significant and growing shortage of skilled data professionals in the nonprofit sector—particularly those focused on using analytics to help organizations raise more funds, rather than just keeping score and reporting what has happened. While many organizations are drowning in data from their CRM systems, they lack people who can transform that data into actionable insights, often referred to as Constituent Intelligence,  that actually help fundraising teams perform better and raise more money.

If you have quantitative training and are looking for a meaningful career path with high demand and real impact, nonprofit fundraising analytics offers a compelling opportunity. The barrier to entry is lower than many corporate analytics roles, the work directly contributes to causes you care about, and the skills you build translate remarkably well to other sectors (particularly sales operations and revenue operations –aka SalesOps / RevOps) if you decide to pivot later.

Here's your roadmap to breaking into this field and building a successful career:

Step 1: Land Your First Data Job at the Right Organization

Take any data-related role at a nonprofit that raises at least $5 million per year from donations. A lot of these positions will have job descriptions that involve managing their fundraising CRM data and possibly include some gift entry, but stay away from anything that looks like a pure gift entry job.

Why the $5MM threshold? You need enough data volume for the organization to care about analytics, and you need enough complexity to build skills that will help you quickly launch into a more analytics-focused role at a larger organization when you're successful in your first job.

How to verify the $5MM threshold: Look up the organization's Form 990 filing on the IRS website or platforms like Guidestar. It's publicly available information.

Where to look:

• Higher education foundations - These are particularly attractive because they tend to close during school holidays (often mid-December through early January), and many offer free courses at their university, which is fantastic if you want to pursue a master's degree or MBA.
• High-end private schools - Depending on your location, many have endowments and fundraising teams larger than a lot of colleges.
• Traditional cause-based organizations - Just don't go too small. You won't have enough data to work with to do something meaningful, and it will be tougher to progress in your career.

Step 2: Master the Fundamentals

Read "Fundraising Analytics" by Arnaud De Bruyn (available on Amazon). This is your bible for understanding how the sector approaches data and analytics.

Spend your first couple of months learning, validating, and cleaning up data. Most nonprofits have significant data quality issues, and you cannot do great analytics work on crappy data. This initial investment will pay enormous dividends later.

You'll also need time to learn the nuances of how nonprofits store data, categorize different types of gifts, and count contributions. Critically, you need to understand how your organization utilizes soft credits and how to work with soft credit data—if you don't, your analytics will be very skewed or just flat-out wrong.

Step 3: Start Delivering Value

Once you have your head around nonprofit data analytics, start building and sharing better ways to analyze and use your organization's fundraising data. Put your training to work. Show how your insights help the fundraising team perform better and raise more money.

When you get some traction and have demonstrated clear results, you should be able to secure a budget for better tools (shameless promotion: Constituent Intelligence Hub is a game changer😆) and scale what you've started.

Step 4: Leverage Your Success

From there, you should expect higher compensation and/or have the ability to move pretty easily to other nonprofits based on the results you can demonstrate.

Or, if you find the nonprofit world isn't your space, start looking for sales operations / revenue operations roles in enterprise businesses. The skills and experience translate really well, and there's a shortage of good data people there too. Nonprofit fundraising and sales are extremely similar in their analytical needs. The main challenge on the commercial side is that there's a less well-defined entry path for first jobs in sales operations, which makes your nonprofit experience even more valuable.

Getting Started

The world needs good data people, and there's a genuine shortage in the nonprofit sector. Don't get lost in some tiny organization without enough data to work with—find the right-sized shop where your work providing actionable constituent intelligence can make a real impact on fundraising performance.

Read the book mentioned above, do a little homework on the space, tweak your resume around these ideas, and send it out with a strong cover letter to several nonprofits that fit the $5MM criteria. I promise it won't take 800 applications before you get a bite. The demand is real, and if you're prepared with the right foundation, you'll find organizations eager to bring you on board.