Both/And: How Fractional Experts Can Supercharge Your Full-Time Team
Why the most successful nonprofits are building powerful integrated teams.
When considering the benefits of fractional staffing, many nonprofit leaders worry that bringing in an expert means replacing their valued, full-time employees.
While a valid concern, it reflects a sense of scarcity, as if fractional team building represents an "either/or" proposition that forces a false choice: either we support our current team, or we bring in outside help.
A strategic, growth mindset embraces "both/and.”
Fractional staffing is not about replacement; it's about enhancement. The most successful nonprofits are building powerful integrated teams, pairing dedicated core staff with flexible, fractional team members. This "both/and" model works in three powerful ways.
1. Enhancing Your Team with Administrative Support
It is an all-too-common scenario: talented executive directors and development directors drowning in paperwork. Hired to be visionaries and strategists, they spend their days buried in administrative tasks.
A fractional administrator, like one of More Than Giving’s specially trained Nonprofit Virtual Assistants (NPVA®), acts as a force multiplier. First, the NPVA® frees up your senior leaders to focus on the high-value strategic work they were hired to do, dramatically increasing their ROI. Second, it ensures you’re investing your budget dollars wisely, paying the right amount for administrative support and the right amount for director-level work, rather than paying a director’s rate for all of it.
2. Enhancing Your Team with Director-Level Expertise
What about the rest of your team? Do you have a small, dedicated staff that is struggling to keep up with rapid growth? Perhaps your team is full of potential – and has already raised the bar for events and audience building – but lacks the specific know-how to expand into annual, major, or legacy giving.
A fractional development director can fill this critical capability gap. You get the benefit of a senior-level specialist — whose expertise would be too expensive or niche to hire full-time — for a fraction of the cost. This expert does the work and mentors and elevates the skills of your existing junior staff, making your whole team stronger.
3. Enhancing Your Team with Targeted Expertise
You desperately need additional administrative support for the busy year-end giving season, but you don’t need that support in March. Or you need help designing a new program but won’t need that expertise once you complete the pilot phase.
A fractional team member solves this challenge. You can bring on a fractional administrator to support your core team for a few months each year. You can also engage a fractional program developer to design and launch a new program, giving you targeted expertise and hands to get the work done – exactly when you need them – so that your core team stays focused on programs that need year-round attention.
The "Both/And" Model in Action: A Client Story
This isn't just theory.
A little more than a year ago, the executive director of a new More Than Giving client was in crisis mode. Our fractional senior operations officer, Susan, began by shadowing him, serving as a sounding board, and offering stopgaps and solutions.
Today, Susan is building a long-term development program to diversify the organization’s revenue. Three more laser-focused fractional team members were engaged, including a major gift officer who is currently working five hours a week. That arrangement will ramp up to ten hours a week for the busy giving season and then scale back to six when the workload cools. There is no waste.
For a cost of less than $65,000 per year, this hybrid model provides strategic capability and capacity that could cost the organization as much as $400,000 annually in traditional, full-time staffing.
A struggling organization now has, right now, all the people it needs to advance its mission and grow sustainably. And when their needs change, their fractional team can adjust quickly and seamlessly.
Build a Team Without Limits.
The “both/and” fractional model gives you the power to build a cultural core of a dedicated internal staff, enhancing it as needed with the specialized skills and expertise. You get the best of both worlds.
Whether you are a small organization trying to get your mission off the ground, or a growing nonprofit ready to scale up, fractional team building is endlessly adjustable to the precise needs of the day. If you are concerned that your organization is stuck in survival mode, fractional staffing offers all of the tools you need to go from surviving to thriving.
Your team is your greatest asset. Ask me how the right fractional partner can unlock their full potential and help your organization thrive.