Book excerpt: The War for Fundraising Talent is an honest yet hopeful critique of professional fundraising, intended especially for small shops that find it difficult to consistently achieve their fundraising goals. These organizations are notorious for rapid turnover and high donor attrition which are merely side effects of a much larger problem. This inter-sector conflict will not be won by those organizations who continue to mistakenly consider their scarcest resource to be donors with dollars. After years, if not decades, of obsessively accumulating new donors, most organizations have more than enough donors to keep them busy for quite some time. Those willing to part ways with this time-worn paradigm will discover how to retain more of the talent they already have and empower their new recruits with an environment where fundraising professionals can achieve mastery and find meaning in their work.