What Makes Fund Raisers Succeed

When Paul Keenan first took a job soliciting big gifts for charity, his supervisor asked him and his colleagues to prepare monthly reports, listing all their contacts with potential donors, and whether they were calls, letters, or visits.

“It was controversial — people resented it because they were professionals and felt they could be trusted,” says Mr. Keenan, now an associate dean of development at Harvard University. “They also felt it was overly bureaucratic.”

Now, more than a decade later, such attitudes seem quaint. More and more charities are adopting sophisticated systems to monitor and assess the performance of staff members who solicit big gifts from wealthy people. The evaluation systems hold fund raisers to exacting requirements for the number of donors they visit, how such visits are reported, the amount of dollars raised, and the percentage of solicitations that result in a donation.

Such efforts can help fund raisers bring in more money, according to researchers. A 2006 study of nearly 600 college and university fund raisers who solicit big gifts found that those who raise the most work for institutions that are more systematic in tracking and applying performance measures.

But some veteran fund raisers worry that charities are focusing on the wrong things, rather than evaluating whether fund raisers are doing the best possible job over the long term. “This focus on the numbers could be hurting philanthropy,” says Kent Dove, senior vice president for development at the Indiana University Foundation, in Bloomington. “Maybe it is not how many times you visit a donor but how well-prepared you are in the meetings and whether you have the right strategy in place. We may be measuring mediocrity.”

Staying on Track

Charities are adopting new performance measures in part because they are putting a growing amount of effort into soliciting wealthy donors — the people who fuel ambitious campaigns to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

In addition, board members want to know that money spent on fund-raising salaries and other costs generates results. And chief development officers say that the evaluation systems help them keep fund-raising operations on track, especially as charities are seeking increasingly large sums each year. They can gauge how much progress fund raisers are making and budget their time and other resources accordingly.

“Everybody is suddenly focused on this issue,” says Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant at Bentz Whaley Flessner, in Minneapolis. “People used to say that it takes money to raise money. Now people want to know if they are getting a good return on the investment.”

Among the efforts under way:

• The Mayo Foundation, in Rochester, Minn., added new performance measures to its evaluation process for 44 fund raisers who solicit gifts of $100,000 or more.

  Formerly, the foundation looked only at the total dollars each fund raiser brought in, but it is now measuring how many contacts fund raisers have with prospective donors and assessing the quality of each contact, based on reports filed by fund raisers.

  “We can hire a lot of people and put them out in the field, but you have to justify your budget to your board, to your benefactors, and others,” says Daniel L. Pennington, the foundation’s assistant chair of development. “In a data-driven society, it helps to point to some data that says if we do x, we can expect y.”

• Boys & Girls Clubs of America recently started tracking the number of visits, calls, and written correspondence of 15 fund raisers who ask for gifts of $50,000 or more, in addition to assessing how much those employees raise each year. The change was made “so I can make sure the right activity is happening to ensure results,” says Cyndi Court, senior vice president for resource development. “You have to be out there making calls and visits.”
• In anticipation of a campaign that will probably seek more than $1-billion, the Nature Conservancy in July started a new effort that will evaluate fund raisers based on at least 10 measures related to seeking big gifts, like the number of potential donors they have identified through referrals and what percentage of prospective donors make a gift.

  Amy Golden, director of advancement services and membership at the conservancy, says that, to come up with the new evaluation method, the organization spent nearly a year looking at how other nonprofit groups assess fund raisers’ performance and making changes in its software programs to collect the new data.

  “At the end of the day, managers can see what is in the works, what is likely and when, in terms of money raised,” Ms. Golden says of the new performance measures. “We can see the pipeline in terms of what is likely to be generated. Fund raising is an art and a science. This is the science side of the art.”

No One System

Experts who have studied performance measurements for fund raisers say that no one system is right for all organizations.

Some charities tailor their performance requirements to a fund raiser’s level of experience. Others change how fund raisers are evaluated over time, depending on what stage the development operation is in, according to a study on evaluation of nearly 1,000 major-gift specialists at 44 colleges and universities. The findings were released in May by Eduventures, a company that conducts research in higher education.

“We’ve seen institutions focus on visits as the primary criteria leading into a campaign, and at later stages when relationships with donors are more developed, they focus more on solicitations or dollars raised,” says Jennifer Zaslow, the senior analyst who conducted the study.

To help ensure that development officers toe the line, charities like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and several public broadcasting stations use a point-based system developed by Richard K. Dupree, executive director of development at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. That evaluation system awards 25 points apiece for four areas of performance: dollars raised, number of proposals submitted to donors, contacts with donors, and quality of work as measured by how well the fund raiser adheres to a budget, the percentage of solicitations that result in a gift, and other factors, like whether the fund raiser involves key university leaders in meetings with donors.

How many points fund raisers earn depends on how closely their performance matches certain expectations. For example, fund raisers are expected to raise at least $1-million each year in cash and pledges, make 150 mostly in-person contacts with donors, and submit at least 30 written proposals for large gifts. Fund raisers who score 80 or more points in their evaluations receive an annual bonus, while those who earn less than 75 points get extra help to improve.

A Longer View

The point system and most other evaluation systems for fund raisers are based on annual measures with monthly or quarterly reviews to make sure major-gift officers are on track to meet their yearly goals.

But one organization, the Alzheimer’s Association, is taking a longer view: Last year, Gary Grant, who served as the organization’s director of major gifts, started what he calls a “baseball card approach” to document and publicize each fund raiser’s performance for all of the years they have worked at the association.

Mr. Grant produced 3-by-5-inch cards for each member of his 15-person staff. On one side is a color photograph of the fund raiser and his or her name. The other side of the card includes personal information, such as the person’s hobby or their spouse or children’s names, as well as both yearly and total statistics about the fund raiser’s achievements. The statistics include the number of solicitations made, dollars raised, and how many significant interactions the fund raiser had with donors.

By publishing both cumulative and annual statistics to measure a fund raiser’s performance, Mr. Grant says his goal was to make trustees and senior leaders at his charity aware that wide fluctuations in dollars raised often occur for reasons that are completely out of a fund raiser’s control, such as changes in a donor’s circumstances, like a divorce or the sale of a business.

What’s more, most people who make large gifts do so intermittently, not annually, he notes.

The cards, he says help provide “the full picture when evaluating a major-gift officer,” he says. “If someone misses a goal this year, but exceeded their goal dramatically in previous years, we want some appreciation of that.”

And, Mr. Grant says, “if we track only the current year, a fund raiser might lose some incentive once they reach their annual goal. The lifetime total, just by being shown, acts as an open-ended goal. Each fund raiser may be motivated to try to reach some personal goal, like hitting the $10-million mark or becoming the top fund raiser in the organization’s history.”

While he started a new job this month as vice president for development at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, in Fort Worth, Alzheimer’s Association officials say they plan to keep using the baseball-card approach.

Acute Concern

But if charities hope that evaluation systems will improve fund raisers’ performance, others worry that focusing on the total number of gifts raised and other numbers pushes development officers to meet their goals at the expense of forming lasting, meaningful relations with donors. That concern is especially acute among experts who have watched charities hire people with sales and other business experience for top development jobs because the shortage of experienced fund raisers is so severe (The Chronicle, August 9, 2007).

“You are looking for someone who can bring the money in,” says Claudia A. Looney, senior vice president for development at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, now in a campaign that has raised more than $700-million to date. “A lot of people are great at cultivation but cannot close a gift. Salespeople understand this. But in our haste to raise dollars, we can forget about the relationship component. The tendency is to run the risk of not getting repeat gifts.”

Mr. Dove, the Indiana University fund raiser, agrees. “If fund raisers are doing major-gift work, it is hard to meet the standards. They can raise the dollar amount, but other stuff suffers. They are stressing out to get 15 calls in without thinking of the quality of those calls and building a long-term relationship.”

That’s one reason some organizations refuse to set dollar goals to evaluate a fund raiser’s performance, while others set goals for the amount to be raised by the entire development staff.

Instead of dollar goals, Smith College tracks the number of visits a fund raiser makes to potential contributors and other ways in which he or she shepherds people through the process of becoming a donor.

“While I believe in quantitative metrics, I do not believe that dollars raised is one of the right ones to encourage success,” says Patricia Jackson, the college’s vice president for advancement. “We periodically ask if we should implement a dollar goal, but this is hard to do without reinforcing behaviors we think are inappropriate.”

Those who do evaluate major-gift specialists based on how much they raise are divided on whether dollar goals should be counted more heavily than other measures, like visits with donors. Ms. Looney is one longtime fund raiser who believes they should.

“We are in the business of raising money, not taking people to tea,” she says. “We have to help people understand why they are here. They have been hired to bring the dollars in.”

A Profession Matures

Even with the potential drawbacks, most institutions that have adopted new quantitative performance measures have decided that they are better than simply looking at how much money an organization raises each year with little attention to how. The new systems, they say, help fund raisers understand what they are expected to do and help their managers do a better job of coaching them by pointing out strengths and weaknesses.

The performance measures are also a sign that fund raising is becoming more professionally rigorous, says Mr. Keenan of Harvard. “Fifty years ago, it was an old-boy network of folks tapping each other for support,” he says. “Now there is a more heightened expectation among donors and board members, and people want to know whether they are doing the right stuff and having an impact. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”