Gift officer turnover continues to plague so many outstanding nonprofit organizations. We’ve been writing about this for several years, but the problem continues. One of the primary reasons is overwork. Major gifts fundraisers are getting yanked around in too many directions and have too many tasks to perform. They can’t keep up, and it burns them out.
What’s the solution?
There are many because several factors besides overwork are causing the turnover problem. But for this particular issue, the solution is to increase fundraising automation.
Why Fundraising Automation Will Reduce Gift Officer Turnover
Automation will make a tangible difference in turnover because it can take over so many tasks that gift officers are doing right now. Fundraising automation enables the gift officer to spend more time on tasks that profit the organization, and less time on ones that get in the way of them doing their jobs.
Here are four specific ways fundraising automation aids gift officers.
Reduces workload
Gift officers are overworked. Most people should agree on that. With automation, you can remove tasks from their to-do list that take an inordinate amount of time. This will reduce their stress and prevent burnout and exhaustion.
The important thing to note here is, these are necessary and valuable tasks. We’re not talking about removing things that are a waste of time. We’re talking about fundraising efficiency – doing more with the same – or even fewer – actual workers. In other words, with fundraising automation, the next time a gift officer leaves, you might not need to replace them (assuming you have others on the team and not just one).
Allows gift officer to focus on donor relationships
Gift officers don’t want to do most of the tasks you can automate. Most of these involve staring at screens and analyzing data. Bo-ring. Gift officers didn’t sign up for that. They want to be out there, interacting with donors. They want to be nurturing relationships and helping donors advance their hero stories and give transformative gifts.
With fundraising automation, you can empower them to do just that.
Simplifies fundraising process
Major gift fundraising has a lot of steps. It’s a complicated process, because relationships and money are complicated.
With fundraising automation, you can completely remove certain steps from the major gift fundraising process, as far as human involvement is concerned. This lets everyone drill down on what remains, elevate their skills, and intensify their focus on what matters most. It also makes it easier to train new gift officers.
Reduces costs
In addition to all the above benefits of fundraising automation, this might be the best of all, at least from the perspective of the nonprofit’s leadership.
Fundraising automation saves money! You won’t need as many staff to do the same amount of work. Automation – at least the type offered by MarketSmart – is kind of like hiring a part-time gift officer, except this one does all the work no one else wants to do, and costs a lot less than the many full-time workers you’d need to do everything our system does.
Automation also saves money because, as already mentioned, fewer gift officers will quit in frustration. This means less hiring, training, and onboarding. All those things cost money too. Plus, think about HR costs, benefits, travel, equipment like new laptops, and so much more that comes with hiring new people. With less turnover, you’ll spend less money maintaining an effective staff.
4 Major Gift Fundraising Tasks You Can Automate
So what can fundraising automation actually do? Let’s take a look at four critical fundraising tasks your gift officers are doing now, that automation can do better, faster, and cheaper.
Lead generation
Finding new leads is difficult. Often, the best way is to attract more email subscribers, but you can also meet them at community events and other in-person locations. You can get them from social media too. Some organizations have big databases full of names, but you don’t know who the real leads are in those lists, and don’t want to waste money sending things to dead ends.
With automation, you can set up systems that allow interested supporters to engage with your organization in ways that require no one from your team to do anything.
One of the most powerful ways we do this is with donor surveys. There’s a lot more we could say about this, but it would distract from the point. Read this for more detail on why surveys work.
Pre-Qualification for Outreach
Once you have supporters engaged, how do you know which ones might be candidates for outreach from a gift officer?
Without automation, your gift officers have to make a lot of guesses. They might use inaccurate and frustrating tools like RFM, predictive analytics, AI, or wealth screeners, but these have high failure rates and outdated information. Relying on quantitative data to conduct relational tasks is usually a recipe for disaster.
Fundraising automation (at least, the right kind) enables you to automate large parts of the qualification process. Instead of a gift officer sending out emails, responding, looking up past communication before responding so they get all the details right, and going crazy with all the emails, the automation can handle all of this.
Donors will feel heard and understood. They’ll be engaging, learning, and deepening their bond with your organization.
Meanwhile, gift officers will be freed from these early-stage tasks that involve far greater numbers of people, and can focus on the most important work they do – interact with actual major donors and potential candidates.
Cultivation and stewardship
The more donors and supporters engage with your organization, the more the fundraising automation software can continue interacting with them. This happens during the cultivation stage, but also even after a donor makes their first gift.
Fundraising automation can handle large parts of the stewardship process, sending out communications, offers, and valuable content donors will appreciate. The automation will keep them in your sphere of influence without gift officers having to manage all these communications.
This is why we say MarketSmart’s system enables you to conduct qualification and cultivation “at scale.”
You can do these tasks for hundreds, even thousands of potential and previous supporters at all different stages of the donors’ journey. Gift officers could never come close to staying in touch with that many people in a meaningful way.
This is why, in addition to reducing gift officer turnover, fundraising automation also increases your revenue! You’ll make more money.
A lot more.
This is why MarketSmart is able to offer an unheard of 10:1 ROI Guarantee. Our clients make far more in revenue than they spend on our system. The reason is, once again, because our system is like hiring a part-time gift officer. But that gift officer takes critical tasks off the plates of the human gift officers, feeds them better leads, qualifies more donors, and filters out the non-donors. The result is far more revenue than you ever would have earned before.
Prioritization
Last, fundraising automation helps gift officers know when a prospect is ready for outreach from a human. It enables gift officers to only call supporters who are interested and ready to hear from them.
This means far fewer cold calls, hangups, annoyed donors, and ghosted voicemails.
You’ll know who to make outreach to, because the system will tell you.
What Will Gift Officers Still Be Doing?
With fundraising automation supporting their efforts, gift officers will get to spend much more time interacting with real people. They’ll be free to devote more time to each donor relationship. They’ll spend more time developing strategies and crafting giving proposals.
They’ll actually get to follow up when they promise donors they will follow up, because it won’t get lost in a sea of emails and data collection and analysis tasks.
Gift officers will love fundraising automation. It doesn’t replace them. It frees them to do what they do best.
Nonprofit leaders will love it, because it saves money and increases revenue.
Donors love it too, because they will experience much higher levels of responsiveness and personalization from your organization compared to all the others they’re in touch with. They’ll feel heard, known, respected, and valued.
Who doesn’t love fundraising automation? Well, you might find less need for things like wealth screening reports. So there might be some vendors you can say goodbye to. More cost savings!
See more about how MarketSmart’s fundraising automation works
Related Resources:
- FREE WHITEPAPER: All About Fundraising Automation
- 3 Types of Marketing Automation — Which One Do You Really Need to Raise Major Gifts?
- How to Use Fundraising Automation Emails for Raising Major Gifts
- Why Nonprofit Fundraising Gift Officers Quit Their Jobs