Gift officer turnover is a major challenge for many nonprofit organizations. While there are many reasons for this, and we touch on this topic regularly on the SmartIdeas Blog, one aspect you can work to improve is in your gift officer hiring practices.
What are the traits of the best performing major gifts officers? What should you be looking for in interviews that may not show up on the resume?
MarketSmart works with numerous organizations on their major gifts fundraising, and we have interacted with countless gift officers. Here, we’re presenting ten qualities of major gifts officers you can look for when hiring your next fundraiser.
Look for ways to draw out these traits during the interview process, including with specific questions and as part of the conversations themselves.
1. Values Emotion Over Information
The best major gifts fundraisers understand that making a large gift is driven more by emotion than having all the information explained perfectly to them.
Giving money away is inherently irrational. Especially giving a lot of it. Think about it. One day, you have a net worth of $15 million. The next day, you have $14 million. Your bank isn’t broken, for sure, but you went in the opposite direction most people want to go.
Regardless of the amount, people don’t ultimately give because they were convinced to do so by facts, statistics, and persuasive or logical arguments. Giving is driven by a different set of needs. Powerful needs. Emotional needs. Personality needs.
An effective gift officer learns to look for and draw out those aspects of a potential major donor. Yes, information needs to be presented too, but that’s not what moves the needle. Look for a gift officer who gets this.
2. Persistent and Resilient
Fundraising is hard. Anyone who says different is selling something.
Even the best gift officers will be rejected, experience setbacks, wrestle with delays, and suffer disappointments. Some of the most promising prospects can suddenly ghost you, out of the blue with no explanation.
The best major gifts fundraisers aren’t dissuaded when these things happen. They don’t fall into despair, lose motivation, or get trapped in a funk trying to figure out what they did wrong.
They let it go. They move on.
Persistence and resilience can’t be taught. They don’t show up on resumes. But they matter far more than whatever certifications or college degrees might show up on one.
Look for strategies to draw these out during your interview process and reference checks.
3. Takes a Donor-Centric Approach
Giving has to be about the donor more than the organization. That’s the path to the biggest gifts, the most repeat gifts, and long-term partnerships.
The most effective gift officers know this, and they gravitate toward any new strategies and knowledge that will help them connect with what matters to donors. MarketSmart’s entire platform was built based on this belief – to better serve, communicate, and meet the needs of donors while respecting their autonomy.
You want gift officers who aren’t interested in internal organizational politics or issues. You want them out there, engaging with donors and nurturing relationships that are profitable for both parties.
You know a gift officer excels in this area when they go so far as to put a donor’s interests above those of the organization, such as in advocating for a restricted gift.
In your interview process, consider asking if the prospect has ever bucked their organization in favor of a donor. A confident gift officer won’t shy away from this, even though it’s a provocative question, because they believe in what they’re doing over internal politics.
4. Good listener
The best gift officers listen more than talk. They want to listen. They love asking questions and learning about people. They know major gifts fundraising isn’t about explaining things, but in listening and drawing out the feelings, longings, goals, desires, and ambitions of donors.
Listening builds rapport and helps the fundraiser gain trust.
As the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, once said, “We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
5. High EQ
Emotional intelligence matters far more than factual knowledge or book smarts. EQ is about relating to people in a way that builds trust and breaks down barriers. An emotionally intelligent person can perceive how others are feeling – and respond accordingly.
There are even EQ tests online that you could consider using as part of your interview process. Consider Bright Dot’s Assessment for finding fundraisers with high emotional intelligence. Bright Dot is a world-class fundraising consultancy that puts emotional intelligence at the core of their work and recommendations.
6. Relational not Transactional
Fundraising is about relationships, not transactions. It’s about building trust, delivering value, and facilitating through guidance and advice.
It’s about learning the other person’s story and helping them tell the story they want to tell about their own lives, through giving.
The transaction of giving is just the final act that happens after the story has advanced and the relationship has matured. Look for people who seek to understand and serve instead of those who aim to solicit and extract.
7. Ability to Stay Organized
Not everyone is inherently organized. To be an effective gift officer, you have to be able to manage and keep track of the unique details of dozens of donors’ lives, often over many years. It’s easy to let things pile up. Literally.
The best gift officers, even if they aren’t instinctively organized, know how to use, leverage, and thrive with modern technology tools and other means of organization.
They can learn how to use CRMs, appointment schedulers, and the many other tools available today, as well as analog ones that work for them, to keep all the information about each donor in their caseload orderly and accessible.
You can’t be a top gift officer if your office and information systems are disaster zones.
8. Led By Intuition More Than Logic
Logic gets bogged down in details. Intuition thinks big picture. Logic tries to craft arguments and ‘make the case.’ Intuition listens, adapts, detects, and takes risks.
In fundraising, intuition is far more valuable to a gift officer than logic. It’s just the nature of the job. The best fundraisers know how to use relational intuition, especially when coupled with experience, to know which questions to ask or not ask, and where to lead the conversation.
They can tell when a donor might be ready for a challenge – to meet in person, to discuss a gift, to join a caseload – and when that donor might need more time to develop their own story related to giving.
For example, does the donor know why giving is important to them? If they don’t, they won’t give as big of a gift, or feel as joyful about it. An intuitive fundraiser won’t just pick up on that – they will value the information and act on it.
9. Driven By Results
Relationships, intuition, emotion, listening, being donor-centric – this all matters. But at the end of the day, you need results.
The most effective and efficient major gifts fundraisers don’t just want great conversations and healthy relationships. That’s all good and fulfilling. But there is a purpose here. They do want a gift. They have a goal, and they are focused on achieving it.
You want to hire a gift officer who is always aiming to help supporters move themselves forward – but without disrespecting or ignoring the donor’s autonomy. ‘Moving forward’ could just mean having another meeting, but the gift officer will make a plan for that meeting. They’ll have topics to bring up, questions to ask, challenges to make, and a plan to follow up and take the next step.
Look for gift officer candidates who don’t become overly satisfied with making new friends. It’s not ‘friendraising’. You want someone who enjoys the process but doesn’t get distracted by comfort or contentment. They want results, and they maintain intentionality throughout the process without seeming overly obsessed.
10. Intrinsically Motivated
Lastly, the most effective gift officers aren’t motivated by external praise, accolades, public recognition, or even financial rewards. Those things are nice, and they likely won’t decline them.
But that’s not what motivates them. Some people are externally motivated. You have to give them a paycheck, ongoing validation, or other positive (or negative!) motivations to keep working and producing.
Other people are self-motivated. They don’t need to be told what to do. They want to learn. They want to improve. They want to solve problems, succeed, and win gifts. They want to be good at what they do and to go home knowing they gave their best effort and are helping lift up the organization.
It’s innate. They probably don’t even think about it in these terms. They just show up and do the work. They are reliable.
The Qualities of Your Next Major Gifts Fundraiser
You’ll meet many candidates who possess one or a handful of these qualities. And those people may turn into decent gift officers.
But the all-stars, the ones you really want to hire, are the ones who possess all these traits. Is that possible?
Very much so. Because most of these traits aren’t in competition. They are complimentary. Probably the one trait most distinct from the other nine on this list is the one about staying organized. Often, emotionally intelligent, intuitive, relationally skilled people aren’t the most organized.
But with the right tools, because they are self-motivated, they will remain organized because they will use the tools you provide them, and the ones they’ve already gotten accustomed to.
MarketSmart’s role in this is to free up your gift officers from having to spend so much time searching for potential major donors, scouring databases and wealth screening reports, and cold-calling someone because a board member said they have wealth and insisted they be called immediately.
Our system has automated the identification and pre-qualification aspects of major gifts fundraising.
It frees gift officers to focus on what they do best – the ten qualities you just read about.
So – hire well. Use the right tools. And watch your major gifts fundraising soar.
Related Resources:
- Are Nonprofits Driving Gift Officers to Do Fundraising Activities that Don’t Work?
- The Ongoing Discouragement of Our Best Fundraisers When Their Talents are Most Needed
- What Is Donor Identification? Major Gift Fundraising Fundamentals Series
- What Is Donor Qualification? Major Gifts Fundraising Fundamentals