What is it about gift officers, who continue to quit in droves after short tenures at nonprofit organizations that hire them?
It always starts off with so much positivity.
For gift officers new to the industry, it’s excitement, ambition, optimism, and joy as they look forward to helping advance a cause they care about. For veteran gift officers starting fresh at new organizations, it’s the ever-present hope that “this time it will be different.”
Sometimes, it is. But often not.
Why?
A survey we (at MarketSmart) frequently cite, because it’s so eye-opening, shed some light on this question by asking gift officers how they spend their time and why so many seem to be frustrated with their work. Here’s what they said:
Broadly speaking, gift officers feel like they spend far too much time doing work other than what they should and want to be doing.
They get stuck in meetings irrelevant to them.
They get roped into helping with events that aren’t the reason they were hired.
They feel overworked and undervalued.
They have too many prospects and not enough time to forge relationships with all of them.
They make too many cold calls that get no response, or get met with angry supporters.
And, they get pressed to ask for gifts from supporters who they know haven’t been properly cultivated.
The study surveyed experienced fundraisers and leaders with an average of 13 years in the industry, specializing in advancement. Respondents had an average of nine years working specifically in major giving or planned giving, or both.
Here are some details surrounding those key findings.
Wealth Screening Data and Wild Goose Chases
Wealth screening reports presume to help gift officers know who among their various databases have potential to give major gifts. And that’s why 86% of people taking the survey reported using them.
But, only 27% agreed that the wealth ratings in those reports were effective or useful. So, hardly anyone relying on wealth screeners is actually benefiting from what they were intended to deliver – finding and focusing on the right prospects for major gifts who are ready for outreach.
That’s not good. And it gets worse.
Only 19% of respondents said the data from wealth screening reports was quite or very effective at helping determine ask amounts.
So, not only do wealth screeners have a terrible track record of identifying viable prospects who are most likely to give at a high level and are ready for outreach — their primary purpose — they do even worse at revealing how much money to ask for.
Predictive Analytics and Propensity Ratings Are Not Much Better
What about other methods of identifying major giving prospects? The study asked about propensity ratings, and they didn’t fare much better.
Only 30% of respondents said these ratings helped predict the likelihood a prospect might make a major or planned gift.
This shouldn’t be surprising, because wealth screeners, propensity ratings, and all other data-driven methods that use quantitative data for identifying potential major donors are working with the same sets of information. It’s just a different recipe. If your data is bad, any conclusions you try to draw from it – no matter the method – will be unreliable. Garbage in; garbage out.
These methods are directional at best and wasting time (which is your past donors’ money) at worst.
That’s why they continue to frustrate gift officers, no matter which organization for which they try to work. It’s not the organization’s fault either – it’s the methods they’re using. They are convenient to invest in and relatively inexpensive, too. That drives fundraisers and consultants to use them. But what is the cost of a wild goose chase? And how much does it annoy supporters to be engaged when they don’t want outreach?
It’s an industry-wide problem, and it’s one of the major reasons more and more wealthy donors are starting and giving to foundations rather than nonprofits. They’re annoyed. And fundraisers are frustrated.
How can we solve this problem?
A better approach is to let potential major donors lean into the process of self-qualification as having wealth capacity and interest in giving, and actually ask to have someone reach out to them.
Sounds great, right? And I promise this works! But how do you do it?
You start engaging them with low-pressure offers through email, on social media, or via direct mail. We recommend you start with a survey. Then you prove that you listened by following up (automatically) with personalized messages that let them nurture and cultivate at their own pace, on their own terms. When they’re sufficiently engaged and showing signs of interest in giving, and have indicated they have capacity to make a major gift of assets – that’s when you reach out.
And in case you didn’t know it, this is what MarketSmart’s software system does. It’s a donor-driven approach that prioritizes which supporters among the thousands in your database are ‘outreach-ready’, according to them. You can do this at scale and at low cost for thousands of supporters — far more than gift officers could ever manage.
That way, gift officers only have to step in when supporters indicate they’re ready. A much better experience for everyone. Imagine how many false positives and wild goose chases you could avoid this way.
Let’s keep looking at more concerns.
Oversized Caseloads
The average caseload size in the study was 142, which is far more than anyone can keep track of in a meaningful way. And that’s why, according to the study, only 52% of assigned prospects in these caseloads were getting personal visits each year.
When large numbers of good prospects aren’t being cultivated actively (70 out of 142, on average), the relationship withers, and their emotional connection to your organization weakens.
That means lost revenue.
And that’s revenue you could have easily won if your gift officers had smaller caseloads. That way, the people who want the extra attention get it and those that don’t get automated cultivation that resonates because it’s based on what they told you in their survey responses and through their online engagement (click patterns).
Unqualified Prospects
Just 37% of fundraisers in the study said newly assigned prospects added to their caseloads were truly qualified to give major gifts or planned gifts because they have capacity, affinity, interest, and most importantly the timing is right for them to consider such an investment.
That means, in a caseload of 142, only about 50 of those people should actually be there.
Imagine – what if there were a way to somehow pre-qualify, completely qualify, and add only those 50 while keeping the others out of your gift officer caseloads?
That would mean gift officers could realistically expect to keep active relationships with everyone on their caseload, and spending that effort would be worth their time because all these people have completely qualified themselves to work with a gift officer.
With MarketSmart’s system, this is exactly what happens. Supporters either pre-qualify themselves as being ready for outreach, or the system pre-qualifies them based on their various responses to surveys and other email communication.
Inefficient Email Priorities
92% of people responding to the research reported being actively engaged with donors and prospects through email. Personal emails. That’s good, so this is a bright spot in the report.
But 55% also said they didn’t spend enough time on solicitation, and 42% said the same about qualification.
So they’re sending personal emails to stay in touch. But it seems like a lot of these emails aren’t very substantive, or aren’t effectively helping supporters move themselves forward in the fundraising process.
That’s probably why 50% said they still have to qualify donors with in-person visits, even though this is an inefficient and costly way to do that. If you could pre-qualify donors before ever visiting them, you would save tons of time for the gift officer, and tons of money for the organization.
“Significant Frustration”
Overall, the respondents to the research said they experienced “significant frustration with the time spent setting up and completing qualification visits that did not ultimately lead to gifts.”
They also felt “significant pressure for their limited donor contact time, as well as frustration in finding good ways to focus on the right donors and amplify productivity.”
When you put all these findings together, you can see why so many gift officers quit less than two years after getting hired.
Bad data is leading to bad leads, oversized caseloads, and too much time and money differentiating the good prospects from the unqualified ones.
MarketSmart was created because we saw this happening, and even experienced it firsthand from the donor’s side. Our system uses an entirely different approach to identifying and pre-qualifying potential major donors, and it does it with automation – so your gift officers no longer waste so much time on fruitless pursuits resulting from low-quality data.
You make your own data. Right from the donors themselves. And it’s on their terms, so they’re happy with the process.
See how MarketSmart works with this quick video
Related Posts:
- How to Deepen Your Major Donor Relationships
- Strategies for Nonprofit Leaders in an Era of Declining Confidence
- 6 Costly Ways Turnover Cripples Major Gift Fundraising Operations — and 5 Ways You Can Reduce It
- 10 Reasons Why Major Gift Officers Quit to Look for New Jobs