How do you hold Fundraising Staff Accountable?

As we said yesterday, there's a need to measure fundraising performance, but we want to understand what the metrics are. If money in the till isn't the only way to measure what the fundraising professional is doing, what, then, are we to measure?

What I think we should be measuring in fundraising staff performance are these elements:
1. Relationship-building activities – are we building significant and productive relationships between our organization's leadership and an increasing number of donors?

2. Prospecting activities -- are we bringing increasing numbers of new prospects within the sphere of influence of our organization, and are we informing and cultivating these prospects on a frequent, regular, persistent and consistent basis?

3. Cultivation and solicitation activities – are we personally cultivating and personally asking an increasing number of prospects and donors for more contributions?

4. Use of Donor Database – are we using the donor database to give us the information we need about donors to produce ever more successful cultivation and solicitation activities?

5. Volunteers – are we working hard to identify, recruit, train, deploy and evaluate an increasing number of volunteers within our organization who can engage in delivering our case for support to prospects, and who can cultivate and solicit prospects and donors for more and higher gifts?

6. Money – OK, yes, we are interested in the financial rewards the above five activity areas will bring in. But, if those activities are being pursued correctly, and if the Board has done its vital work of strategic planning, and if the executive has invested in fundraising infrastructure that ALLOWS those activities to be pursued effectively, then the money willl, in fact, be no worry.: It will be there.

So, what we want to measure, in terms of fundraising staff effectiveness, is the number of calls, letters, visits to donors and donor prospects, the number of volunteers, the number of solicitations made and cultivations underway.

We want to measure the depth of the relationships we have with donors and prospects. So we'll use a three-digit scale of measurement: On a scale of 0-9, what is the prospect's relationship with our institution? On a scale of 0-9 what is the prospect's relationship with a specific person in our institution? And, on a similar scale, what is our judgment of how close the prospect is to making a gift?

We want to measure the number of volunteers who are ready and deployed in the field doing cultivation and solicitation work on our behalf.

We want to measure now many cultivations and solicitations are actually going on in a given week, month, quarter or year, and how many volunteers are involved in that process.

We want to measure the number of times the donor and prospect database actually produce the vital information we need in order to keep all these activity levels going.

If we're measuring these kinds of activities, not just the money, we'll soon find out whether the Board's planning is adequate and in the right direction; we'll soon find out whether the executive has been investing adequately in fundraising infrastructure; and we'll also find out if the new director of development is any good at what she/he does. This kind of evaluation will definitely show whether it's the institution's problem, or whether it's the lack of work or experience on the part of the newly hired fundraising professional.

And nine times out of ten, in my experience, it's going to be the organization that really needs improvement, not the development professional. Why? Because, generally, the focus of Board members is on budget, and the focus of the executive is on program. Fundraising is often seen as just something we need in order to balance the budget, but not something in which many organizations typically invest a whole lot.

Now, I invite some of you out there who have been executives of nonprofits, and think I'm all wet on this, to come back and give your side of the picture. And some of you reading this might also be "Founder" executives, and you've struggled with many conflicting priorities. But your side of the story needs to be told and I'm willing to hear it. That way we can get on with some dialogue here and make this a real exploration.