How do you hold Fundraising Staff Accountable?

As we said Friday, there's a big difference between the effect that a nonprofit organization's lack of planning, ignorance of the fundraising process and their lack of infrastructure has on the organization's bottom line, and the effect produced by the fundraising professional's daily pursuit of activities and responsibilities. Here's how we can tell the difference.

What we want to measure 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 will, 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.

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 institutions' problem, or whether it's the lack of work or experience on the part of the newly hired fundraising professional.