performance and identify best actions to achieve higher levels of productivity. In 2016, we studied ... While hiring had
The Top of the Market for Gift Officers Analyzing Gift Officer Lifecycle
At Case Summit in 2013, every fundraising executive I met had the same phrase pass their lips; “talent acquisition and talent development”. Little did I know as I was hearing these comments, two sides of a peak had been building for some time – a crest of one trend, and the beginning of another. Gift officer staffing models have been the mainstay of capital campaign planning since our company first began serving fundraising organizations in 2002. “How many gift officers should I have for a campaign of this size?”, “how do I get them?” “what should I do with them between campaigns?”. Implicit in this era was the idea that generally the capacity to raise money was a function of the number of feet on the street. Since the 2013 CASE Summit, our Customer Success team has been hearing a different set of questions as they work with subscribers; “what do great officers do?” “Where do I find them?”, “how do I keep them?” and “should I grow my own?”. In our recent comprehensive study of gift officer turnover between 2006 and 2016, we saw that these qualitative questions reflected a deeper quantitative shift in thought from more officers to better officers.
Reeher Studies Gift Officer Lifecycle In our study, we applied a decade’s worth of data we receive in the Reeher Platform Community that generally reflects the market of the top 800 fundraising universities, to analyze officer hires and departures. The Community data comes in nightly to our Platform, and reflects officer actions, among many other things, that we use to analyze customer performance and identify best actions to achieve higher levels of productivity. In 2016, we studied four areas in the “Gift Officer Life Cycle”:
how quickly can we identify strong performers estimating the likelihood of departure, the profile of “prime” gift officers, the analysis of the market for gift officers by type of institution over the decade.
This work is a continuation of our last five years of performance analysis for major gift operations.
The Top of the Market for Gift Officers
Page 1|3
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
In the study, we could see that at the time groups like CASE 50 were digging into the question of talent management, the market for gift officers was peaking. The graph here reflects the hiring of new gift officers for New Officers Starting Jobs our customer set. You 400 will notice that 350 National Publics and Regional - Public National Privates 300 Regional - Private institutions led the 250 National Liberal Arts way in team 200 expansion, while National - Public 150 National Liberal Arts, National - Private 100 and Regional institutions were 50 comparatively steady 0 over the 10-year period. The data fit the narrative that we heard from our Reeher Community Vice Presidents. Coming out of the recession, we saw a split. For our large institutions, the cost of turnover was the opportunity cost of untapped potential. For smaller schools, the real budget constraints made hiring officers prohibitive. The large schools bet on accelerating hiring, while the small schools had to focus on fundamentals. Experiences in both types of schools were an important natural experiment as some focused on performance out of necessity, while some were able to pursue growth through adding to staff. By 2013, the supply of officers was very tight. Salaries in hot markets were rising into the low six figures, and average tenure had dropped to about 3 years. While hiring had probably helped, many VPs reported that quality of officers hired was irregular. Across the board, our conversations at our executive conference, the topic turned from “where do I get more officers?”, to “how do I get more out of the officers I have?”. Through this analysis, we could see that poor performance could be spotted early. This meant that we could identify weakness in the key skills we had identified through another piece of research we conducted the Reeher Fundraising Maturity Model back in 2015. This alert could allow for coaching on particular areas as early as six months after hiring. This intervention would likely mean that more officers could become effective, and if this happened, it would mean higher levels of productivity while they were there. We saw tantalizing evidence that strong performers actually stay longer. If this held, perhaps strengthening performance could actually help reduce attrition. Regardless, organizations would get more out of their officers while they were there.
The Top of the Market for Gift Officers
Page 2|3
When we combined this data on officer performance, with our work between 2012 and 2015 on measuring the variations in maturity of fundraising management, we have been able to create a comprehensive, data-driven, and practical system for measuring performance, that supports the Reeher Platform for Gift Officer enablement. Our “before” and “after” analysis of applying these principals demonstrates that our datadriven, tailored, and manageable approach to major gift fundraising provides for substantial increases in the number of major donors, and the number of first-time major donors. It shows this can be achieved using existing resources. All of this is certainly good news, as all colleges and universities are looking for new ways to establish and expand relationships over the lifetime of a constituent.
About Reeher Reeher provides a cooperative management system that colleges and universities share to enable their frontline with state-of-the art tools regardless of their donor database. Our combination of data-driven diagnostics, easy to use tools, and community insight help customers achieve faster and at a lower cost than each institution having to build their own tool sets. We are honored to partner with so many great organizations who share our commitment to “achieve more”. For more information on the Reeher Community, or to discuss our other findings, please contact us at
[email protected] or visit us on the web at www.reeher.com.
The Top of the Market for Gift Officers
Page 3|3
