To ensure the success of your fundraising efforts, it's essential to regularly evaluate the performance of your development officers and identify areas for improvement.
Measuring against goals: One key component of performance management is measuring your development officers' progress against their goals. This can help you to assess the effectiveness of your fundraising strategies, identify areas for improvement, and make adjustments as needed.
To measure performance against goals, you may use metrics such as the number of solicitations made, the total dollar amount of gifts generated, the conversion rate (the percentage of solicitations that result in gifts), and the average gift size. These metrics can give you a clear picture of how well your development officers are performing and help you to set realistic goals for the future.
Identifying activities that enable success: In addition to measuring performance against goals, it's also important to understand the activities that enable your development officers to reach those goals. This includes the amount of time they spend on different tasks, such as prospect research, cultivation, and stewardship, as well as the methods they use to engage with donors. It also often includes measuring the amount of time prospects are in each stage of the development process and movements between stages.
By analyzing these activities, you can identify best practices and replicate them across your team, as well as identify areas for improvement and make changes to optimize your fundraising efforts.
Understanding the makeup of the portfolio: Finally, it's important to understand the makeup of your development officers' portfolios. This includes the size of the portfolio, the total dollar value of the gifts from donors in the portfolio, and the average gift size. It also includes the diversity of the portfolio, including the mix of different types of gifts (e.g. recurring gifts, major gifts, planned gifts) and sources of gifts (e.g. individual donors, foundations, corporations).
By analyzing the makeup of your development officers' portfolios, you can identify opportunities for growth and improvement. For example, if you notice that a particular development officer has a large portfolio with a high average gift size, you may want to allocate additional resources to support their efforts, or if they have a larger number of high potential donors than they can realistically manage, you may wish to reallocate some of those potential donors to other portfolios. If you notice that a development officer has a portfolio that has become overweight with donors in the stewardship stage, it may be time to consider a dedicated stewardship resource, or at least think about reallocating some of those donors across other portfolios.
Regularly evaluating the performance of your development officers is an essential component of successful nonprofit fundraising. By measuring against goals, identifying the activities that enable success, and understanding the makeup of their portfolios, you can make informed decisions to optimize your fundraising efforts and advance your mission.
There are a number of dedicated and sophisticated development officer performance management tools in the market. In addition, most fundraising systems, such as Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT, have built-in reporting that provides some visibility into the above metrics. Not every organization is ready to make the investment required to implement and maintain a dedicated development officer performance management system. However, they are also often unsatisfied with what is available from their system's built-in reporting options and don't have or want to dedicate the resources to continually export data to create manually built custom views of their data in tools like Excel.
An automated custom reporting and report distribution platform such as Reporting Xpress offer an attractive intermediate step. Custom reports and dashboards can provide enhanced visibility into development officer performance, actions, and activities, as well as deeper portfolio analysis. Automated reports can be updated daily to provide stakeholders with the information they need to make informed decisions without increasing the workload on your database and /or reporting staff.
