How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 1 of a series)

How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 1 of a series)

Question: Steve – I recently took on a position to manage a major gift team for a major capital campaign at a healthcare institution. Any particular advice on operations to enhance efficiency of the gift officers and to ensure prospects don’t fall through the cracks? How would you begin this process?

By Tom Wilson Major Gifts Guru

Your efficiency question is excellent. But, balance the question of efficiency with effectiveness. Over the years we have learned that in managing major gift officers you want to promote results while maintaining a people-first, relationship fundraising model.

Absolutely track dollar results as that’s how everyone will measure the overall impact of your major gifts fundraising program. Therefore, the first efficiency measure is financial impact.

See the chart above for what I think would be a good start. Please note this is set up on a calendar year. You can easily modify this if your fiscal year starts July 1st or some other month.

Also note I track each month and compare it to last year and 2 years ago. We have learned the hard way that the productivity for a brand new major gifts officer is quite different from an experienced person and that to fully hold a major gift officers feet in the fire they need 3 years of experience.

Another assumption in the chart, you have major gift officers but no planned giving officers. I am a firm believer that every major gift officer needs to have basic training to detect planned estate gifting noises. For many fundraising programs the major gift officer also needs to be trained to close basic planned estate gifts only handing off complicated cases to one more highly trained planned giving officer on staff or available on-call. And, even if you have one planned giving officer, the major gift officers should be the lead generator. Monitor these leads to reward good behavior.

So you need to track cash gifts and documented pledges each month as well as documented planned estate gifts.

While monthly tracking is helpful, major accountability for gift generation should be done quarterly with milestone accountability at the end of each fiscal year.

More to come – Why track monitor ROI

This article is part of a series. To read the other articles also in the series, please click the links below:

• How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 2 of a series)
• How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 3 of a series)
• How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 4 of a series)

Permanent Link: How to Enhance Efficiency of Major Gift Officers (part 1 of a series)

http://majorgiftsguru.com/2009/07/how-to-enhance-efficiency-of-major-gift.html