How Do You Measure Success for Major Gift Officers

There is nothing I enjoy more than informally talking shop with my fundraising colleagues. One recurring theme, casually bantered about in our social gatherings, and more seriously examined as part of our work with metrics and reporting, is that executives who manage major gift officers face challenges.

Major gift cultivation takes a long time to pay off, and executives struggle to find the best candidates.  They rely on gut instinct and anecdotal evidence to “feel” if an officer is successful, and they need months and sometimes a year or more to identify who is really working out.  Waiting for the money to come in, everyone agrees, just doesn’t cut it anymore.  No one wants to miss opportunities to identify which gift officers need help and who is on the path to success.

Although I would never discount the value of professional instincts in assessing gift officers’ effectiveness, gut can only get someone so far. The key to minimizing this struggle is, in a word, metrics. And I mean metrics beyond how much money the officer brought in, or number of calls this month. Dollars in the door can be a good measure, to be sure, but it is a lagging indicator of successful activity, and it will fluctuate even for a great officer. Everyone has stories about the officer with great call numbers every month who, seemingly mysteriously, just didn’t work out. So what can we measure to give us clues to performance beyond the dollars?