Fundraisers and advancement leaders at universities and independent schools continue to have high levels of confidence that they’ll meet their fundraising goals, according to results from a new survey. Eight in 10 frontline fundraisers said they expect to hit their benchmarks for the 2022 financial year — the same share that in May 2021 expressed confidence in meeting fundraising goals for the 2021 financial year. Among advancement leaders, 87 percent expected to meet targets for the current financial year. That’s up from 82 percent who said the same in May 2021.
The findings come from the latest survey of development professionals conducted by fundraising consultancy Washburn & McGoldrick. The series of seven surveys began in April 2020 and tracks how the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting fundraisers’ outlooks on their ability to raise revenue and the strategies they use to meet their goals. The most recent survey, which ran from March 28 to April 17 and polled 491 fundraisers at 133 colleges and independent schools, reported the sunniest outlook since the series began.
Still, the survey found that all is not well. Seventy percent of gift officers said they were challenged by staffing shortages and resignations. Fifty-seven percent named burnout and uncertainty as a top challenge, closely followed by staff morale.
In comments, survey respondents blamed their feelings of burnout on overwork because of unfilled positions on their teams. As fundraisers resign, institutions are struggling to replace them quickly, leaving those who remain to pick up the slack.
“I have been doing two and probably three jobs for almost a year now, and it has gotten to be too much,” one fundraiser wrote. “I do have some confidence that this will change, but it has been the hardest year ever in my years at this college. We are all exhausted.”
The youngest fundraisers are feeling the strain the most. Among fundraisers ages 25 to 34, more than half — 54 percent — said they’d considered quitting their job over the course of the pandemic. Fundraisers ages 35 to 44 and 45 to 54 said they considered resignation at slightly lower rates, 45 percent and 44 percent, respectively.
Turnover has long been notoriously high among fundraisers. A 2019 Harris poll conducted by the Chronicle and the Association of Fundraising Professionals found that 51 percent of respondents planned to leave within two years — largely because their jobs were too high-pressured and their morale too low. Those challenges still plague fundraisers, according to the newest Washburn & McGoldrick survey. Dissatisfied fundraisers said the primary reasons they thought about quitting were overwork, leadership policies, and morale.
As donor meetings and events moved online at the onset of the pandemic, the pace of work increased for fundraisers, says Karin George, managing principal at Washburn & McGoldrick. Conversations with donors have become more direct, and fundraisers are able to squeeze more meetings into a single day.
Now, frontline fundraisers are resuming travel and in-person donor visits. Roughly equal shares of fundraisers said they used in-person meetings (38 percent) and virtual meetings (39 percent) to build ties with donors. More than half of respondents said they primarily ask donors for gifts in person. But George says advancement leaders still expect frontline fundraisers to maintain the aggressive output they managed thanks to the efficiencies of virtual work.
“That efficiency has a warning label on it,” George says. “We can’t just keep layering everything on.”
Splitting Their Time
More than half of all fundraisers surveyed — 54 percent — said they now divide their time between working in the office and remotely. Thirty-one percent said they work in the office five days a week — a decrease from November 2021, when 37 percent said they did so. George speculates that some fundraisers may have shifted back to hybrid schedules after the Covid-19 Omicron variant surged this winter. The share of fundraisers working remotely full-time has remained unchanged since November, holding steady at just 15 percent.
“More organizations truly appreciate the fact that people were able to achieve their goals, and it wasn’t dependent on whether they were in a physical office space or not,” George says. Some workplaces are also hoping that more flexible work policies will help them attract talented candidates to fill vacant positions, she says.
Most frontline fundraisers — 66 percent — now say they prefer to split their time between remote work and in-office work, according to the survey. That’s on par with the 67 percent of respondents who said they preferred a hybrid work schedule in November 2021 but a big jump from the 38 percent and 39 percent who said the same in January 2021 and May 2021, respectively.
The popularity of full-time remote work continues to fall among frontline fundraisers. Just 22 percent said it was their preferred way to work. On the other hand, fundraisers were clear that they don’t want to go back to working in an office five days a week. Only 12 percent of gift officers said they would prefer to work in the office full-time.
“I’d like to think that there’s less and less language out there that says in-person is absolutely the best, but if we need to, we’ll do this virtually,” George says.
Advancement leaders are more or less on the same page as the staff who report to them. Three-quarters of senior staff said they preferred a hybrid work schedule and just 8 percent said they’d choose to work remotely five days a week. Sixteen percent said they’d like to return to working in the office full-time.
Among the other findings:
- Nearly 40 percent of gift officers said they had considered quitting their jobs since 2020.
- Roughly three in 10 advancement leaders reported that 20 percent or more of their gift-officer and alumni-engagement officer positions were vacant.
- Frontline fundraisers and advancement leaders expressed more confidence in meeting their goals than they did in November. That’s likely because this survey came further into the financial year, George says.
