Fifty-five percent of major- and planned-gift officers in higher education say they don’t spend enough time talking to donors, according to a new study.
And that, the report suggests, might be because their portfolios contain too many prospects, and not enough of the right ones.
“They have a lot of opportunity but not enough time,” says Brian Gawor, vice president of research at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, the fundraising-consulting company that conducted the survey. “Time is the key barrier.”
The average gift officer in the survey is responsible for 142 prospective donors but manages to make only 74 visits to them per year, a coverage rate of 52 percent.
Forty-two percent of gift officers said they don’t spend enough time vetting donor prospects to make sure they’re qualified to make a major-gift commitment — not just financially capable but also sufficiently interested in the institution.
And on average, fundraisers say only about 37 percent of new additions to their pool of prospects are qualified to be there.
“The rating systems that put people into these pools are not real great,” Mr. Gawor says.
Ruffalo surveyed 270 major- and planned-gift officers, 80 percent of them from colleges and universities. The fundraisers, who completed an online survey in May, have spent an average of nine years in those specialities.
Targeting Resources
Eighty-six percent of respondents said their organizations use wealth ratings to vet prospective donors. A smaller proportion, 68 percent, said their organization used alternative “propensity” ratings systems aimed at determining not just how much capacity people have to give but whether they were likely to.
With fundraisers strapped for time, more sophisticated ratings are necessary to make the most of major-gift and planned-giving opportunities, says Caryn Stein, Ruffalo Noel Levitz’s vice president of marketing.
“The days of saying, ‘Here are the 100 richest people in our area, go at it,’ are over,” Ms. Stein says. “That’s [version] 1.0 of major-gifts fundraising.”
Mr. Gawor echoes the notion that providing fundraisers more intelligence about a prospective donor’s connection with an institution can help them focus on the best potential sources of gifts. When meeting with a wealthy individual, he says, “there’s a difference between saying, ‘What do you think of the university?’ and saying, ‘I noticed that over the past 20 years you’ve attended 35 of our events.’ "
The survey revealed that fundraisers are more likely to be evaluated on quantity of donor visits than on what share of them result in big gifts. Nearly three out of four respondents said they’re rated on the number of times they meet with donors; only 27 percent said they’re evaluated on how many of those solicitations are successful.
Among the report’s other findings:
- Forty-four percent of fundraisers said they don’t spend enough time on stewardship.
- Gift officers are most often using direct mail (87 percent), email (84 percent), and special-event invites (79 percent) to complement in-person visits as they court prospective big donors.
- Donors and prospects who do not get personal visits during the year are instead sent email messages (92 percent), spoken to by the fundraiser at the institution’s events (88 percent), or phoned at least once annually (72 percent).