The problem of turnover in fundraising is widely known. While the last few years have brought particular and persistent hiring pressures, the competition for talent has always been fierce. Last year, I wrote a two-part series addressing the reality of turnover in our field. I addressed both building organizational resiliency and making longer-term plans to ensure success. However, I haven’t yet addressed the most critical area for stopping the cycle of turnover: onboarding new staff and setting realistic initial expectations.
Too often, I’ve seen new hires asked to achieve impossible goals quickly. This may be born out of an organization’s real need, but that doesn’t change the fact that it sets people up for failure and burnout, fuels turnover, and further entrenches financial issues.
There’s a better way than continuing to follow this boom-and-bust cycle. There are two key elements for setting up new employees for success: making an honest assessment of your organization’s fundraising capabilities before recruiting and using that knowledge to set realistic goals that go beyond simply dollars raised. This holistic approach to hiring helps break bad cycles and promotes fundraising sustainability.
Making an Honest Appraisal of Fundraising Operations
Before you can set expectations and goals for a new hire, you need to take a good look at your current assets and capabilities. For example, what does your donor portfolio look like? Is there an established, robust pipeline, or will this person be working to build a lot of new relationships from scratch? This assessment will also be useful in helping you determine the right mix of skills you need. While relationship building is at the core of all fundraising, the work can look very different depending on where your organization is. Your needs should shape your job description and inform your hiring choices.
Another important area to consider is leadership involvement in fundraising. Often, I see organizations struggling with turnover because they expect fundraising to be siloed in the development office, and do not see it as a shared, organizational responsibility. Building both board and executive staff roles in fundraising is crucial for overall success. If your board is not where you’d like them to be in this process, I’ve written about how to engage your board in fundraising and deepen their involvement.
Setting Attainable Goals for New Hires
After you have conducted a thorough assessment of where your organization stands, you can set realistic goals for your new staff members. I like to focus on the first six months as a key period for onboarding and setting employees up for success.
Determining your exact targets and goals can be tricky. When you set out to establish them, keep in mind the importance of developing metrics that go beyond dollars raised. If your new hire can raise funds quickly, that’s great, but it doesn’t address the important relationship building that needs to happen. Also, focusing on dollars raised in the short term doesn’t really tell you about your new hire’s long-term prospects for success. Because fundraising is a long game, early success is often the result of previous or longstanding efforts.
I like to focus on goals that address relationship building and that put solid processes in place that will ensure future success. For relationship building, this takes us back to your earlier assessment of your donor portfolio. Will you set a visit target, or have a select group of supporters that require extra attention in the early days? Beyond face-to-face work, what’s the status of your donor communications strategy? If this is an area that needs attention, you could, for example, formulate goals around new content and increasing engagement.
The backbone of any successful fundraising operation is solid processes and procedures, and it’s crucial that new staff members understand how things work. Goals in this area could vary drastically by organization size and type, but all should have deeper understanding and integration at their core.
If you’re fortunate to be operating in an environment with solid processes and procedures, great! An early goal for a new hire could be meeting with back-office staff and getting to know the whole organization and its work. If a new hire is expected to develop or improve processes and procedures, then this time and hard work needs to be accounted for in their onboarding plan.
I hope that this gave you some ideas to break the cycle of fundraiser turnover. If you need help making plans for onboarding and setting up sustainable development plans, please don’t hesitate to reach out.