How Do You Keep Good Fundraisers Without Making Them Managers?

One of your frontline fundraisers has been doing a great job. They’ve made an impact right away for your organization, continued to bring in more revenue each year, successfully expanded their portfolio and cultivated a lot of meaningful relationships with top donors.  

As a result, they’ve started to earn more money and set their sights on the next step in their career. 

If you’re a development director, you’ve probably had this situation occur a handful of times. You obviously want to keep this successful major gifts officer on your team, but you risk losing them if they’re not promoted or rewarded the right way.  

It’s a common problem. Retaining your employees is always critical, but even more so for your front-line fundraising staff. Not only do you have the cost to replace that fundraiser if they leave, but the damage and loss of revenue from their donor portfolio is even greater. 

So, what do you do to keep them?  

Related story: Find the Balance Between Managing Your Portfolio and Your Staff

The Potential Flaw of Your Best Major Gifts Officer

Let me start with what not to do. Too many organizations take the path of least resistance and elevate their best fundraisers into leadership positions. And because many nonprofits have salary restrictions for individual roles, offering major gifts officers promotions into management becomes the only way to satisfy their monetary needs. 

But when your best major gifts officer is hired to be a director of major gifts, the equation of your major gifts program starts to change and causes even more problems. Typically, the best major gifts officer is motivated by getting results through their own efforts, which is a good thing. They are not motivated by getting results through others, which is the definition of management. They don’t have a desire to develop people.  

It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s just not how they’re wired, but leadership put them into that situation. Over time, the manager spends more time on their full caseload and isn’t motivated to perform the duties of their new job. This creates a bad trickle-down effect and a vicious cycle. 

The front-line fundraiser then has no structure, only top-down goals thrust upon them. With a manager that’s more worried about their caseload, no one is developing  — or celebrating — the major gifts officer or helping them stay focused or accountable, causing many to consider leaving.  

The Best Ways to Retain Top Fundraisers

There are several ways to counteract that trend and make your nonprofit a place where the best fundraisers still have incentives to stay.  

As a good baseline, it’s important to consider giving fundraisers more training and development opportunities to keep updating their skills. And though pay levels and satisfaction are also only modest predictors of an employee’s decision to leave the organization, those can still be primary motivators. Here are three possibilities.  

1. Lead the market with respect to compensation and rewards. 
2. Tailor rewards to individual needs in a person-based pay structure. 
3. Explicitly link rewards to retention (e.g., tie vacation hours to seniority, offer retention bonuses or stock options to longer-term employees, or link defined benefit plan payouts to years of service). 

Another potential way to keep your superstar major gifts officer in their sweet spot? Elevate them to a principal gifts officer. This will get them more pay, sure. But it will also give them more responsibilities and new challenges. They can help the CEO cultivate and steward high-net-worth individuals and prepare them for an ask.  

These are things you can do as a leader or manager to not just retain your good fundraisers but help them thrive and find meaning and joy in their work. That should be part of your organization’s mission — beyond what you’re doing every day to make a difference in the world.  

If you can thread that needle, you’ll keep your fundraisers doing what they do best.  

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.