Tips to Boost Gift Officer Retention and Job Satisfaction

All organizations should prioritize employee retention for several reasons. Effective retention practices bring beneficial ripple effects — improved donor experiences, a stronger public image and reduced hiring and training costs — that bolster your nonprofit’s health and ability to grow.

For many organizations, frontline fundraising roles, particularly gift officers, are their biggest retention pain points.

It takes fundraisers an average of four years to reach full productivity in their roles, creating a long ramp-up period of elevated overhead costs. Yet, gift officers are also among the shortest-tenured nonprofit employees. In higher education, for example, the average tenure of a gift officer sits around just 18 months!

High gift officer turnover puts a significant drag on a nonprofit’s bottom line and donor relationships. After all, gift officers often serve as the friendly faces of your organization for major donors — when they depart, the relationship can take a jolt and potentially be damaged.

What steps can you take to reduce fundraiser turnover, boost job satisfaction and create a more positive impact for your organization? Let’s take a look.

1. Make Sure You’re Gathering the Right Insights

First, make sure you track your organization’s retention rates and satisfaction ratings for gift officers (and ideally all other roles, too). How? We recommend:

• Sending regular surveys to your development team. Ask for big-picture satisfaction ratings of their jobs, then ask more specific questions about technology, workflows, management, etc., as needed. Allow for open-ended feedback. To maximize the value of this feedback and boost retention, it should not be provided anonymously.
• Having frequent one-on-one conversations. There’s no replacement for open communication between a manager and their direct report. Gift officers should regularly meet with their primary manager to discuss how things are going, recent challenges, their goals and any other pertinent topics. This recurring opportunity for discussion and feedback is a retention goldmine. It will give managers much more direct and nuanced insights into how fundraisers feel about their jobs.

As you collect feedback and speak with gift officers, actively show how your organization values their input. Talk about their responses. Act on them, or explain why certain suggestions aren’t adopted.

2. Align Strategic Goals at All Levels

Strategic disconnect, or the feeling that one’s efforts aren’t having the right impact or are irrelevant to broader goals, leads to frustration and feelings of ineffectiveness.

Think about trying to solicit a major gift without a compelling or even cogent explanation of the impact it’ll drive — difficult, right? Gift officers might feel a similar kind of pointlessness if their work isn’t clearly tied to concrete organizational, mission-centric priorities.

To combat disconnect, align goals across your nonprofit at the organization-wide, team and individual levels. In practice, this means setting clear strategic goals, explicitly talking about them and tying them back to your mission. Gift officers should know the organization’s priorities, like growing planned gifts or launching a capital campaign in the next five years, so that they’ll know the bigger picture of where your organization is headed and why.

Additionally, when setting goals for individual gift officers, be thoughtful. While they shouldn’t be 100% personalized, goals should be somewhat tailored to fundraisers’ performance, specialties, portfolio size and more. Completely uniform goals can create unreasonable hurdles in some cases and contribute to burnout and strategic misalignment.

3. Provide Clear Growth Opportunities

A lack of opportunity for upward career growth has been a top reason for voluntary turnover in NonprofitHR’s annual survey for years now (cited by 38% of respondents in 2023). It’s also a largely avoidable problem.

While you can’t provide an opportunity for upward growth every time a gift officer expresses interest and readiness in one, you can more clearly define the path for moving from junior to senior roles. Take the time to explicitly lay out the increased responsibilities, potential specializations and other distinctions that fundraisers would want to know.

Then, provide the resources and support that employees need to actively pursue those paths, including:

• Organized and effective workflows.
• Ambitious but achievable goals.
• Meaningful training and networking opportunities.
• Regular discussions and check-ins with managers.

Show gift officers that you want them to stick around and drive increased impact for your mission by setting clear priorities and providing what they need to succeed. From there, they can show you when they’re motivated and ready to step up.

4. Fill Critical Staffing Gaps Promptly

Departures happen, sometimes predictably and sometimes not. Despite your efforts and improved practices to boost retention and create a more engaging culture for gift officers, some will leave for various reasons.

Never let departures become the root cause of further departures.

For example, suppose a gift officer (or practically any role) departs the organization. It’s not uncommon for their work to be handed off to remaining team members, at best for a short time and at worst indefinitely while the issue slips off leaders’ radar. That’s a recipe for serious burnout and dissatisfaction.

Create succession plans for higher-level roles. Actively fill gaps when the missing team members’ workloads must be passed onto the remaining teammates. And again, provide clear growth opportunities and career pathing — you’ll know when folks are ready to be promoted, allowing you to adapt to departures and mitigate negative impacts with greater agility.

Plus, remember that staffing services exist specifically for nonprofit fundraising and leadership positions. Don’t hesitate to explore these resources when needed.

Effective approaches to retention are underpinned by communication and proactiveness. These are notorious weak spots for many organizations of all sizes simply because they’re complicated. But don’t overthink it.

The simplest approaches can and do work — be transparent and responsive, tie decisions back to your mission and explain your reasoning. Get the insights you need, communicate opportunities and expectations clearly, and take an active concern in staff workloads.

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