End the Churn, Part 1: Reasons to Invest in Your Development Staff
Some of the most recent literature indicates that the average tenure of a Development Director is eighteen months, and the level of turnover at the junior staff levels aren’t much better. While high turnover remains a steadfast hurdle for nonprofits, it may prove even more widespread considering this year’s overall staffing trends. Achievers’ most recent Employee Engagement and Retention Report highlights that approximately 52% of employees will look for a new job in 2021, which is 43% higher than the 2020 and 2019 data.
Staff turnover is literally and figuratively costly, especially when it comes to your development department. Every time a fundraising team member leaves your organization, in addition to losing a person who likely brought a slew of intangibles to your community, you’re also losing someone who managed relationships with your donors, oversaw the logistics of soliciting and acknowledging gifts, and probably held a great deal of institutional knowledge as well.
There are a number of reasons why staff members may leave their organizations, and turnover rates for development staff members have historically been especially high. Sometimes, unfortunately, there is just nothing you can do—a young or mid-career team member is looking for an opportunity for growth and your organization might not be structured to allow for a promotion. But, in many other cases, the culprit is something else: working conditions. Your staff might not feel like you are investing in them and their professional growth. They might not have goals and financial expectations clearly outlined for them, or they simply might not have the freedom to communicate their needs transparently with their supervisor or the organization’s leadership.
Luckily, there are changes that you can make in all of these areas that will end the churn in your development department, specifically by improving working conditions and morale for your employees.
In the first of our 3-part series about ending the churn in your development department, we’ll tackle the subject of investing in your development staff.
Investing in your development staff takes on many forms. Let’s talk about three key areas where you can focus your attention:
Compensation through salary and benefits
Ongoing professional development
Tools and back-office support
Compensation Through Salary and Benefits
Being able to offer a candidate a competitive salary and benefits package (including health insurance and a 401K or 403b plan) is important; however, fundraising salaries are rising, and if you’re a smaller organization, it can be difficult to compete with opportunities that come up at larger institutions. Even when you are unable to provide a competitive financial offer to a candidate, think about the other benefits that you can provide.
Some of those might include:
Generous time-off
Flexible working hours
Reimbursement for home office outfitting or other expenses
For those job seekers and employees who put a premium on work-life balance, especially in their post-pandemic lives, the intangibles you offer can go a long way when you can’t compensate competitively, especially when it comes to giving employees the ability to set boundaries and protect their personal time.
When talking about compensation from an equity perspective, it is important to be transparent. Make sure salary ranges are clearly and accurately stated on job descriptions. Everyone working at the organization should know where they fall on the organizational chart and how their salary level is being determined.
Ongoing Professional Development
Keeping your employees engaged and fulfilled also means making sure that they have opportunities to develop their skills so that they can progress at your organization and in their careers overall.
Make sure your employees know how much money and time they can spend on conferences, webinars, training sessions, books, and other forms of professional development over the course of each year.
If your financial resources for professional development are more limited, there is still plenty of support that you can provide. Work with your employees to set specific goals for self-training and help them locate low-cost resources to help them meet those goals. There are several fantastic organizations, for instance, providing helpful content free-of-charge online, here are just a few that we love:
Tools and Back-Office Support
Your Development staff cannot do the great work of raising funds to support your organization if the department is not properly outfitted to ensure that donor prospecting, cultivation, and stewardship can happen effectively. Not only do you need to have tools, but also you need to work with your Development Department to provide the staff support to keep the data clean and updated, as well as make sure that laborious tasks like large mailings can be handled without distracting from other important projects. Equally as important is that your fundraisers have access to donor research—whether that research is conducted in-house or outsourced—to help them prioritize their prospect lists.
Here are a few of the kinds of tools and resources you might want to consider:
A CRM/donor database with an appropriate level of customer service access
An email marketing platform to help automate and manage newsletters, fundraising appeals, and impact reports
·A project management tool to keep workflows clearly outlined and tasks appropriately delegated amongst team members
Donor research tools, or a subscription to a donor research firm that will do the work for you. Download Donorly’s DIY Guide to Donor Research here.
A development consultant—read here for tips on how to hire the one that’s right for you.
These three areas of staff investment can go a long way toward employee retention in your development department—and the effect of not making these investments is potentially huge, especially if a staff member leaves and the position sits empty for several weeks or months. Save yourself the stress and costs of high development staff turnover by investing in your team as professionals, supporting their growth, and making sure that they are set up for success.
A previous version of this article was posted in June 2018.