End the Churn, Part 3: Radical Transparency
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 66% of employees will look for a new job in 2022. Although this is just below the 69% who planned to look in 2021, it indicates that the “Great Resignation” will continue into the foreseeable future.
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 third of our 3-part series about ending the churn in your development department, we’ll tackle the subject of radical transparency with your development staff.
Standard workplace expectations in the United States suggest that employees give employers a requisite “two weeks notice” before leaving their current position and moving on to their next job opportunity. This goes far beyond the world of nonprofit fundraising, of course, but the implications for a development department can be detrimental given the time that it takes to conduct a thorough, equitable hiring process. To reach and attract a diverse pool of candidates, and then to interview and hire your next team member, could take several weeks or even months. In the time between the end of that “two weeks notice” and the beginning of your new hire’s employment, you risk missing foundation deadlines, letting individual donor communications go unanswered, and even allowing necessary administrative tasks to slip through the cracks—and that’s just if you’re replacing an administrative or mid-level position. If it’s the Development Director who has left your organization, you’re missing out on valuable guidance and departmental strategy, and your recruitment process is probably going to take even longer than it would for more junior positions.
In the first two posts of this series, we addressed ways to better support your development staff, and increase communication around their goals and other financial expectations. These tools are meant to prolong your staff’s tenure at your organization and reduce the rate of turnover in your development department. Even in the best of circumstances, however, no employee is forever. So how can you better prepare for that inevitable moment when a member of your development department decides to move on to another opportunity? The answer, we believe, is radical transparency.
Most employees, when beginning the search for a new job, hold their cards close to the vest out of fear that if their employer knows that they are looking around, it will put their current position at risk—or at the very least, will make their current work environment uncomfortable. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the employer, you have the opportunity to change the culture of your organization and set a tone that encourages and celebrates your staff as they engage in long-term professional and personal development.
From the beginning of their tenure at your organization, begin an open dialogue about where the members of your staff realistically see themselves going and how long it might make sense for them to stay with you. Did they accept their current position in order to help them gain a skill set that will eventually propel them into a Director-level position? If that opportunity isn’t going to be available at your organization, how can you help the employee assess when they are ready and move into that role at another organization? Or perhaps their long-term plan involves a move to a different city or state, or a transition to part-time work. How can you collaborate on a work plan that will support both the organization and the employee as they build up to that move?
Being open to these conversations without the threat of negative consequences supports your staff (much in the way that we discussed in the first part of this series), while offering you much greater lead time for a robust recruitment and hiring process when the moment comes to replace that employee.
Radical transparency is a value that we take to heart at Donorly, and it is advice that we have offered to our clients in moments of transition as well. The result is that we see development departments that are prepared to navigate turnover in a way that supports continued research, cultivation, and execution of fundraising strategies, all while supporting team members as they move on to their next endeavors. In some cases, team members who might have otherwise walked away from an organization entirely were even able to find new ways of engaging with their current employer that satisfied their long-term career goals.
Without the willingness to engage in transparent conversations, we might never have discovered those employee retention opportunities. We encourage you too, wherever you are in the lifecycle of your development staffing, to embrace the value of radical transparency.
A previous version of this article was posted in August 2018.