From the Desk of

Jaci Thiede ¦ Partner

It’s the People! 

As part of a campaign readiness assessment, I recently met individually with eight members of an advancement team. This team has been through a significant number of leadership changes over the past decade, so professional development has generally been put on the back burner. However, everyone I met with told me – unprompted – how appreciative they were that their new Vice President reworked the budget to ensure everyone on the team would have at least one professional development opportunity annually. The decision to prioritize the team’s professional growth clearly made a huge statement and is positively impacting morale, job satisfaction and the inclination to stay at the institution.

What a great reminder of how important it is to invest time, effort, and resources into developing the people who ensure our organizations’ success day in and day out.

As fundraisers, we know that it is easier and less expensive to retain a donor than to acquire one. This holds no matter where they fall on the donor spectrum—annual, major, or planned giving. It’s exactly why we develop donor retention strategies through various cultivation, stewardship, and communication plans. Then, we allocate resources to those strategies, execute our plans, analyze our results, and tweak as needed, year after year. That’s a very high level, but it’s the general cycle. 

As leaders, managers, and/or supervisors, we should apply this same “cycle” concept to retaining staff. After all, it is generally easier and less expensive to retain a top performer or a rising star than to lose them and have to go to market to replace them.
Turnover disrupts workflow and results in significant financial and organizational costs. From recruitment expenses to lost productivity during the transition period, the impact of turnover can be staggering, no matter where the employee falls on the employment longevity spectrum. I’ve seen:

• a rising star take another job because they didn’t know how to talk to their supervisor about their career goals and professional development;
• a mid-level manager with a proven track record for building successful programs leave for another position because she was passed over for a promotion several years in a row; and
• a seasoned and successful gift officer with a long institutional memory, make a career change because he didn’t believe he was valued by leadership.

In all these examples, the employees didn’t want to leave; they just didn’t see a path that made staying feel like a strategic career choice. So, they moved on, and the institutions they served lost out. Programs were disbanded or put on hold, gift conversations had to be started months later, and, very importantly, institutional memory was lost. ROI took years to rebuild and be realized.

Advancement is a relationship business, but leading, managing and/or supervising should be a relationship business, too. Don’t forget about your people! Make sure you talk to them about their career aspirations and professional development needs. Be disciplined about setting annual goals and reviewing progress towards goals on a regularly scheduled basis. Commit to having candid two-way conversations about performance and what the future might look like.

Developing and retaining your team takes time and we all know there is never enough time in non-profit work. Non-profiteers are deeply driven and committed to fulfilling the missions they so passionately serve. If devoting time to your people is an issue for you, I encourage you do some self-reflection and evaluate if you are spending more time on what seems urgent or what is most important.

I hope you come to the conclusion that what is most important is your organization’s success and then realize that that success is contingent upon having a talented, dedicated, appreciated, and thriving team to fulfill that mission. Remember, it’s all about the people!