Case Session: Shifting Donor Officer Time
May 25 (Replay at end of page)
In the opening plenary, we presented many of the findings from our quantitative analysis of donor motivations (feel free to bookmark and return to the Session 1 Recap as you like). Notably, we did not cover one set of key insights having to do with donor officer time, an extraordinarily powerful lever for increasing donations — and these insights formed the basis of today’s smaller group session. We were grateful to be joined by Kyle Polite, Deputy Director of Development at the San Francisco Opera (SFO). In addition to laying out our research on the value of optimizing donor officer time, we walked through an ABA case study on the changes Kyle successfully implemented at SFO, then facilitated a member-led discussion.
A Moment of Unprecedented Change
To contextualize this discussion, we looked at a familiar graph (left) which suggests that while arts organizations may be getting slightly more money from our donors year over year, we’ve been getting that money from fewer and fewer donors. What’s more is that younger generations have different motivations for giving to the arts (right).
It’s clear that if there ever was a time to refocus on prospecting, it’s now, in a moment of unprecedented change. Fortunately, ABA research shows that we already have a powerful lever at our disposal: development staff. In our survey of over five thousand arts donors, we saw that communication with a donor officer has an immense influence on getting donors to increase their giving. In fact, interacting with a donor officer has more than twice as much influence on donation level than any other factor, as indicated by the blue bar below.
Clearly, donor officers are extremely valuable to fundraising efforts — but the question, then, is how even the best donor officers can manage prospects and foster growth with limited time in the day. To think about this, we turned to evidence from higher education.
Learnings from Higher Education
According to research by the Education Advisory Board (EAB), one of ABA’s sister companies, reducing the size of a donor officer’s portfolio can dramatically increase the number of asks, number of gifts received, and ultimately the dollars raised. In particular, EAB found that by reducing officers’ portfolios from 115 to 30-40 prospects, the number of asks increased by 170%, the number of gifts more than tripled, and there was a nearly six hundred percent increase in dollars raised over a two-year period. By limiting their prospects, donor officers had to make the absolute most out of each one — and now had the bandwidth to do so.
While reducing portfolios may or may not be possible within our own environments, this evidence suggests that we need to be very thoughtful about which donors we choose to focus on.
Making Informed Decisions in Fundraising
The most straightforward way to make informed decisions about which donors to focus on is to let the data lead the way. However, many of our members may not have access to as much data as they would like. While we’ve heard from some members that they are using predictive modeling services like BWF, others may be relying mainly on their own wealth screening tools and information captured in their CRMs over time.
Recognizing this, we suggested a few metrics that could supplement indications of growth potential, based on the way donors have acted during the pandemic:
Did you have donors who gave during the pandemic without actually viewing your digital content? They could be arts lovers who are invested in making sure you’re there when they are ready to go back out into the world and experience art live. Reopening could be a prime opportunity for them to get more involved.
Did you have donors who returned to you during the pandemic, after a lapse?
Did any donors attend more digital social events? Perhaps they’ve developed a deeper personal connection to you and your community during this time – one that could extend to heightened involvement and giving as we return.
The problem, of course, is that even if you know you should be making changes to your donor portfolio – and even if you have the data to do so – it’s not always easy to act. We took a moment to identify some of the pressing challenges of changing donor behavior:
It is easy to fall into comfortable habits, including working with the donors you know are consistent givers.
With so much at stake, it can be a challenge to take the risk of moving your time toward something unknown.
It is hard to close doors since it always feels like there could be a major gift just around the corner.
As officers develop relationships with their donors, it becomes more difficult to spend less time with them.
With high levels of turnover in many development offices, it can be challenging to make meaningful long-term behavioral changes.
All of these challenges were what drove Kyle to take a thoughtful new approach with his team at SFO. He knew from other environments – including higher education – that he wanted to spend more time on growth and cultivation, and so has been focused on concrete ways to make that possible at the Opera.
Case Study: Optimizing Officer Time
On a high level, Kyle’s team took a look at where they were spending time – primarily with the wealthiest current givers – and made an intentional choice to move that towards where potential to give more was highest. They thought through which high-end donors were likely to keep giving without too much help, such as donors who gave at a particular level tied to a valued benefit. Per the graphic below, the team chose to shift their focus away from these donors (represented by the light blue) and toward the darker blue, based on a probabilistic bet on growth in less proven donors.
To achieve this kind of shift, Kyle and his team needed to create a new development ecosystem that would pull together many changes to create a full culture of cultivation. Among these changes are resetting the donor officer role back to one of cultivation and solicitation (booking tickets and providing updates on programming, for example, should be handled by other staff), fostering relationships with donors that are focused primarily on the goals of the institution, and reorienting the portfolio review process. This final point is what we dug into for the remainder of the case study.
The central change Kyle is making for his team centers around the quarterly portfolio review meeting. Each aspect of this process has been shaped to promote targeted growth and cultivation, and to eliminate time that is less well-spent.
Attending this meeting is the donor officer, their manager, and the Director of Prospect Research. The officer prepares notes on strategies taken and obstacles faced during the quarter, along with their own insights, with a special focus on who to spend less time on. On the other hand, the prospect researcher brings the data, particularly looking at donors (or not-yet-donors) with high growth potential.
As shown below (right), these team members will review the past quarter and identify the top 20% of donors in the portfolio whom the donor officer will spend more time cultivating in the next quarter. What sets this meeting apart is that in giving more time to some donors, officers are also using that meeting to decide which others will get less time.
In deciding who to categorize in that top 20%, SFO looks at current donors who have high capacity but give more elsewhere, as well as high-net-worth subscribers who are non-donors. On the other hand, individuals who have given consistently but have not increased their giving over the past 5 years are less likely to be given extra donor officer time.
It’s important to note that Kyle is starting with these measures, but his team will test and learn over time to see which latent prospects are highest probability givers and which large donors are safest to spend less time on. Making the conversation explicit provides a repeatable framework for institutional learning and an important roadmap for the next conversation.
In practice, this prioritization and deprioritization is time-based, spurring concrete action. We summarized SFO’s current iterations of this process in the graphic below.
While the execution of this initiative is still in progress, Kyle has set up several measures of success for the future of the program. Some of these goals might feel a bit intimidating, but the fluidity of the process allows the San Francisco Opera team to constantly adjust their practice based on what’s working and what’s not.
At this point in the meeting, we turned it over to Kyle to elaborate on his work at SFO and take questions from the members in attendance.
Notes from the Discussion
To kick off the conversation, Kyle noted that SFO’s development team continues to progress in the way it handles donor prospecting, and that the work would not be possible without the investment and contributions of the whole team. Commenting on his own journey as a fundraiser with SFO, he mentioned that in his first week on the job, he began keeping a list guided by the question: “What’s holding me back from raising more money?” He found that his observations fell into four overarching categories:
(1) He and his team were hyper-focused on benefit fulfillment, stewardship, and renewals, but not growth.
(2) By and large, the team was asking donors to give for benefits, and therefore training not only donors but also staff to manage to that paradigm.
(3) The team needed a robust method to collect and evaluate data. To paraphrase Kyle: if there’s an art and a science to fundraising, they were doing really well on the art side when he joined the team, but they were not yet embracing the science of it.
(4) He felt that as a company, SFO was not yet able to articulate its “why” as the bedrock of the donor value proposition.
During his time at SFO so far, Kyle and his team have had to formalize how they use Tessitura to track donor work (which has included switching priority to quarterly and employing probability) before they could devise the right metrics, beyond total fundraising goals. But he noted that setting metrics can also induce anxiety: what does it mean if we don’t meet those metrics? Because of this, it has been important to facilitate transparent conversations about what metrics the team is tracking and why. This includes ensuring that everyone on the team is included in the honest process of evaluating current systems, while recognizing that portfolios can vary widely between fundraisers, especially with respect to donor capacity.
To that end, the development team meets on a bi-weekly or weekly basis to discuss success stories, obstacles, and surprises in their work, and how to approach them. One recent success story came out of using data to create a list of prospects who had donated tickets in the past but had not yet given monetarily. When a brand-new gift officer called the first prospect on that list, the prospect thanked him for calling and said she’d always been looking to get involved by making a major gift. She gave a whopping $10,000 via credit card over the phone, and moreover, noted that she would plan to give more in the future.
One member asked about the size and structure of SFO’s development staff, and how they manage the analytics. Kyle remarked that SFO raises roughly $40 million USD each year, necessitating a fuller development team of 20 individuals. As individual giving is SFO’s primary area of support (comprising about half of the money raised each year), 5 of those individuals are full-time staff devoted to individual and leadership giving, including a Director of Prospect Research and Strategy and a Strategic Initiatives Manager.
Kyle explained that SFO remains reliant on a small number of generous donors, and continued efficacy in prospect research will be central to fostering a more sustainable future. To this end, SFO’s Director of Prospect Research and Strategy helps the development team leverage data to inform their decisions and focus their efforts. Kyle noted that in his past experience as a fundraiser for higher education, the donor pool was seemingly limitless — so in order to answer the question of where to even start, fundraisers had to turn to the data.
Partnering with the rest of the company has also been key to Kyle’s work. He noted that in the performing arts, organizations typically have built-in cultivation opportunities with performances and events, a box office staff, a donor concierge, and more. But in SFO’s case, the team’s early optimization toward benefits and renewals led donor officers to spend valuable time stewarding donors in an ecosystem that was already set up to take on that work. He has been pushing back on the assumption that development needs to take care of cultivation work that the box office and marketing team are better equipped to handle. The important next step, then, is to scale personalization using technology and data, while keeping in mind that deprioritization does not mean ignoring.
As for SFO’s why? The company is still figuring it out; it’s not a development decision. However, Kyle notes that the pandemic has accelerated this work, since (for possibly the first time in its history), SFO was forced to think about what it was without its performances. And indeed, that is the multi-million dollar question at stake: what is your organization’s why?
We look forward to continuing to explore that very question in the remaining sessions of our donor summit, including an in-depth review of survey data on Wednesday, and a closing session on Thursday. To access all of our case studies, recaps, and other articles, visit our Donor Summit homepage here.
Watch the Recording Here
