Asking by Caveat

Recently a client shared with me one of her favorite methods of broaching the subject of a gift commitment with a donor.  She always starts with “I wouldn’t be doing my job if  . . . I didn’t ask whether you would consider including XYZ Organization in your will.” According to Charles H. Green, author [...]

What Gets Measured Gets Done: Part I

by pfreedman on February 8, 2012 · 1 comment

A key component of measuring the performance of your planned giving program is quantifying the performance of your people.  I usually encounter a lot of resistance to this idea, some if it appropriate, most of it simply employees not comfortable with being held accountable in this way.

Just as we measure the number of qualified leads generated by our marketing efforts as a predictor of conversion to gift commitments and we measured the number of new legacy society notifications as a marker of gifts our marketing has prompted but that we have not been notified of, we need similar mileposts to ensure that the investment we’re making in people and in more personal donor contact is returning dividends, even if the divident may be many years into the future.

Usually the arguments against gift officer performance metrics fall into one of two categories “I’m building relationships and that’s hard to measure” and/or “because these gifts are deferred and often the donor doesn’t notify us, it’s not fair to measure me on something I have no control over or that can’t be measured.”

The challenge is not whether to measure gift officer performance but how to do it in such a way that it promotes the right behaviors.  So many of the methodologies seem to promote non-productive behaviors.  For example, simply requiring a certain number of visits per month can prompt a gift officer to visit people who haven’t been appropriately qualified just so he/she achieves the required visit count. Or, a gift officer might make multiple annual stewardship visits to a legacy society donor with no potential to upgrade–what Jeff Comfort refers to as “the stable of stable visits”–when a once a year visit is sufficient stewardship to ensure an irrevocable gift is not revoked.

Jeff Comfort, in his presentation to the NCGPC, talked about how performance is measured at Georgetown. He recommends measuring:

Closed gifts by number and $

# of proposals sent

# of visits

Other contacts

Quality of visits and contacts

He has difference measures for young gift officers (2 or fewer years of tenure) versus mature gift officers.  For young gift officers, Comfort says, the emphasis should be 2/3 on activity and 1/3 on closed gifts. Expectations of mature gift officers should be a reverse of those percentages.  What are the right numbers?  I’ll describe Comfort’s methodology next week.

Phyllis

 

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{ 1 comment }

Jeff Steele February 8, 2012 at 10:25 am

Phyllis,

Evaluating performance is one of he greatest challenges in planned giving, especially when supervising a staff of PGOs. One of the most common misallocation of resources seems to me to be personal visits that lack a specific objective, made simply to satisfy an arbitrary annual goal. I’m anxious to see Jeff’s methodology, as this is a critical area of need, especially in fiscally strained times.

Thanks for addressing this extremely important issue.

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