What do you do when your existing prospect and performance management systems aren’t working for anyone? That’s the question Misa Lobato answers for us this week in our month-long Research Pride look at prospect management. Misa and her team embarked on a serious soul-searching, data-gathering, preconceived-notion-busting, solutions-finding mission to find out what would make their system actually work. Part of what they learned is that you have to measure what matters. And what matters? Read on! ~Helen
Photo by tracyshaun
Many years ago, when I first started learning about performance management in fundraising, I noticed a strange disconnect: there didn’t seem to be a correlation between gift officers meeting established individual goals and being promoted. In fact, often the gift officers who were promoted hadn’t met their goals. As I dug in a little further, I realized no one cares about these goals.
How did we get there, to the point where goals had been established to measure performance but no one viewed them as an indicator of success or failure? It seemed to me that goals had just been handed down year after year without being questioned. Goals were standardized across titles. Some were based on questionable industry lore–a gift officer should raise X times their salary. And some just seemed to be based on what had always been done. [Read more…]
