In my last video, I talked about the importance of development staff staying at their jobs and not job hopping. Today’s video is directed more at Executive Directors in an effort to help you keep your development staff members longer.
Attention Executive Directors
As you may know from experience, there’s no worse feeling than when a staff member quits or you need to fire them.
Today I want to talk about how to prevent both of those things, so that you can keep your development staff for years or even decades.
The reason this is important is that fundraising is really about relationships. Every time a development staff member leaves, you need to start over. All the relationships that person developed while working at your nonprofit are compromised. Your organization suffers, your donors suffer, and you lose precious fundraising ground.
If you like your development director and believe they are doing a good job, you should do everything in your power to keep them.
7 Ways to Retain Your Nonprofit Development Staff
Here are 7 ways to keep your development staff (in no particular order). Best of all, most of these are low or no cost.
1. Give more gratitude.
Everyone loves to be appreciated. How often do you say “thank you” and “great job” to your development staff members? Those two words said often and with sincerity go a long way to keep your team happy.
2. Provide a raise.
Yes, there’s no getting around it. Many development directors leave for a higher salary. You may not think you can afford to pay them more, but just think about how much it will cost you when they leave. The fundraising ground you’ll lose… the donor relationships that are compromised.
In addition, you’ll lose time and money from having a staffing void, you’ll need to retrain a new staff member, and spend money on the hiring process. Replacing a good fundraising staff person can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 or more in lost fundraising revenue and costs associated with bringing on a new staff member.
So why not save yourself the trouble and just give your existing staff members a raise?
3. Allow for flex time.
I realize you might be uncomfortable with flex time, but the reality is that most fundraising professionals work more than 40 hours per week. They’re expected to be available in the evenings and on weekends for events and meetings.
So why not provide a little flex time so they can drop their kids off at school, take care of important personal tasks, or even just avoid some rush hour traffic.
4. Be generous with time off.
Around your events or busy times, offer a few extra days off. There’s no cheaper way to create good will and loyalty among staff members.
Also, consider sending staff members home early or even at 5:00 (if they normally work later). Insist they leave to be with their families, get home in time to exercise, or even simply rest and relax. It will come back to you tenfold in hard work and loyalty in days and months to come.
5. Encourage training and continuing education.
Training and educational opportunities are a huge perk for most staff members. If you don’t have a large budget for training, offer to give staff paid time off to attend trainings on their own. Also, consider splitting the cost of training with them. After all, you’re both getting something out of it.
Not only is staff training good for staff, but it’s good for you too. Research shows a significant return on investment for meaningful training opportunities like CFRE, multi-day conferences and college level courses. In fact, recent research found that meaningful major gift training yields an average of $37,000 in additional major gifts raised. That seems well worth the cost of a $2,000 or even $3,000 conference or course.
6. Provide autonomy and room for growth.
Don’t micromanage. Trust you development staff member to do a good job. Give them increasing levels of responsibility and trust them to work directly with board members and large donors. Then, simply check in and hold them accountable — but trust them to do their work on their own. They’ll be happier for it.
7. Allow work from home.
Have a great staff member or want to hire one you can’t afford? Consider a work-from-home arrangement. Maybe not full time, but one or two days per week to start.
As someone who does work from home, I rarely work an 8 hour day. But I’m much more productive because I don’t have any colleagues interrupting me or impromptu meetings that keep me from getting the important stuff done.
Remember — it’s not about the quantity of hours worked, it’s about quality of work done.
Please also check out my recent post on how to create happy, healthy nonprofits.
In the meantime, what else have you tried to keep your development staff members happy and productive? Leave a comment and share your ideas.
Thank you Amy for the lovely reminder. However it should be born in mind that most of small upcoming non profit organisation do suffer from budget constraints to such an extent that they have nothing to spare for continued education and training. I don’t know what could be done to such up coming organisations. Let’s talk for instance there happen to be coincidence between budget constraints and a training course .Such non profit organisations won’t make it . There most difficult stage of any non profit organisation is the implementation stage , no wonder why most of them still lag behind.
This also explain the reason why most of the executive staff don’t stay with such type of organisations.
The other 6 ways are not only applicable but are essential for keeping the organisation intact. They boost the moral of all board members and stakeholders at large
This and your previous video are wonderful, thank you for sharing these suggestions. A lot of Development Directors and CEOs pay lip service to these suggestions but never follow through on them. Eventually it does impact your team and damage the organization. For example, at one organization our supervisor obviously did not trust her team and saw us as competition, giving us little to empower ourselves and grow while playing favorites. When a new CEO arrived this behavior became worse and within six months the entire team, save the supervisor, had turned over leaving the organization and its donors at a disadvantage during what should have been a critical time of forward funding momentum.
My only comment would be that when you reference “work from home” you imply staff aren’t working their full 7.5 hours, and I think that’s an error. Often when I work from home I put in more hours – but it is enjoyable as I love my work and have lots to do – but don’t waste time driving and in traffic, I can take fifteen minutes and toss the dinner ingrediates in the oven, and then keep on working until dinner is ready and everyone is home to eat. Most at home workers put in more, quality time – which I know you know- but I’m not sure it came across…;)
Amy D