Measuring What Matters

The most revealing data could be what you aren’t evaluating

By Kenna Barrett

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We all live in a material world. For fundraisers, this fact is especially relevant. Our primary goal-
by definition-is to raise money. What kind of money, then, are we supposed to raise and how
much of it?
Surely our goal isn't to raise money for courses on underwater basket-weaving or hair bands of
the '80s. Rather, we seek support for the institutional mission. We might think of this as raising
quality dollars.
For corporate and foundation relations officers, raising quality dollars is largely accomplished by
developing and submitting winning proposals. This fact is a given in our field. But in order to
manage staff effectively, it is imperative to know how we get to the happy result of successful
solicitations-what activities staff members should focus on as they go about their routines.
Two big questions
At a CASE conference for corporate and foundation relations officers in 2007, I conducted a
workshop with Bob Paul, who was at that time associate director of corporate and foundation
relations for the University of Pennsylvania. We proposed that the CFR field lacks a generally
accepted set of performance measures that reflects that activity most relevant to successful
solicitations (not just activity that is easy to measure or translates across other development
functions); is practical and can be implemented by CFR staff; and guides CFR staff in focusing
their day-to-day work.
For our workshop, we conducted an informal, online pilot survey of 185 practitioners in the CFR
field. We asked people to reflect upon what activity matters most for success and to indicate
what activity they record in their tracking databases.
We sent the survey to the prior year's CFR conference participants as well as to subscribers to the
CFRnet listserve, which is hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The
respondents were strongly CFR-oriented: About 94 percent of the group reported spending at
least one-half of their time on corporate and foundation relations. Overall, the respondent pool
was fairly well-established in the field: Over 50 percent had eight or more years of experience in
development, and 31 percent had 12 or more years. All in all, 93 percent had at least two years of
experience in development. Just under 52 percent of respondents worked at doctorate-granting
institutions; 27 percent worked at master's-granting institutions; and 19 percent, at baccalaureate-
granting institutions.
For the first task we had set (determining what activity matters most for success), we asked
survey participants to rate different factors for importance in successful solicitation outcomes.
For each factor, respondents could select "unimportant," "of little importance," "moderately
important," "important," or "very important." We focused on three groups of factors: fixed (such
as the reputation of one's institution), internal (such as a C&F officer's knowledge of her or his
institution), and relational (such as visits to meet with a funder).
What's important
Which factors came out highest-ranked, on average? Here are the top five:
• Degree to which project aligns with funder's priorities
• Quality of proposal
• Quality of prior stewardship of funder's grants
• Institution being among types of organizations normally supported by funder
• C&F officer's knowledge of her/his institution
What factors trailed the list as far as importance?
• C&F officer visits to a foundation funder
• C&F officer's degree of competence in academic subject matter of a solicitation
• Faculty project leader's social/personal relationship with funder
• C&F officer's social/personal relationship with funder
• Institution's nonacademic contact with funder
(See the sidebar for complete list and rankings.)
Is there a "takeaway message" from the data? One conclusion is that in CFR, external
relationships with funders are only part of the story. The data revealed that fixed and internal
factors are important too, including a natural fit between project and funder, a high-quality
proposal, knowledge of your institution, and productive interactions with faculty.
Our second task was to find out what type of activity we record in our development databases.
We created a list of activities and asked respondents to indicate those that are tracked in their
development database. We gave them these response options: "capture in institutional database,"
"capture informally," or "do not capture."
Surprising answers
By comparing the rankings generated by responses to both parts of the survey, we were able to
answer our question from the beginning: Do we measure what we think is important?
The result of the comparison was revealing. For four of the five top success factors listed above
(every factor besides stewardship), the vast majority of respondents did not capture related
activity in their institution's development database. To cite a specific conundrum, 33 percent of
those who said that the quality of a proposal was "important" or "very important" do not track
C&F officer proposal writing or editing activity at all. See Table 1.
In other words, people tend not to formally track time spent in the following ways: researching
funders to ascertain structural and content-related fit; writing and editing proposals; and
participating in academic activities to increase our knowledge of our institutions.
What about the importance factors that ranked lower? Ironically, the majority of respondents did
use their institutional databases to track activity related to three of the bottom five factors (C&F
officer visits, phone calls, and mail correspondence). See Table 2.
What these data say is that more of us track mail correspondence, visits, and phone calls than
internal activity like research, proposal writing, and academic participation. In fact, the second
most commonly tracked activity (aside from gift closures) was C&F officer visits with funders
(86 percent track in their database), despite the fact that C&F officer visits to a corporate funder
was the sixth-lowest ranked factor and C&F officer visits to a foundation funder was the fifth-
lowest ranked factor. It's useful to track relational activity like visits, but to track these and not
track internal activity is not consistent with what our pilot survey indicated is important.
Some adjustments needed
It appears that Bob Paul and I were right that the performance metrics in CFR do not correlate
terribly well with our sense of what matters. Why?
The answer is not, I think, because nonrelational (that is, internal and fixed) factors are too
difficult to measure. One could certainly create data fields to capture internal activity, such as
"internal preparation meeting" and "substantive proposal editing." We could track the prospect
research that yields information on fixed factors such as alignment. To an extent, visits are
valuable tools for information-gathering, and we track these.
It's also not right to de-emphasize nonrelational factors because some are purportedly out of our
sphere of influence. True, it's not our role to change the quality of our institutions or the
reputation of our faculty. But we can strive to affect the perceptions of our institutions, faculty,
and projects by the proposals we develop and the counsel we offer our faculty as they prepare
solicitations.
The discrepancy between what we think is important and what we measure, I believe, results
from an overall culture of development that prioritizes external activity for development officers.
Face-to-face visits are indeed the lingua franca of the major gifts field, where giving is a personal
act between individual and institution. But institutional donors with professional staff do not
always behave like major gift prospects. External activity is certainly critical in CFR; but without
the alignment, without the faculty interactions, without the stewardship, these visits or proposals
aren't as likely to yield gifts. That is why CFR staff must spend so much time finding and
exploiting the fit between donor and project.
What can be done?
What can the field do to incorporate stronger performance metrics? First, we need to become
better at translating our work into measurable activity. Rather than just talking to one another
about how much time we spend researching prospects, coaching faculty colleagues on
positioning their projects, and editing proposals, we need to develop constructs representing such
activity, which can be encoded into institutional databases (or into informal tracking systems, if
use of the former is impracticable). Once we start tracking this type of activity, we will generate
empirical evidence about what activity really does drive successful outcomes-and continue to
refine our performance measures for the field.
About the Author
Kenna Barrett
Kenna Barrett is director, corporate and foundation relations, and associate director, major gifts,
for Yale Law School in Connecticut. She would like to thank CASE for providing valuable
feedback on the survey.
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