From the Nominator

As we emerged from COVID-19 in 2022, universities faced a world wildly different from the one we left. It was an employees’ market—everyone wanted to work from home, and experienced fundraisers were in high demand. At Chico State, we lost most of our development professionals during or after the pandemic, and replacing them proved difficult. Our budget was fixed, and they demanded almost twice what we had been paying. We experimented with hiring amateurs and training them. It failed. In 2023, we shifted gears and pursued quality over quantity, decreasing our development officer count from eight to five and bringing in experienced professionals at a higher cost. We assigned them multiple colleges, but the workload was too much. How could we most effectively leverage these experienced (and expensive) professionals? The solution was two-pronged. First, we shrank their territory, limiting them to a one-day travel radius. Next, we asked our foundation board to fund an experiment. We found that retired professional fundraisers with years of great experience loved the idea of returning to work part-time (saving us the expense of paying benefits). Then, we created a team of six outreach managers who work with the frontline fundraisers, managing their lists and scheduling meetings with potential new donors. Not only do they do the groundwork for solicitations and donor stewardship (at a lower cost than the fundraisers’ time for the same effort), but we’ve created a pipeline of fundraisers-in-training, learning the ropes through their close working relationships with the professionals.

From the Judges

Chico's project was straightforward and simple to understand, hire better people for more money. Narrowing the travel radius, cutting time on the road and having outreach people to take care of the groundwork were all great ideas. While the upfront cost was expensive, the dividends really seemed to pay off in the end.