She Carries Eleven

There is a fifty-eight-page board book, printed on the small color printer behind the office manager's desk on the second floor of a regional children's hospital foundation in Wichita, Kansas, that lands on the agenda of the quarterly board meeting at 7:00 a.m. on the fourth Thursday of every March. On page nineteen, in a chart labeled Major Gifts: Portfolio Coverage, there is a single horizontal bar in the foundation's institutional blue. The bar runs from the left margin almost to the right, and the label reads:

Director of Major and Planned Gifts — 120 active portfolios.

The number has been one hundred and twenty since the spring of 2018. It has been printed in eight straight board books. It has, in eight straight board meetings, drawn one quiet nod from the board chair, no follow-up question from the finance committee, and a single small notation in the meeting minutes — Portfolio coverage on track — that the corporate secretary has been pasting in, verbatim, since the spring of 2019.

The director of major and planned gifts is Maren Voss. She is thirty-four. She grew up on a wheat farm outside Larned, in central Kansas, in a small white house with a screen door her father has been meaning to fix since 2007. She went to Kansas State on a scholarship her grandmother's bridge club helped fund in 2009. She has been at the foundation for nineteen months. She earns one hundred and ten thousand dollars a year and a small bonus tied to a fiscal goal nobody in the boardroom can recite from memory.

If you ask Maren, at the end of a Thursday in the parking lot of the hospital — not on a panel, not in the boardroom, in the parking lot — how many donors she actually carries, the answer is eleven.

Not one hundred and twenty. Eleven.

She knows their middle names. She knows the names of two of their dogs. She knows which one's son started chemotherapy in April at the very hospital his mother has been giving to since 2006. She knows which one prefers to be called at her husband's office because her own line is screened by an assistant who is the wife of a board member at the other foundation across town. She knows which two of the eleven will not, under any circumstance, take a meeting in April, and will, in October, take three.

The other one hundred and nine names on the bar in page nineteen are not donors. They are CRM rows.

What the slide is for

The 120-donor portfolio is the most expensive polite lie in major-gift fundraising.

It is not a measure of relationship. It is not a measure of attention. It is not, in any defensible methodological sense, a measure of coverage. It is the field-conventional slide-deck artifact a development director walks into a board meeting carrying, in order to demonstrate — to a room of bankers, attorneys, and one retired pediatrician — that she is being thorough.

The slide does, very effectively, one thing. It absorbs the question the board would otherwise have to ask. Who is she actually talking to? The bar runs from the left margin nearly to the right. The board chair nods. The next slide loads. The boardroom is, on the institution's books, covered.

It is not covered. It is performed.

In the nineteen months Maren has been at the foundation, the bar has not moved. The names beneath it have rotated four times. The eleven people she could phone tonight have, on her phone, small blue checkmarks next to their names in a Moleskine she keeps in her cardigan pocket. The other one hundred and nine are not on her phone. They are on a spreadsheet she opens, on average, twice a quarter — which is the cadence the field considers active.

It is not active. It is archived.

Where the number came from

The 120-donor portfolio dates to a 1997 monograph from a development consultancy in Indianapolis that ran the math on average officer compensation, average gift size, and average meeting count. The model assumed forty hours of weekly cultivation time, six meetings per donor per year, and a fully staffed advancement-services team behind the officer. It assumed the officer was forty-two, married, settled in the city, and three years into what was expected to be a long tenure.

Twenty-nine years later, the average director of major and planned gifts in this country is thirty-three, two years into her current role, eyeing her third position by forty, and supported by an associate she shares with the events team and the database manager. The 120-donor portfolio is a memorial to a job that was last viable, in the form the model assumed, in about 2003.

Field practice has not retired it. Field practice has done what fields do with retired ideas. It put a chart of it in the board book.

The honest caseload

The honest caseload — the number of donors a working director of major and planned gifts can be in a relationship with, at the level the work actually requires — is, in our experience and in the experience of every veteran director we have asked, somewhere between nine and fifteen.

Call it twelve. Call it eleven.

Maren carries eleven.

A caseload of eleven does not look impressive on a slide. It looks, to the bankers in the room, like the director is being under-asked. It looks, to the retired pediatrician, like the foundation is paying one hundred and ten thousand dollars a year for not very much. It looks, to the board chair, like a staffing inefficiency.

That is because the slide does not measure the right thing. The slide measures names assigned. The work measures people known. A relationship with eleven donors at the level the work actually requires — knowing which one was just diagnosed, which one is selling the family hardware business in October, which one's daughter just moved to Tulsa with a one-year-old, which one's husband is quietly grieving the loss of a younger brother in a way the wife has been carrying since April — is more work, by a wide margin, than a relationship with one hundred and twenty names at the level a CRM measures.

The board does not see the work. The board sees the bar.

What the bar costs

The bar is not free.

Every hour Maren spends keeping the bar alive — opening the spreadsheet, logging the four-line touch to keep the row from going inactive, drafting a small templated newsletter blurb a donor she has never met may or may not open in November — is an hour she does not spend on the eleven.

There are, by our rough count, about three hundred and ten of those hours a year. Eight working weeks. Two months of a director's life. Six monthly check-ins, on average, with eleven donors she actually knows — pushed past the calendar, deferred to the spring, missed because the bar needed feeding.

We are paying directors of major and planned gifts a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year to spend two months a year forgetting one hundred and nine names. We are paying the same directors one hundred and ten thousand dollars a year, in the same year, to under-call the eleven names they would, if left alone, give the next decade of their professional life to.

That is not a slide problem. That is a structural problem.

What changes when the institution stops pretending

The institution that adopts the twelve-donor caseload, and means it, does three things on a Monday morning.

First, it tells its director that ninety percent of her calendar — actually ninety percent, not the rhetorical kind — belongs to twelve people. Second, it instructs its associate, gently and well, to do the careful work of re-routing on the other one hundred and eight — not into a dead pool but into the right slow streams: annual-fund stewardship for nine, planned-giving prospect research for forty, board-led cultivation for the eighteen the board members are quietly closer to than the director will ever be, and a long, patient will-they-come-back file for the rest. Third, it changes the board-book chart.

The new chart does not read 120 active portfolios. It reads 12 in active major-gift cultivation. 108 in supporting streams.

The bankers will, the first time, ask the question. The director will, the first time, answer it. The pediatrician will say, slowly, That sounds about right.

A year later, the gift report will tell a different story than it has told for the last decade. Two of the eleven will become four. Four of them will, in their own time, on their own decisions, in their own paper, do what donors do when an institution stops pretending it knows them and starts actually knowing them. One of them will name a third-floor reading room for a sister who died in 1987. One of them will fund a chair in a field nobody at the foundation had thought to ask her about. One of them will, in a small handwritten line on a Christmas card eighteen months from now, mention the foundation in a sentence that ends the gift is in the trust.

The institution that goes first will, in eight years, have the bequests.

What the parking lot already knows

In the meantime, in three hundred quarterly board meetings on the fourth Thursday of next month, the same chart will print. The same bar will run from the left margin nearly to the right. The same board chair will nod.

The director, in the parking lot at 6:48 a.m., will be on the phone with one of the eleven. She will know, by 7:02, when she is sitting down in the boardroom and the bar is on the screen, exactly who she carries.

She just won't get to say so.

She carries eleven.