It’s a familiar story to philanthropy leaders. A gift officer resigns in the middle of a budget freeze. You have a portfolio with no steward, prospects with no relationship manager, and a revenue line that suddenly looks exposed. The requisition for the backfill is filed before the office chair is cold.
It’s the obvious move.
But when a frontline position opened up at Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation, Elizabeth Gross, the chief development officer, made a different one. She gave the position up. She used the salary line to hire a Donor Relations Coordinator and to build out a specialized events team.
By every traditional benchmark, this should have backfired. Fewer frontline fundraisers means less revenue.
It didn’t.
Anne Arundel landed on AHP’s list of the most sustainable foundations. And the foundation’s existing gift officers are closing more revenue than they were before the trade.
The Math Nobody Runs
When a gift officer resigns, leadership’s instinct is to calculate the saved salary. It’s a comforting number. It’s also the wrong one.
Here’s what gets left out of that conversation:
It takes 18 to 24 months for a new gift officer to reach full productivity. During that ramp, you are paying full salary for partial output. You’re also paying recruiting fees, onboarding time from senior staff, and the opportunity cost of an unmanaged portfolio. By the time the new hire is actually closing gifts, they have cost the foundation a multiple of their salary…and the relationships left behind by the previous officer are nearly two years cold.
So the real choice isn’t “fill the role or save the salary.” The real choice is: spend that salary on someone whose value lands two budget cycles from now or spend the same money on capacity that pays off in the next quarter.
Elizabeth ran that math.
What She Bought Instead
The Donor Relations Coordinator doesn’t carry a portfolio. She doesn’t make donor visits. What she does is handle the proposals, the gift acknowledgments, the data entry, the touchpoint cadence, and the dozens of small administrative tasks that used to live on every major gift officer’s plate.
The events team doesn’t ask for gifts. They handle the contracts, the printing, the seating charts, the night-of logistics. In short, they all the work that gift officers used to do on Saturday nights instead of cultivating donors.
“My fundraisers were spending too much time on in-office work,” Elizabeth told me. “I needed to free them up to actually be in the field.”
The result is that the remaining gift officers stopped spending a third of their week on administrative tasks. They got that time back to do what they were hired to do: build the relationships that lead to major and planned gifts.
She didn’t lose fundraising capacity by backfilling a gift officer position with back-office staff. She just redistributed it.
The Quiet Multiplier Effect
There is a second benefit to building infrastructure to support your gift officers. When you protect your gift officers from administrative work, you also protect them from burnout. And when you protect them from burnout, they stay.
That matters because relationships are the actual product. A donor who has been worked by the same gift officer for five years is in a completely different place than one who has been handed off three times in that span. The trust required for seven and eight-figure gifts cannot be built in a portfolio that resets every 18 months.
Put another way, by giving up one frontline position, Elizabeth bought continuity for the rest.
When Not to Backfill
This isn’t an argument that every vacant gift officer slot should disappear. There are foundations that are genuinely understaffed at the frontline, and there are portfolios that absolutely need a relationship manager today. But before you autopilot into a backfill, ask three questions:
- Are my current gift officers actually spending 80% of their time on fundraising, or are they doing data entry, event logistics, and proposal formatting?
- Is the role I’m filling protecting a relationship I value, or patching a hole out of habit?
- Would a coordinator, a researcher, or a stewardship hire produce more revenue in the next 12 months than a new gift officer who won’t reach full productivity until two budget cycles from now?
If the answers point you toward support, follow them. The most sustainable foundations aren’t the ones with the most fundraisers. They’re the ones whose fundraisers can actually fundraise.
To go deeper on the strategies sustainable foundations use to build resilient teams, listen to the webinar recording for “The New Blueprint for Foundation Performance“.
