The email arrived on a Tuesday morning, and the subject line might as well have been written in all-caps: “Help! HR is asking for $0.12.” 

The sender, a seasoned Chief Development Officer we’ll call Mary, was in a state of professional panic. Her organization was in the second year of a grueling restructure. Her team was raising money at a highly respectable $0.17 per dollar.  

Then the “benchmarking” started. 

The HR leader at her organization had decided (likely via a quick AI search) that excellence looked like $0.12. 

“We are already incredibly lean,” Mary wrote. “And we're also being asked to double our fundraising goal. I feel like I’m being asked to run a marathon while holding my breath.” 

Mary’s predicament isn't an outlier. In our quest to be data-driven, we have become obsessed with Cost to Raise a Dollar (CTRD) as the ultimate scorecard. But my research into high-performing healthcare foundations has taught me that this is a trap.  

Whales, Luck, and the Myth of the $0.12 Goal 

Why is $0.12 a dangerous target? Because that number usually happens by accident. 

In major gift fundraising, revenue is lumpy. One year, you might land a "whale"—a $5 million estate gift or a transformative capital commitment that was actually the result of five years of quiet stewardship. In that specific 12-month snapshot, your CTRD looks miraculous. You look like a productivity genius. 

But a snapshot is not a strategy.  

When HR sets a performance goal based on a year where your (or another) organization caught a whale, they are benchmarking against luck, not labor. When you force a team to hit $0.12 every year, you are essentially telling them to stop spending money on the very things (stewardship, prospect research, long-term cultivation, etc.) that make those whale gifts possible in the first place. 

The $0.05 Difference between Efficiency and Sustainability 

My research into organizations that are set up for long-term success reveals a counter-intuitive truth: they often don’t have the lowest CTRD. 

One organization that stood out in my research for its sustainability is Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, MD. But when I told Elizabeth Gross, the leader at Anne Arundel, that her foundation was a top performer, she didn’t believe me. 

"Look at my CTRD,” she said. “We are right in the middle of the pack." 

She was right. Anne Arundel isn't the "cheapest" shop in the data. They sit near the median for efficiency. But while their peers are cutting staff to lower their CTRD, Elizabeth is doing the opposite.  

In a year where budgets were tight, she made a bold move: she sacrificed a vacant frontline gift officer position to hire more back-office support. 

She hired a Donor Relations Coordinator to handle the paperwork and keep the data clean. She built a specialized events team so her major gift officers wouldn't have to spend their nights printing name tags and hauling boxes. 

Elizabeth is intentionally "less efficient" so that her team can actually do their jobs. By spending that extra five cents per dollar on support, she is buying her team’s time and protecting them from burnout.