Your Fundraising Team Is Busy. That's Not the Same as Productive.

I hear the same thing from nearly every development leader I work with: "My team is working so hard." And they are. They're asking for meetings, sending emails, updating Salesforce. The activity might look fine on paper.

But when I pull more holistic data, a different story emerges.

In a recent engagement with a 20+ person frontline fundraising team, the activity reports showed high meeting volume across every sub-team. Officers were averaging two to five meetings a week. By any standard measure, this team was hustling.

The problem wasn't effort. It was that all that effort wasn't converting into asks. The team had a 71% win rate on solicitations they actually made. That's exceptional, well above the 50-70% range you typically see from high-performing gift officers. The system wasn't broken. The team just wasn't making enough asks.

Activity Is Not a Proxy for Progress

This is a pattern I see constantly. Organizations track activity as a proxy for progress. But activity metrics measure motion, not necessarily momentum. If we're not tracking our qualification journey, how effectively our meeting requests convert into meetings, or the efficacy of our solicitations, we can't diagnose what's stalling revenue.

I remember sitting with this team's leadership, looking at a dashboard full of green indicators, and saying: "Everything here says your team is performing. But your revenue tells a different story. Something in between is broken, and the only way to find it is to measure the steps between activity and outcome."

Diagnosing What's Actually Stalling Revenue

The fix was structural. We set metrics around the full fundraising lifecycle: tracking how donors moved from qualification to either disqualification or cultivation, measuring the "hit rate" on meeting requests to understand whether outreach was actually landing, and tracking solicitation efficacy to determine whether we were asking the right people for the right amounts at the right time.

The result was that challenges became quickly diagnosable. Some officers were requesting lots of meetings but not getting them, so we provided coaching and training on how to make more compelling meeting asks. Some fundraisers were getting plenty of meetings but not moving donors toward solicitation, so we focused on cultivation strategy and readiness assessment. Others had high solicitation volume but relatively low close rates, meaning the asks themselves weren't landing, which required a different kind of coaching entirely.

When you can accurately diagnose the issue, you can effectively address it, coach to it, and grow revenue.

If your team is busy but your revenue has plateaued, don't start with a pep talk. Start with the data. Look at portfolio composition, solicitation frequency, and pipeline stage distribution. The answer is almost always in there.

Working through something like this with your team? Let's talk. (opens in new tab)