​The Missing Piece of Your Strategic Planning: Conduct a Benchmarking Study and Advance Your Fundraising and Career

Tis the Season for Strategic Planning! Now is the time of year that many higher education fundraisers are doing two things:

1. Working it hard to reach our fiscal year end goals and,
2. Planning how we might do things better next year.

I totally understand you are busy. Trust me. Between travel, work, and personal responsibilities, I’m stretched too.

But, I think you should consider one more project: a benchmarking study. It's the missing piece of your strategic planning process.

A benchmarking study is a survey of peer organizations that will give you insightful information about what your program should be doing. I assure you that this process doesn’t take long. The data you obtain will be so useful to you, I guarantee you that you will not regret investing the time.

A benchmarking study can help you:
​

• Check your fundraising results versus peer institutions.
  • Are they raising more or less than you? Why?
• Assess your portfolio of programs and provide supporting evidence to start new programs or drop unproductive ones.
  • For instance, say your biggest rival school does a day-of-giving and you don't. They raise more money than you overall and have a higher alumni participation rate. This is a persuasive reason for you to try a day-of-giving. Likewise, if your leadership believes the reunion giving is the most important thing in the world, but none of your peers do this and it always takes a ton of time for not much revenue, recommend dropping it.
• Give you justification to lobby for more budgetary resources.
  • If another school has 25 calling stations and calls year round successfully, and your phonathon only has 15 calling stations and doesn’t call in the summer, perhaps you need to add more stations or calling hours.
• Inspire you with ideas but also provide important return-on-investment data of those ideas.
  • With the questions I will recommend you ask, you’ll get inspired but avoid the temptation to implement ideas that sound great but don’t pull real results.
• Open a window onto what’s possible, as well as confirming where you are doing well.

How do I get started? I have no time for this…

This doesn’t have to take a long time. If you employ an intern or student worker, have them help you with the process. The first phase of identifying your peer institutions is the hardest part. Just hang with me and you'll find you can fit this in and that the long term benefits (to your institution and your own career) are worth it.

Here’s the 5 phase process for doing a benchmarking study:

1. Research
2. Create survey
3. Solicit participation
4. Analysis
5. Follow-up

Phase 1: Research

List your “peer institutions”. You know at least some of them. They might be your in-state rivals or other nearby institutions of similar size, age and student population. Your peer institutions are the ones that your boss always asks about in meetings: “What is XYZ College doing in this area?”

Note: There is a big difference between a peer institution and an aspirant institution.

An aspirant institutions is one that your institution wants to be like but isn’t. They are a significant level-up from you. They may have 50-100 years more institutional history, a much larger endowment, a larger student body or other significant indicators that make them just a bit beyond your organization.

Sometimes leadership or volunteers believe a rival institution is a peer institution when it is actually a aspirant institution. When I was at Southern Miss, we were frequently compared with Mississippi State and Ole Miss, but Southern Miss is actually much more like Eastern Carolina University or the University of Memphis than either of those in-state rivals.

It’s a bit dangerous to confuse an aspirant institution with a peer institution. You would be comparing apples to papayas. However, you can include them in your study because they are a great source of inspiration and ideas. Just mark them clearly in your data as aspirant and understand that they will likely have bigger budgets and bigger results.

If you only can come up with a few institutions, do some internet searches to find similar organizations. You might google, “liberal arts colleges more than 100 years old” or “southern universities with endowments of less than $100 Million”. I recommend you have a list of 10-12 peer institutions and perhaps 3-5 aspirant institutions because not all the institutions will respond.

Once you have a short list of potential peer and aspirant institutions, you (or your intern) should do a bit of research. You need to identity the equivalent program director at those places. For example, if your study is for annual giving, you will want to find the Director of Annual Giving at each place on your list. Record this staffer’s name, title, phone and email address in a spreadsheet.

Phase 2: Create survey

I recommend you ask a mixture of questions in these categories:

• Institutional questions
  • Student body, Endowment size, type of institution, year founded, etc. These questions provide confirmation of their peer status to your institution and establish where you are alike and different.
• Overall Fundraising Results Questions
  • Dollars, donors, alumni participation, etc.
• Resource Questions
  • Resources at the disposal of their program, including monetary resources, space, software, equipment and staff.
• Program Questions
  • Major gifts, lead annual fund, giving societies, events, direct mail, digital promotions, student philanthropy, phonathon, etc.

You can follow this process to design your survey for any area of development but here is what I’ve used before for annual giving.

Annual Fund Questionnaire

1. Institution:
2. Alumni Base:
3. Overall Annual Fund statistics:
   1. Overall Dollars Raised in most recently completed fiscal year:
   2. Overall number of donors (or pledges):
   3. Overall participation rate:
4. Other constituencies that you solicit: (Please indicate the total amount of dollars and number of donors that each program generates towards your totals above.)
   1. Parents?
   2. Students?
   3. Friends?
   4. Faculty/Staff/Retirees?
   5. Other?
5. Methods Utilized:  Please describe how you use this, the scope, etc. (Please indicate the total amount of dollars and number of donors that each program generates towards your totals above.)
   1. Phone
   2. Direct Mail
   3. E-solicitations
   4. Other e-mails (for reminders, stewardship, etc.)
   5. Social Media
   6. Personal Visits (High End Annual)
   7. Events
   8. Other Methods
6. Do you recognize or have special solicitation plans for any of the following groups: (Please indicate the total amount of dollars and number of donors that each program generates towards your totals above.)
   1. Young Alumni
   2. High Level Annual Societies
   3. Consecutive Year donors
   4. 1st time donors
   5. Reunion giving
7. Can you describe your research/data integrity plan?
8. Can you broadly describe how you segment your data for phone and direct mail?
9. Can you describe your fulfillment and stewardship cycles?
10. Do you undertake any student philanthropy education?

Phase 3: Solicit participation

Take your own survey for your institution putting in your data and make sure each question is clear and makes sense. When you do this, time yourself, so you have an accurate range of how long this will take.

Construct an email to the staffers you recorded contact info for in Phase 1. Let them know that you would love for them to participate and the survey will only take XX minutes. (I would recommend that it take no longer than 15 minutes.)

Then, and this is important, tell them that you will share the results of the survey with them to benefit their program as a thank you for their participation. Provide a deadline and let them know that you’ll remind them closer to the deadline. Keep your window not longer than 2 weeks out, otherwise there is no urgency to participate.

Remind them 4-5 days later if they haven’t participated and again closer to the deadline. You can even through in a phone call 3 days before the deadline, especially if there is a school that you need feedback from for political reasons.

Phase 4: Analysis

Review your survey results, noting where your institution does well and where you fall short. What are the great ideas that stick out? What resources do other organizations have that you don’t? How might you get access to those resources?

Compose your results into an executive summary sheet of 1-3 pages that can be included with your strategic plan or sent to relevant stakeholders as a stand-alone report. This report will be for your institution. You'll also need to consolidate and package up the raw survey results to send to your peer participants in Phase 5.

Phase 5: Follow-Up

Be professional and prompt with your follow up. Send a copy of every survey or the consolidated results to all survey participants. Do this within 2 weeks from the survey deadline. Thank them profusely and perhaps include an invitation to establish an on-going professional support relationship.

Maybe you start a Facebook or LinkedIn group where you can compare data throughout the year on an ad-hoc basis. These relationships are of great value to your institution and to your own career.

Conclusion

This process shouldn’t be intimidating and when you are done with it, you will have some important tools in your strategic planning process.

I did this exact process at The University of Southern Mississippi to prove my point that the annual fund had historically under-performed. The benchmarking study certainly showed the under-performance but it also showed similar institutions were raising so much more money, which meant there was no reason Southern Miss couldn’t do it too with strategy, consistency and investment. I’m happy to say that’s exactly what happened. I’m pleased to report the program has now exceeded the five year goals I set for it back in 2011-2012 when I did the benchmarking study.

If you do this project, you’ll have some persuasive data to lobby for changes to your program. Plus, you’ll be seen as a self-starter not only in your office or institution but in the broader development community as well. It’s worth it.

Have you undertaken a benchmarking study? Why or why not? What conclusions came out of your study?

As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged!

Cheers,

Jessica

PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these: 

• Goals versus projections
• What should a strategic plan contain?
• Planning for the Unexpected

PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my  guide to Call Center Games for Free!​​

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