Recent Questions

What Gifts are Most Cost- Effective

No more pledge cards.

Is The Name of The Board Important?

How to personalize your Thank You's

“Have you been wondering about the Transfer of Wealth and how to prepare for it for your organization?”

How to Ask Faculty & Staff for Gifts?

How Restrictive Is The HIPPA Privacy Regulation?

What Happens When A Campaign Is Completed?

Archive of Previous Questions

Kim Fischer is a consultant in San Antonio, Texas. She asks: What is a reasonable budget for cultivating major donors (eighty to one hundred) annually?

I’ve asked Bill Sturtevant to respond. There’s no one more knowledgeable in the field than Bill. Here’s what he says: It depends on the organization’s constituency. That’s because a major cost element is travel which understandably varies significantly between local organizations and those with national and/or international constituencies. Here are the cost elements that should go into your computation:
1. Salary of major gift officer.
2. Salary of support staff (perhaps this can be shared).
3. Travel (this is often the biggest item).
4. Office supplies.
5. Telephone and Postage.
6. Entertainment.

Obviously, there are other expense lines which apply departmentally, but the above items are relevant to the direct cost of an individual major gift officer. Other than the salaries, the expenses are either variable or semi-variable.To determine travel, you should figure at least four personal visits per week, and for a community-based organization you can figure an average for auto mileage and multiply times the reimbursement rate.

For a national organization, airfare and hotel must be considered. Establish your budget by figuring 25% to 40% of the time spent on overnight trips (at least 50% if your sole focus is a far-off territory). Then compute costs per trip by using average airfares and hotel/meal expenses. Just to give you an idea of how this works in a large, national operation, in the planned/major gift department, you can approximate costs per fundraiser as follows:
Travel (including auto, airfare, hotel and meals) $11,250.00
Entertainment (including some large group seminars) $4,131.25
Telephone/Postage (excluding mass mailings) $2,500.00
Office Supplies (excluding shared office overhead such as copiers, etc.) $1,625.00

I hope this at least provides a starting point for customized computations. Each fundraiser in the above example is charged with maintaining one hundred relationships. -Jerry Panas