Category: Decision-Making

Benchmark with purpose

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Have you ever benchmarked against your university fundraising peers? Did you find it easy or hard? If you found it easy, you may have done it wrong.

Alright, maybe your Advancement shop benchmarked only for general information; that’s one thing. If you benchmarked for insights to act on – to inform decisions about staffing or performance expectations or institutional funding for Advancement – that’s something else. The comparisons had better be valid.

Getting apples-to-apples, as the cliché has it, is surprisingly hard work. You should be clear what you want out of it before you commit.

Our department reports to the university on the return of investment made in Advancement. It’s a handsome return, exceeding most things that go by the name “investment.” It would be strange if it wasn’t. But a positive return, even a handsome one, could be produced by a department that is underperforming, and performance issues should be addressed before the university considers additional investment. ROI alone lacks context – benchmarking provides context in the form of confidence in our performance in relation to our peers.

It was a journey. It took four years to get to the point where we felt assured of the comparability of the numbers. Here are some things I learned along the way.

First, having the right comparator group is essential. The credibility of the exercise hangs on it.

Second, work with an external facilitator. Universities used to have to initiate their own partnerships, but today a number of consulting firms and organizations are doing excellent work in this area. Benchmarking is valid only when the partners provide data that is prepared roughly the same way. It takes years of effort to align on definitions; do-it-yourself initiatives can’t be sustained long enough to yield value.

Third, don’t spread limited time and resources over multiple benchmarking efforts. Better to pick one group and stick with that group. (Unless you’ve got a lot of capacity.) The work of assembling the data falls to my team; when a new invitation to benchmark comes in, we look at it, but most of the time we decline to participate.

Fourth, nominate one person to own it, even if several people are involved. A director of finance will provide expenditure data, human resources will provide FTE counts by function, development reporting will provide fundraising totals – but one person, possibly an analyst with strong knowledge of the business, should be responsible for keeping an eye on annual deadlines and monitoring the quality of the submitted data.

One clear owner will also be better able to engage with his or her counterparts among the benchmark partners to ensure consistency in data definitions and processes. These conversations are more efficient when each partner sends only one or two knowledgeable people to the table.

And finally: This is important, and worth extra effort. The goal is having data that is comparable across institutions. The ROI calculation is very sensitive to how we count, both on the fundraising side and the expenditure side. Discrepancies among peer schools may be footnoted, but leadership is not reading footnotes. Multiple asterisks on everything degrades the value of the exercise.

Alert leaders to sources of variability that will affect the integrity of decisions – and work with your peers and the vendor/organization to make it better.

Of preachers and lawyers

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Some have the gift of impromptu eloquence. Some, like me, do not. I have been humbled many times, after speaking to a topic tersely and inadequately, hearing a colleague offer their own explication that is as fitting as it is lengthy. I can speak my mind, but I have difficulty improvising; I covet others’ fluency.

I’m comforted to know that my slow-wittedness is a phenomenon known throughout history, and therefore, I suppose, quite normal.

In the 1570s, Michel de Montaigne, in an essay called “Of prompt or slow speech,” wrote: “So we see that in the gift of eloquence some have facility and promptness, and, as they say, can get it out so easily that at every turn they are ready; whereas others, slower, never speak except with elaboration and premeditation.”

Eloquence is the profession of lawyers and preachers, he says. The quick person would do better as a lawyer, and the slow person would do better as a preacher. A lawyer adjusts in the moment, adapting to every novel twist. A preacher delivers premeditated messages in a continuous stream without interruption.

I think our teams would do well to include both: the deliberate along with the nimble.

The traditional hiring process favours lawyers. The way we interview candidates prioritizes the ability to think on one’s feet. Some basic questions a candidate can prepare for, but hiring panels really like candidates who are articulate in the face of questions that are unanticipated. In these situations, the preacher, sensing disadvantage, compounds the problem by becoming nervous. With little to go on, interviewers see only the nervousness and conclude the candidate is not a fit.

Most roles in Operations do not require the incumbent to argue in court – or perform improv comedy, or field questions from the press. Why the interview process has been made to resemble these activities, I’m not sure.

A bias in favour of lawyers is not mistaken; it only lacks balance. There are ways to achieve balance. I have sometimes provided a question or two in advance, given exercises to work on, and invited candidates to deliver a prepared presentation.

I limit the amount of time to prepare. As Montaigne wrote, anxiety to present oneself well leads to overworking the material and yields an unnatural result – what we call overthinking it. “We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp,” he wrote. “If it doesn’t go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a bookish hermit but in fact he was mayor of Bordeaux, aspired to statesmanship, and was embroiled in the hazardous politics of his day. He preferred conversation to writing.

On the job, where again conditions often favour the lawyer, we should ensure all types get their share of the conversation.

The virtual work world presents some opportunities. I have seen effective use of meeting software that encourages team members to provide input in the form of written statements, which other participants in the meeting can upvote. The author may then be invited to speak to the statement. It is easier to elaborate on an idea that one has already put out there, especially an idea that has been upvoted, than it is to break in on others’ full flight with a new thought.

It helps if the meeting is run by someone skilled at facilitating who can gently elicit comments from quieter members of the group. The preacher isn’t necessarily a shy or unconfident person; it just takes a bit to prime the pump.

The goal is not to shut up the quick-witted in favour of the slow, but to allow the quick and the slow to contribute more equally, leading to stronger teams and better decisions.

When to stop procrastinating

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Some time ago, after a lot of dithering, I decided to participate in a leadership development program. I had delayed and delayed before finally committing. I was on unfamiliar ground; all I knew I was looking for something personally challenging, immersive, and experiential. I wanted to come out changed.

The stakes seemed high. I would not sign up for anything until I knew exactly what I was getting out of it.

Then I read this quote from Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

The quote was in a piece by Rebecca Solnit. “The things we want are transformative,” she writes, “and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”

From time to time, I make a list of things I’m avoiding, and why. Sometimes there are good reasons for procrastinating; sometimes I just need to get my shit together. Other times, I see I’m waiting for knowledge of the unknowable future, a future that could in fact be changed in unpredictable ways by what I’m thinking of doing. Then I have to picture myself in a year or three, and ask if that future self would regret not having acted, even if things didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. If the answer is yes, then it’s time to go in blind.

Willingly going in blind is like being lost and feeling okay with it. When you are lost, Solnit writes, “the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.” However it feels, sometimes we need to start there.

Data is an expensive tool. We should teach people how to use it.

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When you buy a tool you have to learn how to use it, or you’ve wasted your money. Our team understood this when we implemented a new CRM system: If frontline staff used it and used it well, the investment would deliver on the promise of facilitating advancement of the mission.

Data is also a tool. Managers and decision-makers will succeed if they know how to use data. The question is, what have we done to maximize on that investment?

During our CRM implementation, we had more than 50 working sessions with frontline staff – focus groups and training sessions that involved nearly everyone in configuring the software and applying it in their work. So many hours!

CRM was big, but our investment in data, spread over years, is much bigger. Like other advancement shops we have staff employed in the collection, creation, and management of data, staff who design and maintain the infrastructure for securely storing, assembling, and preparing the data, and staff who use the data to develop reports and business insights.

That investment far exceeds the cost of any CRM, yet has it been matched with an equivalent degree of training in its end-use by managers and decision-makers? For us and many other organizations, the answer is no.

Operations can get very good at translating between the data and the business, but staff across Advancement must be able to speak the language. Author and advisor Bernard Marr says, “… organizations that fail to boost the data literacy of their employees will be left behind because they are not able to fully use the vital business resource of data to their business advantage.” (1)

Organizations large and small, in every sector, are coming to this realization. A 2019 Gartner survey found 80 percent of organizations now plan to start developing staff competency in data literacy. (2)

Data literacy simply means the ability to understand data in the context of one’s business knowledge. It includes knowing where the data comes from, how it’s defined, the methods used to analyze it, and having a view to applying it to achieve an outcome.

You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car. You don’t need to be an analyst to make decisions with data. The next big leap forward in data-informed decision making might lie in helping more and more staff across the organization learn how to drive.

  1. “Why Is Data Literacy Important For Any Business?” by Bernard Marr (see also “What Are The Biggest Barriers To Data Literacy?“)
  2. “Design a Data and Analytics Strategy,” Gartner Inc., 2019