What a High-Performing Nonprofit Development Team Looks Like

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Here’s a question every executive director eventually asks.

Usually quietly, and usually after a stretch of soft major gift numbers:

“Is my development team actually performing? Or am I confusing activity with results?”

It’s harder to answer than it looks. Because most development performance gets measured by dollars raised, which matters… but misses a lot.

A team can hit annual fund goals while a major gifts program stagnates. An MGO can stay completely busy while their portfolio barely moves.

Activity and forward movement are not the same thing. Here’s how to tell the difference.

The Four Indicators of Genuine Major Gift Performance

When GPG assesses a development program, these are the four things we look at:

1. Portfolio movement. Are major donor relationships actually advancing — moving from identification to discovery, from discovery to cultivation, from cultivation toward solicitation — or are they sitting at the same stage month after month? A portfolio that isn’t moving isn’t a cultivation program. It’s a maintenance program.

2. Discovery visit activity. Are new major gift prospects being identified and genuinely engaged on a consistent, ongoing basis? A development team that isn’t regularly running discovery visits is managing the current portfolio, not growing it. The pipeline that closes gifts in year three is being built right now… or it isn’t.

3. Quality of donor strategy. Is there a real, written, individualized plan for each major relationship? A specific next step grounded in what the fundraiser actually knows about this donor? Or is strategy implicit, informal, and reactive?

4. Executive director’s presence in the cultivation work. Is the ED actively involved in major gift strategy alongside the development team — not just reviewing reports — and making the relationship moves that only an ED can make? When EDs are absent from this work, the development director can’t move key relationships forward, regardless of how talented she is.

Why These Are Hard to See From the Inside

The team sees the activity. The executive director sees the reports. Neither view tells the complete story of what’s actually moving, what isn’t, and why.

That’s not a failure of leadership. It’s a structural limitation.

Internal teams often can’t clearly see their own blind spots, especially when the team is working hard and committed.

A development assessment creates that clarity: not as a judgment of the team, but as a map of what the program needs to reach its potential.

The Goal: Capable, Not Dependent

The point of an assessment isn’t to find problems. It’s to find the highest-leverage opportunities: the two or three changes that would have the most impact on major gift results. Then, you build a plan around those specifically.

Organizations that work with the Gail Perry Group leave with a clear, prioritized roadmap: what to build, what to restructure, what to invest in, and what to stop doing.

The value isn’t only the findings: it’s the direction that follows.

Your development team is almost certainly working hard. The question isn’t whether they’re working. It’s whether the structure around them is built to support the results your organization is capable of producing.

P.S. If you’d like an honest outside assessment of your development program — what’s working, what isn’t, and where the highest-leverage opportunities are — let’s start a conversation: gailperrygroup.com/contact.