What would it take, staff-wise, to reach our development and alumni relations shop’s full potential?

That question led our team at Vanderbilt University on a journey to assess our needs and, ultimately, grow our team. Four years later, we’ve found that data-guided workforce planning—along with supporting our team and staying true to our culture—has paid off. 

In today’s times of strained budgets, cutbacks, and “do more with less” mandates, it can be challenging to make the case for investing in advancement. Here’s how we did it and what we learned along the way.
 

A New Way of Thinking

Vanderbilt is a private, 13,500-student university located in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. In 2022, our Development and Alumni Relations operation was experiencing growth, both in ambition and in dollars raised. We had revamped our customer relationship management system and moved to a Salesforce environment, which gave us valuable insights into our donor population. We discovered that we had 23,295 unassigned, unqualified prospects with a giving history to Vanderbilt. We felt confident enough in this data to request increased budget from our leadership, specifically Chancellor Daniel Diermeier. 

We shared our rationale for support, using our data to show that we could make incremental gains in reaching our untapped potential by hiring more development officers. In the process of making our request, Diermeier sat back, paused, then asked a question that would change everything for DAR: “What would it take to cover all of your prospects adequately?”

This was a new way of thinking for us. Previously, we’d made smaller, incremental appeals to grow our operation. What he challenged us to explore was not hiring three or four more development officers. He wanted to know what resources we needed to hire enough team members to capture all our potential—and to capture it quickly.
 

Determining Our Prospect Coverage Gap

We dove back into our data. We knew it would be unreasonable to hire enough development officers to cover 23,295 prospects, nor would all those prospects want to connect with us at a major gift level. We needed to determine our engagement rate so we could accurately size this group and scale our proposal.

To do so, we looked at the engagement rate of new development officers we had hired to work with this unqualified population. We determined that they were seeing a robust response from about 8% of their outreach. From here, it turned into a math problem: 24,000 unassigned, unqualified prospects multiplied by an 8% engagement rate equals 1,863 untapped prospects.

With our prospect coverage gap set at 1,863, we needed to determine how many development officers to hire to work with this pool. Our average portfolio size, from junior development officers to senior ones, is 55. So, we did one more calculation: 1,863 untapped prospects divided by 55 average major gift portfolio size equals 35 development officers.

To cover this group, we needed to hire 35 development officers. 
 

FUNDRAISING IS A TEAM SPORT: Vanderbilt Vice Chancellor for Development and Alumni Relations John M Lutz snaps a photo with colleagues at an athletics-themed team meeting.

Credit: Vanderbilt University

Scaling Operational Support in Tandem

We knew, though, that we could not hire frontline fundraisers without increasing our operational support in tandem. We also know that different levels of development officers need different organizational support. An early-career associate director with a large portfolio (but smaller asks) will likely need more support from our data analytics research and prospect development team, as their portfolio churn will be higher. Meanwhile, a principal gift officer later in their career will need robust support from communications and stewardship, as nearly everything they work on will be custom. 

Using this framework, we also examined our frontline to operational support ratio. In our peer benchmarking, we determined the gold standard was a three operational staff to one development officer ratio. But Vanderbilt has, historically, had a two operational staff to one development staff member ratio, and (compared with other development shops) there are some functions Vanderbilt situates elsewhere, outside of DAR. Therefore, we decided we would continue with our leaner 2-to-1 ratio in our modeling.

To maintain this balance, we needed to hire 53 support staff professionals alongside our 35 development officers for an operational growth of 88 new team members. When we made our request, our team was roughly 240 staff members, with approximately 65 frontline fundraisers. This request would move us to more than 340 total.
 

What Would This Growth Accomplish?

Now we knew how many employees we wanted to hire, but we needed to bolster our case by projecting our return on investment. We modeled the growth over a series of four fiscal years. To give ourselves a reasonable revenue timeline, we modeled our development officers’ performance, delaying their top productivity until year three and giving them adequate time to grow their cold portfolios. We also modeled hiring operational support, such as research and prospect development staff, early to be able to prepare for the increased needs around portfolio creation and research.

We determined that with a $15 million annual investment, we would return $110 million in new revenue and deliver six times our return on investment. We would need to increase our team by 36%. We used this information to respond to our chancellor, who enthusiastically supported our growth proposition. We then shared with others in university leadership, including our deans, who also agreed to support our staff increase.

Grow Without Losing Your Culture

STAFF CELEBRATION: Vanderbilt Development and Alumni Relations colleagues (including Rosie Carter, Assistant Director of Talent Management, and Michelle Morgan, Director of Vice Chancellor Operations, pictured here) gather in the fall for a family-friendly tailgate party before a football game.

Credit: Vanderbilt University

We were ecstatic to receive the order, but we knew that we had to grow in a smart manner. So, we focused on alignment around our culture—driven by our values and leadership principles—which are essential to our planning and long-term success.

We leveraged a grassroots effort to determine our DAR organizational values, embodied in the acronym “ACORNS,” which stands for Agility, Collaboration, Ownership, Respect, New Ideas, and Service. Vanderbilt’s campus is an arboretum filled with many stately oaks, with wonderfully tame squirrels scurrying about. Using an acronym makes our values memorable. We surface them regularly, including giving out year-end staff awards for them.

Yet we also knew that our management structure and leadership would be key at all levels of the organization. We wanted to tie these ACORNS to specific behaviors we expected our leaders and managers to inhabit, so we developed these leadership principles:

Dare to Grow: Growth mindset, encouraging learning, and adaptability 
One Vanderbilt: Shared purpose focusing on collective success over individual 
Radical Ownership: Aligning work to priorities and owning outcomes 
Radical Collaboration: Breaking silos, embracing diverse perspectives
Courtesy & Trust: Fostering trust, respect, and open communication

Our principles translate abstract values into consistent actions, driving accountability, and ensuring strategic alignment across DAR.
 

Team Development and Performance

With our values and leadership principles in place, we needed to make sure we brought in the right team members to help us produce results. We built a team to help us recruit, scouring the field for the best fits for all roles in the division. We revamped our onboarding process, making sure that new hires felt a part of Vanderbilt and our culture from day one. But we did not just focus on the new hires—we also developed an intentional talent development program, making sure we were challenging, stretching, and growing our most talented team members. Our efforts are paying off: During this growth period for DAR, we have made over 80 internal promotions. 

Remote work is also key for us. With certain roles, if we offer remote options, we can attract a deeper, more experienced talent pool. Now, 16% of our division is remote. We also have flexibility for our team based in Nashville, with our teams not held to strict days in the office. 

At the end of the day, most advancement operations know they need to drive results to prove their worth. We use a few systems to ensure we are tracking this. Leveraging the tools in the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr, we established annual objectives and key results. We track our progress toward achievement throughout the year, making sure we break down our larger goals into achievable pieces. We also use a robust balanced performance indicator scorecard to build a high-performance culture among our development officers. We track each development officer’s work on an online Tableau dashboard available to everyone in the organization. Their performance on this scorecard is tied to an annual bonus that incentivizes not just achieving goals, but exceeding expectations.
 

SHARED SUCCESS: Vanderbilt development and alumni relations colleagues celebrate reaching the $3.2 billion goal for the Dare to 
Grow campaign.

Credit: Vanderbilt University

Results of Our Investment

In our growth phase, we continue to monitor our efforts and ensure we are delivering what we promised. To date, it has been a tremendous success. Since fiscal year 2020, Vanderbilt’s DAR operation has achieved a 22% cumulative annual growth rate. Three out of the last four fiscal years have set new record highs in dollars raised and cash-in for the university. Our three-year rolling average for our ROI has increased from 4.26 in fiscal year 2020 to 6.11 in fiscal year 2025.

While the numbers look great, our culture continues to thrive. Our overall staff turnover has dropped from 22% in 2020 to 7.1% in 2025, which means we are keeping our top performers. 

In the end, our rapid advancement growth came from pairing rigorous, data-driven workforce planning with an honest assessment of what it would take to cover prospects well. By scaling frontline and operational support together—and reinforcing our culture through ACORNS values and leadership principles—we grew quickly without losing who we are. The results speak for themselves: sustained fundraising growth, stronger ROI, and lower staff turnover.

Our story proves that intentional investment in advancement can unlock an institution’s growth potential.