Benchmarking Staffing, Budgets, and Trends in Advancement Services

This research brief profiles advancement services strategy, staffing and structure, budgets and operating resources, trends, and metrics collection at small to mid-sized selective universities.

Summary Advancement services divisions within university advancement are becoming increasingly important to fundraising efforts. This research brief profiles advancement services strategy, staffing and structure, budgets and operating resources, trends, and metrics collection at small to mid-sized selective universities. Key observations from our research: 1. An executive director or assistant or associate vice president of advancement services leads a non-fundraising division of university advancement and reports to the chief advancement officer. 2. All profiled institutions have reorganized advancement services structure and workflow in recent years to eliminate redundancies and optimize service offerings. 3. As the importance of analytics, data automation, and metric collection grows in fundraising, contacts report that advancement services are hiring more data analysts as researchers. 4. Central appropriations often fund personnel salaries and operating expenses of advancement services divisions. 5. Customer relationship management (CRM) and other software, printing and postage, and subscriptions and periodicals constitute major line-item expenses of advancement services units. 6.Chief advancement services officers collect metrics for multi-year self-evaluation; however, contacts report great difficulty in defining and measuring metrics for advancement services. 7. Contacts warn that boards of trustees misinterpret and overemphasize cost to raise a dollar benchmarking. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT