Written by Hannah Kowszun. I have worked in charities for nearly 20 years and have experience with a wide variety of challenges, especially those unique to the social sector. You can find out more on my LinkedIn profile.
I have qualifications in Organizational Psychology (the scientific study of human behaviour in the workplace) and Professional Marketing, and I have raised millions of pounds through successful fundraising campaigns and activities.
Exam results do not tell us whether someone is a good teacher. How many paintings they sell does not affirm the value of an artist. Income raised does not prove whether someone is a good fundraiser.
These are indicators, certainly, but as standalone metrics they tell us little about a professional’s competence. Van Gogh, for example, is believed to have sold only one painting in his lifetime. Recognition after death is scant validation for the individual.
How often has a fundraiser left an organisation only for people to realise they were better at their job than they had been given credit for when doing it?
Years ago my Dad was facilitating a group of teachers, encouraging new approaches to teaching. One of the participants worked at a school serving the most affluent part of London. At some point he became frustrated and blurted out: “I have the best exam results in the country for my subject!” My Dad looked at him and asked, “Do you honestly think it’s your teaching alone that’s responsible?”
Socio-economic status is the most accurate predictor of exam results (IFS, 2022). So no, while this man may well have been a good teacher, he could not take sole credit for his students’ success.
In a similar way, some charities have a far richer seam to mine when it comes to fundraising than others. Cancer, for example, affects both rich and poor, which is why so many cancer charities raise so much each year. Criminal justice, in contrast, rarely has rich or even middle-income people personally affected, which means fundraising can be that much harder.
I have seen recent job adverts for fundraisers asking for a track record of “raising six figure sums”. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a great fundraiser. If you’re serious about using income figures to assess outstanding fundraising skill, then hire someone from the VAWG sector that has managed to keep their charity in the black for the last few years!
But if we discard income as an indicator of how good fundraisers are at their job, then where does that leave us?
The Job Characteristics Model (JCM) is a framework for identifying how different intrinsic factors in the design of a job affect your experience in that job. One of the factors is called “Feedback”. This doesn’t mean external feedback from others, but rather whether the act of doing your job provides you with feedback of how well you are doing it
I used the JCM in research I undertook to understand why there is high staff turnover in the charity sector (Rogare, 2025). Among the fundraisers who took part in this research, ‘Feedback’ was correlated with both job satisfaction and intention to leave their job, which means that the extent to which fundraisers get a sense of how well they are doing their job affects how likely they are to stay in it.
What kind of feedback?
Imagine someone who works at a blood donation centre. When they insert the needle, it will be abundantly clear from the reaction of their patient, and any mess, whether they’ve done it well.
Or to go back to the teaching example, there is the relationship with the students: levels of engagement, interest in the subject, willingness to focus in the room – and say hello outside it – as well as their ability to demonstrate learning in the classroom (especially when not all students thrive in exam conditions).
These feedback loops are built into the person’s understanding of their job, and most importantly how they can monitor their own performance over time.
I heard a fascinating example of a poor feedback loop from a fundraiser working in a large charity. They were given a list and told to make calls to supporters about a certain campaign. That was it, no training, no listening in. This fundraiser made the best of it, but even now, several months later, they don’t know if their calls were any good.
They weren’t quite sure what the aim of the calls was, and so they didn’t have a simple, measurable metric for success. As someone in a junior role, they didn’t feel like they could ask to have their calls monitored (you know, “for training purposes” as the recorded voice says).
The risk of this is that this fundraiser is getting lots of experience but with the wrong skill! They’re also not building confidence in their abilities, because they have no sense of whether they’re doing the job well.
How can we enable better feedback?
An effective feedback loop understands how someone experiences their job, how they’re able to recognise the quality of their own performance: not limited to whether they meet objectives, but the work done to get there.
Not all fundraising jobs are the same, however there are certain dimensions similar across fundraising.
One potential dimension is engagement with donors and other external contacts: positive interactions, a sense that relationships are developing and deepening. This could be supported by a colleague as a sounding board: a debrief with someone else to help calm concerns, highlight the positives or identify risks.
Another is the simple act of getting something done: drawing a line under the successful completion of a thing, such as the sending out of an email or a proposal being signed off; the feeling that it’s possible to now move on to the next thing. This could be affirmed with a shared, public space for colleagues to celebrate these wins: both big and small. With so many of us working remotely, an approach like this can help reduce any sense of isolation people might be feeling, as well as providing a potential feedback loop for performance.
A third dimension is rooted in clear objectives and KPIs. Annual targets can be too long as to be meaningless in fundraising. What might progress look like over the next week, month, quarter? What does success look like? If all objectives are about success rather than progress, you may be setting your fundraisers up to feel like failures.
You might consider actual feedback from others, but this is rarely as useful as we might hope. The power dynamics at play, the credibility of the source, the competence in giving feedback: these can all affect both the experience of receiving feedback and its value in helping a fundraiser understand whether they are in fact doing a good job.
You should ask your fundraisers if they feel they have the tools and experiences to monitor and assess their own performance. Are there things they’re unsure of, and are unsure how to ask about? Are their objectives meaningful to them, or something on an appraisal document looked at once a year? Always better to ask than assume.
It starts and ends with culture
An effective people strategy does not get lost in process, it is emboldened by culture. A people-first culture considers how a job role is designed, how it is experienced, and is open to change, because the person you recruit today is not the person doing the job in twelve months’ time.
If you can’t be sure whether you’re doing a good job as an outcome of doing the job itself, if you’re worth is measured only by what you bring in, it’s worth reflecting on what needs to change.
Do you want to build a stronger, more inclusive people culture, develop yourself and others? Join Fundraising Everywhere’s Fundraising Culture & Change Conference 2025 on Thursday 20th November at 12:00 GMT.