How to Justify the Investment in Nonprofit Fundraising Operations: Frameworks That Work
Exec. Summary: Making the case for program investment and seeing the resulting growth in giving has been among my favorite parts of fundraising consulting across nearly 25 years in this field. I can speak confidently because the data is sound. I can speak with credibility because I am not asking for my own resources — I am making the case for someone else's. And I can speak with genuine empathy for all the roles in development, having had personal experience in advancement operations myself. That combination of data, distance, and empathy is what the following frameworks are built on — and what I hope makes them useful when you take them back to your own leadership conversations.
Why Leadership Underinvests in Nonprofit Fundraising Operations — and How to Change the Conversation
Why is it so hard to secure investment for non-frontline roles? The easiest answer is to acknowledge that leadership rarely has a fundraising background, and leaders are more likely to interact with frontline officers than with anyone else in the development office. Their direct experience with fundraising tends to be the cultivation and solicitation process — the visible, human-facing work. Their line of sight to the rest of the organization is limited, and it makes intuitive sense for them to think fundraisers are the ones raising funds.
That intuition is understandable and incomplete, and the frameworks below are designed to address it with evidence rather than advocacy. As I think through my successes in building advancement operations investment, I have followed a rather consistent methodological path — one that starts with language, moves through data, and ends with a comprehensive picture of value that most leadership teams have never been offered. I hope these techniques equip you to make similar cases at your organizations.
Framework 1: Use Return on Investment Language, Not Cost Language
When you discuss your program — whether or not you are asking for resources — use return on investment language consistently, and eliminate the phrase "cost to raise a dollar" from your own vocabulary. If asked about cost to raise a dollar, pivot the dialogue to return on investment the way a skilled advocate pivots an unfavorable question.
In your regular reporting, include analysis of the return on investment of all staff and the contribution to your operating margin. Correlation coefficients showing that revenue per staff actually increases with overall staff volume are particularly effective, because they establish the reverse precedent equally clearly: any cuts in the program would cost more in revenue than they save in salary.
Use investment language when discussing returns. Rather than saying "we have a $0.25 cost to raise a dollar," say "we are maintaining a 400% return on our staffing investment." A useful illustration is to compare your returns to top-performing stocks or index funds — it reframes the development office not as a cost center but as the highest-yielding investment the organization makes.
Although this first framework does not address advancement operations directly, it begins to shift the narrative in three advantageous ways: it strengthens the overall program's reputation as a revenue center; it decreases the likelihood of the development office being subject to across-the-board cuts; and it gives leadership confidence that program value is supported by evidence rather than self-interest. With that narrative shift in place, the next step is to show, with data, that operations staffing itself is a direct driver of revenue outcomes.
Framework 2: Show the Link Between Operations Staffing and Revenue Goal Attainment
In our analysis of institutions across sectors, we consistently find a correlation between the operations-to-frontline ratio and revenue goal attainment — in other words, as the number of advancement operations staff increases relative to frontline fundraiser counts, the incidence of organizations hitting their goals increases.
At the individual organization level, we have run this comparison repeatedly. In one example (with numbers modified for anonymity), the pattern was clear:
The organization met its revenue goals in years when it was better staffed in advancement operations.
Decreases in operations staff reduced revenue by 2.7 times the cost of the staff cuts themselves.
We cannot yet prove causation — but the correlation is consistent, and the key drivers appear to be related to how duties are allocated across the team. Understanding that allocation — and making a principled case for restructuring it — is precisely what the next framework provides.
Framework 3: Apply Top-of-License Thinking to Your Development Team
Healthcare organizations are accustomed to the phrase "top of license." Law firms use a similar concept — "lowest cost biller." The principle is the same in both cases: the most expensive and most specialized resource should be doing the work only they can do, while everything else is handled by someone who can do it at a lower cost point.
A general top-of-license evaluation asks three questions:
Can someone provide the same value for less cost?
Can someone provide more value for the same cost?
Can the work be scaled with technology or process to reduce cost?
In fundraising, a time audit of frontline officers reveals how much of their working day is spent in donor-facing activity versus administrative and support tasks. If two fundraisers at a $100,000 price point were each spending 50% of their time on administrative work that an advancement operations professional at $80,000 could handle equally well, the cost of the same work drops from $200,000 to $180,000 — and the frontline officers are freed to do the work only they can do. Extrapolating this principle across the full development team, adding operations staff can actually increase frontline activity and philanthropic revenue simultaneously — and the yield analysis framework that follows puts a specific number on exactly how much revenue the absence of that investment has been costing.
Framework 4: Use Yield Analysis to Reveal the Cost of Understaffing
An increasingly common measurement of fundraising programs is the yield rate — the percentage of the organization's philanthropic capacity that it actually realizes. Yield can mean different things in different contexts: the close rate on solicitations, the philanthropic share of wallet from a specific prospect pool, or the overall realized percentage of total constituency capacity. An organization raising 1.5% of its overall file capacity is yielding 1.5% — and the question worth asking is where the other 98.5% went.
This analysis is powerful for advancement operations specifically because the losses happen at every stage of the pipeline:
Research verification: If only some screened names are research-verified, there is a cost against the yield of the verification process.
Screening and analytics effectiveness: If only some verified names are appropriate prospects, there is a cost against the quality of the screening itself.
Assignment protocols: If only some qualified names are assigned to officers, there is a yield reduction related to assignment processes.
Discovery call attainment: If officers conduct discovery calls on only a portion of assigned names, there is a cost related to call attainment rates.
Prospect qualification accuracy: If a lead is deemed not a prospect after a discovery call, there is a cost of misaligned identification upstream.
Strategy alignment: If a new prospect's cultivation strategy targets an ask below their capacity rating, the yield is reduced before the ask is ever made.
Solicitation execution: If the actual ask is lower than planned, yield decreases further.
Gift realization: If the funded amount is less than the asked amount, the yield is reduced once more.
Not all of these steps are managed by the frontline team. Increasing the verification volume from the prospect development team — an advancement operations function — produces a ripple effect on the total yield rate, and that ripple is the most direct argument available for connecting operations investment to revenue outcomes. The fifth framework widens the aperture further, classifying value in a way that speaks not just to the CFO's revenue interests but to their risk instincts as well.
Framework 5: Classify All ROI Outcomes — Not Just Dollars Raised
Total dollars raised is the most common measure of fundraising staff value, but it is the least complete one. Most CFOs weigh risk as heavily as reward — and a comprehensive ROI classification that speaks to both produces a more persuasive case than revenue figures alone.
Revenue returns should be presented in three time horizons: short-term (gifts now), long-term (pipeline development), and emergency response and recovery (endowment campaigns, disaster response, pandemic needs). Advancement operations staff contribute to all three.
Risk management includes the due diligence necessary to vet donors in cases of inappropriate action or influence, legal exposure, funds management and security, technology breach response, and activities that would otherwise distract frontline fundraisers from bringing in revenue.
Continuity is the argument that most programs miss. Short-term gains are often only possible because of previous long-term investments — and in times of disruption, certain staff roles, technologies, and processes are essential to organizational function. Their absence creates continuity risk or recovery costs that far exceed their salary lines.
Versatility and adaptability are increasingly relevant in an environment that changes rapidly. Staff members with the capacity to move between functions — from events to prospect development to major giving support — provide organizational flexibility that cannot be quickly rebuilt after a reduction in force.
Outsourcing opportunities are worth naming proactively, even in a staff investment discussion. Demonstrating willingness to evaluate outsourcing signals that you are making the case for what's best for the institution, not just advocating for your own resources. Outsourcing certain work can make the remaining work more interesting to existing staff — and it can be a critical gap filler during staffing freezes without permanently reducing program capacity. These five frameworks together make the fullest possible case for investment in advancement operations — and there is one more dimension, arriving in force, that makes the case more urgent than it has ever been.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping the Case for Advancement Operations
The arrival of AI in the fundraising sector has not reduced the need for skilled advancement operations staff — and anyone who has suggested otherwise has misread what AI actually requires to deliver value. It has shifted what those staff members need to do, and it has raised the stakes for getting that shift right. The most consequential development is this: bespoke AI models built exclusively on an organization's own data, donors, and strategic priorities consistently outperform generalized AI tools — which means the quality of an organization's data infrastructure, the sophistication of its analytics team, and the rigor of its prospect development processes now determine how much value AI can deliver. Organizations with strong advancement operations teams are positioned to benefit from AI. Organizations that have underinvested in operations will find that AI amplifies their existing weaknesses as much as their strengths.
The top-of-license framework from Framework 3 applies here directly. Tasks that advancement operations staff spent significant time on in 2021 — basic screening, routine prospect identification, standard report generation — are increasingly handled by AI tools, which frees skilled operations staff for the higher-value work that AI cannot do: interpreting complex data, managing relationship intelligence, designing cultivation strategies, and providing the judgment layer that turns data into decisions. The argument for investing in advancement operations staff in 2026 is not that they will do the same work they did in 2021. It is that the work they will do is more consequential than ever — and that the organizations which invested in building those teams are the ones best positioned to lead.
These five frameworks — and the sixth dimension in AI — represent the most consistent path I have found for making the investment case for advancement operations. Most of what I know about this comes from working with the sector's leading nonprofits, hospitals, and universities, and that learning continues to deepen every year. I welcome your thoughts and reactions in the comments section of the website.
About the Author
Josh Birkholz is CEO of BWF, one of the nation's leading fundraising consulting firms, where he oversees organizational fundraising leadership, innovation, strategic planning, and change engineering. In nearly 25 years in the field, he has been driven to help organizations turn tomorrow's ambitions into today's results, working with leading nonprofits, universities, and healthcare systems across the United States and beyond. He is the author of Fundraising Analytics (Wiley, 2008) and BeneFactors (Wiley, 2022), a contributor to Giving USA, and a recipient of APRA's Visionary Award and CASE's Crystal Apple Award for Teaching Excellence. Learn more at bwf.com.
