Together or separate: the conundrum of marketing and development departments
Terry Richey
In the same week, we were asked twice for advice about whether marketing and development departments should be combined or separate. Ironically, one of the organizations had three staff in marketing and development and one had more than two hundred. The question of what works best persists despite the size of the teams. Many organizations move back and forth between models over time.
The right answer to this common question is elusive because it really depends on your revenue strategy and the culture you want to establish. However, the decision is often made on personnel, political, or budget reasons without a clear picture of the strategy underlying the decision. We do have some thoughts on how you can evaluate whether to combine these disciplines or manage them separately.
Aligning the organization to your revenue strategy
Combining departments better supports a revenue strategy focused on major gift fundraising and separating departments better supports a revenue strategy based on small annual gifts, membership, events, and online giving. With a major gift focus, you want marketing to be the other side of the coin to your fundraising efforts. However, when your revenue strategy primarily focuses on smaller gifts, separating departments, makes the most sense. In these cases, you want to get the creative and technical skills of marketing staff as close to the action you are trying to create as possible.
Many organizations certainly have both a small, annual giving and major gift strategy. In fact, that is best practice. How you organize these groups really depends on what the key growth strategy is for revenue. Finally, some organizations are built on earned income as the predominant source of revenue. For these, access to marketing support may be easier with separate departments.
We’d also add that you should look ahead on your revenue strategy to where you want to be rather than simply where you are today. If you want to transform your organization into an online giving powerhouse or build greater competency in major gifts, designing a structure to get you there makes sense.
Creating a culture for growth
Whether you separate marketing from fundraising or not, both need to be aligned around growth metrics and feel responsible for achieving them. While the end objective is to reach a revenue target, there are many inputs into that outcome and most can be tracked. Many of our clients are using a dashboard that is updated weekly or monthly to make visible these critical inputs. Examples include: dollar value of proposals out the door, membership renewals, online advocacy actions, average appeal gift size, growth of monthly sustainers, etc. If departments are separate, we’d recommend creating cross-departmental metrics that are shared between teams to better align efforts to outcomes.
At Timberline Strategy, we’ve helped design effective Marketing and Development team structures and the metrics that support growth. Let us know if we can assist your non-profit in these critical decisions.