Benchmarking in healthcare fundraising

Using data to protect resources and support investment

• Benchmarking equips healthcare fundraising leaders to protect budgets and advocate for strategic investment by demonstrating data-backed value amid rising costs and resource constraints.
• It enables data-driven decisions on staffing, budget efficiency, and portfolio management by comparing performance to peer institutions, highlighting strengths and improvement opportunities.
• By aligning advancement efforts with broader organizational metrics and outcomes, fundraising leaders can use benchmarking to support confident advocacy, realistic goal-setting, and sustained philanthropic growth.

Hospitals and medical centers face financial pressure due to rising care costs, persistent workforce shortages, and evolving reimbursement structures. In this environment, healthcare advancement and fundraising teams must do two things:

• Protect existing resources against budget constraints.
• Advocate for continued investment in fundraising to drive long-term philanthropic growth.

To make a compelling case for both, fundraising leaders in healthcare must use benchmarking data to illustrate their impact, guide resourcing decisions, and support performance expectations.

Benchmarking supports overarching organizational growth by helping healthcare advancement and fundraising teams:

• Visualize current resource allocation.
• Set expectations based on performance data.
• Project future results tied to various investment levels.

At its core, benchmarking is a communication tool. It empowers healthcare advancement leaders to advocate with confidence, communicate value to institutional leadership, and ensure that philanthropy is seen as a strategic engine for growth.

Effective benchmarking starts with identifying appropriate peer institutions. Advancement and fundraising teams should:

• Work with executive leadership to define comparison points (e.g., number of fundraising professionals, faculty size, total staff).
• Include a mix of peer and aspirational organizations.
• Use multiyear averages (three or five years) to account for fluctuations such as large gifts.

It’s also essential to factor in organizational structure and geography. Differences between stand-alone hospitals, joint programs, and university-based medical schools can influence budgetary expectations and staffing needs. Cost-of-living differences by region should also be considered.

In many cases, access to peer data may be limited. A combination of quantitative and qualitative benchmarking, supported by interviews or surveys, can provide a better picture of performance. Cultural differences, volunteer engagement, and leadership support all influence outcomes but may not appear in numerical analysis alone.

Benchmarking should also be revisited regularly. An annual review ensures teams use the most recent data to inform hiring plans, strategy shifts, or technology investments.

Benchmarking can span many categories, but three critical areas stand out:

1. Total Private Support (TPS) and Fundraising Progress (FRP)

Compare your institution to peers based on:

• Total private support (cash and pledge payments)
• Fundraising progress (new commitments and outright gifts)
• Fundraising professionals and development staff ratios

Initial comparisons may suggest a performance gap, but deeper analysis often reveals strengths when evaluating dollars raised per officer or support across specific portfolios.

Further granularity — such as assessing new donor acquisition vs. donor retention performance — can help isolate what’s working and what’s not in current strategies. When aligned with prospect pipeline reports, TPS and FRP data can also surface blind spots in mid-level donor engagement or major gift conversion rates.

2. Fundraising team impact

To understand front-line officers’ direct contributions, development leaders should track:

• Closed solicitations by major and principal gift officers
• Annual fundraising totals attributed to individual staff

In some high-performing institutions, benchmarking shows that front-line officers consistently account for a majority of total giving, even when adjusting for unexpected or one-time gifts. This consistency highlights the importance of stable staffing and focused portfolio management.

This data can also inform gift officer training, portfolio sizing, and performance expectations. It provides evidence for how changes in staffing, like hiring freezes or turnover, have real implications on fundraising outcomes.

Growth in giving may depend less on unpredictable windfalls and more on scaling what works, such as hiring more officers who consistently close high-level gifts.

3. Budget and staffing alignment

Benchmarking staffing levels against peer organizations can provide insight into budget efficiency and resource needs. Institutions that operate with leaner teams but achieve comparable or higher fundraising returns per full-time employee (FTE) can validate continued or increased investment.

This kind of comparative analysis helps leaders make the case for resource allocation by:

• Demonstrating staffing productivity
• Identifying cost-efficiency in fundraising
• Supporting advocacy for strategic team growth when performance supports it

Additionally, understanding how peer institutions distribute staffing across functions (annual giving, stewardship, events, prospect research, etc.) can reveal whether a team is under-resourced or structurally misaligned. This insight is particularly valuable when justifying investments in roles that support front-line fundraising, like data analysts or donor relations specialists.

When requesting new resources, development leaders must provide data-driven forecasts. But expectations should remain realistic. For example, evaluating new director-level hires shows:

• Modest first-year returns
• Strong performance by year three, once portfolios and relationships mature

Investments in new staff take time to yield returns. Benchmarking supports the case for patience and strategic ramp-up planning.

It also helps refine onboarding timelines and goal-setting frameworks for new hires, aligning expectations across leadership teams and reducing the risk of misaligned performance evaluations.

Benchmarking elevates the advancement function beyond anecdote and instinct. It places fundraising within the same evidence-based planning framework used across clinical and academic medicine operations, helping to foster collaboration and credibility.

To recap, benchmarking allows advancement teams to:

• Quantify their impact
• Reinforce the value of philanthropy
• Advocate for strategic investments