You’ve just hired a terrific person as your new development director. Congratulations! But chances are, during the interview process, you didn’t discuss the issue of “meeting goal” very deeply, if at all. Careful – this issue can cause trouble.

“Meeting goal” is a thorny issue for development directors and organization leadership, especially given the chaotic economic times in which we live. How can a senior staff and Board set the right goal number for fundraising in a year that turns out to be the start of a recession or sees a 25% fall in stock market indexes? Or a year when the economy is recovering but it’s the first year of the recovery? Or a year in which your biggest donors happen to be in a slowing part of the economy but everyone else is gangbusters?

Just as challenging: How should you set fundraising goals in an overall growing economy? What about a good year followed by a challenging one?

More to the point, how can the leadership be fair to the development director in setting and meeting fundraising goals?

There are many options for approaching this challenge, including but not limited to the following:

1) Decide that it’s not the development director’s responsibility to meet the goal alone – it’s a shared responsibility with the Board and ED (along with setting the goal to begin with);

2) Decide to measure strategic fund raising activity (like the formation of a legacy giving society) and/ or achievement of benchmarks (like achieving an 80% donor retention rate from the previous year) on the part of the development director for the year, and not monetary results alone;

3) Decide to judge the development director’s results in monetary terms not just in one year, but over a 2- or even 3-year period, being sure to factor in the conditions outside the development director’s control;

4) Give the development director primary responsibility for SETTING the goal(not just input) and then hold the development director responsible for meeting the goal each year with a small permissible variance (like 5%) below the goal that will be made up over a 3 year average;

5) Don’t set a goal at all in the development director’s first year, and review the need for it in the first quarter of the second year. This gives your new director the latitude to get on top of the fundamentals in the first year and start developing new plans for growth in fundraising revenue without the pressure of a first year goal.

6) Some combination of the approaches above.

I’m sure there are other creative ways to approach this need, and I would love to hear from anyone having tried something else that worked well.

In my topics over the last three months, I’ve been urging organization leaders to be willing to support their new development director through honest communication and extending themselves to help. Having a clear understanding with your development director – before you hire or in the first few weeks – around performance accountability and setting fundraising goals can prevent disappointment and loss to your organization later.

And it can help that terrific new development director do their very best for you.