One major gift officer works about forty prospects a year

The travel calendar holds fewer names than the assignment list

A major gift officer is a fundraiser whose job is securing large gifts from individual donors. The names assigned to one officer are called a portfolio, and cultivation is the relationship work, the visits and calls that come before any request for money.

An officer plans fall travel against a portfolio of 115 names, the number EAB documented at Northwestern University. In the practice literature, stated visit goals cluster at 120, 150, 180, and 210 a year, and a standard rule says an officer sees about half the portfolio annually. Visiting half of 115 names means 57 or 58 first visits before anyone gets a second meeting.

Which names get the flights? A 2012 survey of practice reported in the journal Colloquy measured the actual pace. Officers averaged 7.3 visits a month, about 88 in a year. Nearly 70 percent completed ten or fewer in a month, and high performers averaged 8.3. So the officer plans the quarter the way any skilled person plans a finite calendar. The flights go to the 30 or 40 relationships with momentum, and next year has the same 88 visits in it.

The benchmarks put the median portfolio at 75 names and the ask rate at 17 percent

A solicitation is the formal ask for a gift. The widest current benchmark comes from Kindsight, a fundraising-software vendor, working with Apra International, the professional association for prospect development. Their 2026 study of 500 organizations puts the median major gift portfolio at 75 prospects; the middle half of organizations sits between 25 and 125.

The spread around that median is wide. A 2020 benchmark study funded by MarketSmart, a fundraising-software vendor, and conducted by researcher Melissa S. Brown across 580 nonprofits found portfolios running from zero names (8 percent of officers) to more than 200 (about 10 percent), with the largest band at 11 to 50 names. The same report's footnote records the commonly accepted full-time portfolio at 150 names.

The 2026 study also traced how far an assigned name travels. The median organization assigns 12.5 percent of its qualified prospects to an officer, solicits 17 percent of assigned prospects, and closes 14.5 percent of its solicitations.

Those two medians together price a 75-name portfolio at about 13 asks a year.

The one published portfolio redesign settled at about forty names

EAB published an analysis in 2017 covering nearly 400 major gift officers in its partner data. The article opens with the theory under test: "For decades, advancement leaders followed the theory that assigning major gift officers 125, 150, or even 200 prospects would ensure broad cultivation." In EAB's data, officers with larger portfolios closed more gifts, and "total dollars raised actually track downward as the number of assigned prospects increases." A portfolio that produces more gifts and fewer dollars is producing smaller gifts. Tenure had no bearing on portfolio size in the sample.

The case inside the analysis is Northwestern, whose officers held roughly 115-name portfolios and, in EAB's words, "only cultivated about 40 prospects in any given year." The university cut portfolios to 30 to 40 names and required a plan for every name: an ask date, ask amount, close date, and gift design (the gift's structure). EAB reports that asks and gifts increased and that total funds raised grew 595 percent.

The 2020 benchmark carries a corroborating pattern at small shops. At organizations raising under $3 million, 65 percent of respondents with portfolios under 50 names met or came close to goal, against 41 percent of those with 50 or more. At organizations raising $3 million or more, the difference disappears (82 versus 86 percent).

EAB published no methodology beyond the officer count, so the 595 percent is one institution's result inside one vendor's analysis. It is the only published before-and-after account of portfolio size we could find. Officers were already cultivating about 40 names; the redesign set portfolios at 30 to 40.

No published study measures what happens after a wealth screening

Wealth screening is a purchased service that runs the donor database against public wealth records and flags who could afford a large gift. Prospect research is the staff work of turning those flags into usable profiles. In the 2020 benchmark, 59.3 percent of organizations reported buying technology-based wealth screening, second only to the 87.5 percent that analyze their own database.

What happens to the flagged names afterward has no published measurement. A search across the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), Apra, Kindsight, EAB's public materials, the Blackbaud Institute, CCS Fundraising, the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), and the peer-reviewed literature found no study reporting what share of screened or rated prospects are ever contacted, assigned, or solicited. The nearest published numbers sit upstream: 30 percent of organizations consistently use any process for identifying prospects, 27 percent have processes they use inconsistently, and 42 percent have none.

Every load-bearing benchmark in this piece is vendor-produced. The 2026 study comes from a software vendor working with the professional association. The 2020 study was funded by a software vendor, and the portfolio analysis came from a consultancy selling advancement advisory work. Blackbaud, the sector's dominant database vendor, tells its own customers in an undated marketing graphic that "more than half of assigned prospects are not visited." The sector measures itself mostly through its vendors.

The median shop staffs three-quarters of one prospect researcher

The 2026 benchmark puts median prospect-research staffing at 0.75 of a full-time position (middle half: 0.25 to 3.0). The median ratio is one researcher for every six gift officers. Organizations the study classes as emerging assign 12.5 percent of identified prospects; advanced and leading organizations assign 37 percent. In the 2020 study, the share of organizations with any individual doing prospect research was 49.6 percent.

Half of fundraisers expect to leave their jobs within two years

In 2013, CompassPoint and the Haas, Jr. Fund surveyed more than 2,700 executive directors and development directors, the staff who lead fundraising; 50 percent of development directors anticipated leaving their jobs within two years, and 40 percent were unsure they would stay in development for their careers. In 2019, a Harris Poll for the Chronicle of Philanthropy and AFP asked 1,035 fundraisers; 51 percent expected to leave their current jobs within two years, and three in ten said they had recently left or planned to leave fundraising entirely within two years.

In the same poll, 84 percent of fundraisers felt "tremendous pressure to succeed," 55 percent said they "often feel unappreciated," and 12 percent cited retirement, family, or personal reasons.

No advancement-specific turnover rate exists in public data: CUPA-HR reports higher-education turnover by employee class with no fundraising breakout, and CASE's compensation reports are member-gated. The two-year expectation surveys are the citable series, and they agree across six years to within one point.

The 2013 study also measured the departure in time: the median development-director vacancy took six months to fill, and organizations with operating budgets of $1 million or less reported a median of twelve months.

The published evidence keeps arriving at about forty names

In the one published case, officers were assigned about 115 prospects each and worked about 40. The survey average is about 88 visits in a year. Half of the people in these jobs told two national surveys, six years apart, that they expected to leave within two years. Every source we could check puts it at about 40 names.

Methodology

Compiled August 21, 2026. Every figure in this piece traces to a fetched URL or a downloaded primary PDF read on the compile date, as recorded in the project fact-base. Vendor-produced research is labeled as vendor-produced in the body at first mention: the 2026 benchmark is by Kindsight (a fundraising-software vendor) with Apra International; the 2020 benchmark was funded by MarketSmart and conducted by researcher Melissa S. Brown; the portfolio analysis is EAB's, a consultancy, with no methodology published beyond the officer count; the Blackbaud line is an undated marketing graphic and is presented as such. The EAB article no longer exists on eab.com and was verified in a Wayback Machine snapshot; the Chronicle of Philanthropy article is paywalled and was verified the same way.

The claim that no published study measures wealth-screening follow-through rests on searches of CASE, Apra, Kindsight, EAB's public materials, the Blackbaud Institute, CCS, AFP, and the peer-reviewed literature; it is a statement about publicly verifiable published research. Derived arithmetic in the piece: 88 visits a year is 7.3 visits a month across twelve months; 57 or 58 visits is half of a 115-name portfolio; about 13 asks joins the 2026 study's median portfolio (75 names) with its median assigned-to-solicited rate (17 percent), two medians from the same study combined for illustration. The sentence "a portfolio that produces more gifts and fewer dollars is producing smaller gifts" is arithmetic on EAB's two published findings (more gifts closed, lower total dollars), stated to resolve them for a lay reader; EAB does not state average gift size. Widely circulated figures on fundraiser tenure and on replacement cost that could not be traced to any primary source were excluded. A companion piece covers the alumni database and participation; the two pieces do not share figures.