Ask any experienced gift officer what they do on a donor visit and they’ll walk you through something that sounds deceptively simple. They arrive knowing something about the person (some of us more prepared than others), make warm introductions, ask questions designed to surface what matters most, and listen for signs of capacity and propensity to give. Before they leave, they’ve identified next steps and committed to a follow-up. It’s a skill built mostly through trial and error — because most shops don’t design a way to teach it or invest in expensive training programs — but it exists, and it lives almost exclusively on one side of the advancement shop.
Most alumni engagement professionals have never been in that room, and neither has the gift processor, annual giving coordinator, or prospect researcher.
The two sides of advancement (frontline fundraisers and “everyone else”) have settled into a division of labor that may make organizational sense but doesn’t actually serve constituents well. Development officers build relationships with a portfolio of donors. Everyone else builds programs, creates communications, processes gifts, manages data, and handles logistics. The assumption underneath that split is that one-to-one relationship building at scale is impossible — so we concentrate it at the top of the pyramid and replace it with events, mass communications, and platforms for everyone else.
We used to think there was a personality trait (extroversion, warmth, or the commonly described “people person”) that made someone a good fundraiser or relationship-builder. The truth is these are skills anyone can learn. A gift processor who gets a call from a donor updating their address can say “got it, I’ll make that change” and hang up. Or they can say “thanks for keeping us updated - have you been back to campus recently?” That’s not a major gift conversation, but it’s a thirty-second relationship moment that either deepens a connection or doesn’t.
This plays out at every level. The intern who answers the phone. The events coordinator who checks someone in at a reception. The communications professional who gets a reply to an e-newsletter. Every one of those is an inflection point — a moment where someone on your team gets to choose whether this interaction stays transactional or becomes something more. How they’re trained, skilled, and supported will determine which way that decision goes.
A few years ago at UTEP, we implemented Fundraiser’s University from Generous Change. Because we were growing and building quickly, we offered it to everyone in advancement — not just the gift officers. The goal wasn’t to turn alumni engagement professionals into fundraisers. It was to give everyone a shared language and a baseline understanding of how relationships move — and with that foundation, people start to see their interactions differently.
Better tools exist now for building this muscle deliberately. Mallory Erickson’s AI-driven coaching platform, Practivated, helps professionals practice relational interactions — and it’s increasingly being applied not just to fundraisers but to alumni engagement professionals as well. The idea is right: the skill gets built through repetition and feedback, not just through hearing about it in theory during an all staff meeting. Gift officers have always had an informal version of this — the role-play before the visit, the manager who rides-along, and the debrief afterward. The rest of the shop gets nothing equivalent.
When did your alumni engagement staff last shadow a gift officer on a visit? When did anyone outside of frontline fundraising last have a structured conversation about what it actually means to deepen a relationship with someone, as opposed to getting them to show up to something or complete a transaction for them?
The skill exists in every advancement shop. It’s just concentrated in one place, pointed at one population, and treated as though it belongs exclusively to the people with portfolios. Every interaction your shop has with an alum or a donor is a relationship moment. The question is whether your team is trained to see it that way and act on it.
Give everyone the baseline. Then give them somewhere to practice.
