In the book, and later the film starring Brad Pitt, Moneyball showed how the Oakland A’s transformed baseball by focusing on one overlooked metric: on-base percentage. It turned out to be the key to building a winning team on a limited budget. In major gift fundraising, I believe there’s a similar game-changing metric: Asks per Visit. It may sound obvious, but the data proves it – more asks lead directly to greater productivity.
I reviewed the full set of frontline fundraiser metrics for a fiscal year including visits, commits, and gift asks. And from that calculated each fundraiser’s Ask-per-Visit rate (the percentage of visits where an ask was made). The results were clear. Fundraisers who made asks in 20% or more of their visits were significantly more productive, while those who asked in 20% or fewer visits lagged far behind. Below are the key findings from this analysis:
Higher Ask Activity, More Productivity
Fundraisers above 20% ask-per-visit average 38 asks per year, compared to only 21 asks for those below 20%.
Bigger Impact on Commit Totals
The high ask-rate group averages $1.5M in commitments, while the low ask-rate group averages only $846K. That’s nearly double the productivity.
Efficiency per Visit
On average, high ask-rate fundraisers secure $10,657 per visit, compared to $6,085 per visit for the lower ask-rate group. This indicates that more frequent asking not only increases volume, but also improves the return on each visit.
More Annual Giving Society Asks, More Closes
High askers average 30 annual giving society asks and 16 closes. Low askers average only 14 annual giving society asks and 8 closes.
Overall the 20% ask-per-visit rates are more productive because they maximize the value of each donor interaction. They aren’t actually more effective per ask; they’re simply creating more asks, which compounds into greater commitments and higher ROI on visits.
Email me at adamplatzer@gmail.com if you want more information on this topic and the ChatGPT prompts to do it for your fundraising team.
Forward Fundraisers 