Buck the High Turnover Rate of Fundraising Staff: Your Guide to Conducting Stay Interviews
Gallup's 2021 survey revealed a sobering truth: 52% of departing employees believe their organization could have done something to keep them.
Stay interviews empower employees to share their valuable insights and concerns. This direct feedback allows you as a manager to take action and create a workplace where employees feel heard, valued, and motivated to stay.
High turnover rates can cripple your fundraising efforts, draining resources and hindering your ability to build sustainable support. Happy and satisfied fundraisers are much more likely to stay on your team for longer or grow their career within their organization, resulting in improved donor relationships, increased team morale, and enhanced fundraising productivity.
So what is a stay interview and how can this help retain your top fundraising talent?
Stay interviews, also known as retention interviews, are proactive conversations between managers and their direct reports. These crucial discussions delve into two critical aspects:
What keeps employees engaged? What aspects of their role and the organization do they truly value?
What needs improvement? What challenges or frustrations are impacting their experience, whether it's their workload, work-life balance, team dynamics, or the work environment?
Stay interviews vs. exit interviews: a proactive approach
Unlike exit interviews, which often occur after an employee has already made the decision to leave, stay interviews are conducted while the employee is still actively engaged. This proactive approach empowers managers to directly address employee concerns and implement meaningful changes, creating a more positive and fulfilling work environment for each team member.
By focusing on individual employee experiences, stay interviews provide valuable insights into what truly motivates and retains top talent within your organization. These targeted conversations can also help you as a manager improve your leadership skills, build stronger relationships with your teams, and gain valuable insights into team dynamics.
How do you set up a stay interview for success?
On each team I have led I made it a mandate for managers (and me) to conduct stay interviews with 100 percent of staff members each year. I have learned so many valuable gems that helped me to retain my top performers from the need for a more flexible work schedule, the desire for increased professional development opportunities in an area or aspirational career trajectories I can offer support for.
While I couldn’t always accommodate or act on each and every point brought up by employees and sometimes they were tricky or uncomfortable conversations as a manager, I was so glad that I learned more about what mattered most to my teammates so I could try my best to make them as happy and fulfilled as possible and ultimately retain them.
Every teammates I have held stay interviews with said they were grateful for the conversation. Most told me that no manager had taken the time before to have a dedicated conversation like this outside of performance evaluations cycles. It makes a big difference!
To make people feel the most comfortable to be vulnerable and share of themselves in a stay interview you need to prep them:
Schedule a dedicated 60-minute meeting outside of regular team meetings.
Send the questions you want to ask them about a week or so ahead of time so they have time to reflect and think through their answers. It will be a richer conversation
Meet in a comfortable space with no distractions where there is enough privacy and focus to have a more authentic conversation
Do not make a stay interview part of a performance evaluation. This is a separate conversation at a different time of year. Trust me on this one - it will be a much more useful and appreciated conversation if this is seen as its own sacred conversation. You demonstrate that you as a manager truly care about your teammates as individual people when it’s outside of what HR mandates in annual reviews.
Great questions to ask during stay interviews:
What do you look forward to most when you come to work every day?
What have you felt good about accomplishing in your job and in your time here?
What is the best part of your job?
What part of your job would you cut out straight away if you could?
What would tempt you to leave the organization?
Which of your talents are you not using in your current role?
What would make your job even more satisfying?
Do you feel connected to your teammates?
Do you feel you have clear goals and objectives in your role?
As your manager, what can I do more or less of?
Do you feel valued and recognized here?
What kind of feedback about your performance would you like that you aren’t currently receiving?
How would you like to be recognized for the work you do?
What are we currently not doing as a Development/Advancement shop that you feel we should?
What would be helpful to you in balancing your work and home life?
Are you satisfied with our current hybrid work policy/schedule? If not, what would you like to change?
Do you have enough tools and resources to do your job properly? If not, what is missing?
What would a dream job for you look like?
What opportunities for self-improvement would you like to have that go beyond your current role?
The most important part of all of this as a manager is to actively listen to your teammate – ask clarifying questions, and summarize key takeaways to ensure they understand the employee's perspective.
Take notes on what they share. Follow up on relevant requests and conversation points in future 1:1s and stay interviews. If you go through this process of holding a stay interview but then never integrate the takeaways from that conversation going forward then it will work against you and your team.
Don’t wait until it’s too late!
Hold stay interviews with all of your team within the next few months. You and your staff will be so happy you did.
If you have any questions or need further guidance, connect with me.
I’m here to support you!
You got this!
Jen Stirling
Principal Consultant, Brighter Philanthropy —
Fundraising consulting for higher ed and K-12
As your partner, I’ll bring my considerable expertise, high-energy efficiency, optimistic realism, relational approach, and fresh perspective to guide your team and help your institution reach its goals, enabling more students to thrive. I offer support for campaign services, development organization assessments, staff coaching and board development.
