Fundraisers get goals that are easy to write: raise this much, renew this many members, close these major gifts. The people who process the gifts, clean the records, and pull the reports usually get something vaguer, like “improve data quality” or “support the campaign.” Those aren’t goals. Nobody can tell in June whether they’re on track, and nobody can tell in December whether they hit them.
SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) fix that, but only if the measurement is something your database can actually produce. For organizations running Blackbaud Altru, that means writing goals around things you can count with a query, a report, or a batch, and agreeing on how you’ll count them before the year starts.
Start with what development operations actually owns
Before writing goals, list the work. In most museums, zoos, gardens, and historic sites, development operations covers some mix of:
- Gift and payment processing: entering donations, pledges, and payments, and getting batches committed.
- Acknowledgments: thank-you letters and tax receipts going out on time and to the right people.
- Data integrity: duplicate constituents, bad addresses and emails, household links, deceased and do-not-contact flags.
- Membership operations: renewals, lapsed-member follow-up, card fulfillment, and the accuracy of membership dates.
- Reporting and reconciliation: matching Altru revenue to finance, and producing the numbers the director and board ask for.
- Systems and training: web forms, smart fields, saved queries, user security, and teaching new staff the process.
Pick two or three of these areas for the year. A department with eleven SMART goals effectively has none, because no one can track them all.
Turning a vague goal into a SMART one
The test is simple: could someone else run the measurement and get the same answer you would? If not, the goal isn’t measurable yet.
Acknowledgment turnaround
Vague: “Send thank-yous faster.”
SMART: “By June 30, 90% of gifts of $50 or more will have an acknowledgment marked as sent within five business days of the gift date, measured monthly with a saved revenue query comparing gift date to acknowledgment date.”
The percentage and the threshold are yours to set. The important part is naming the query and the two dates being compared, so the number means the same thing every month. Before committing, confirm that your process actually records an acknowledgment date in Altru for every gift. If letters go out from a mail merge and nobody marks them, you’ll need to fix that first, and that fix might be the real goal for the first quarter.
Duplicate records
Vague: “Clean up the database.”
SMART: “By the end of Q2, review and resolve every possible duplicate constituent pair identified in our baseline duplicate check, and keep new duplicates created per month below the level we measure in January.”
You need a baseline to make this work. Run your duplicate check once at the start, record the count, and save the method so you can repeat it exactly. Without a starting number, “fewer duplicates” can’t be proven.
Batch timeliness
Vague: “Keep batches up to date.”
SMART: “Starting in February, all revenue batches will be committed by the third business day of the following month, so finance can reconcile on schedule. Track misses in a shared log.”
This one is relevant because finance depends on it. Ask them what date they actually need; that’s your deadline, not one you invent.
Membership data accuracy
Vague: “Improve renewals.”
Renewal rate is usually a membership or fundraising goal, not an operations one. The operations piece is the part you control: “By April 1, every active membership will have a valid email address or a documented reason it doesn’t, and we’ll re-check that monthly with a membership query.” Better contact data supports the renewal goal without making your team own a number driven mostly by marketing and pricing.
Keep the “achievable” part honest
Operations goals fail most often because the team didn’t budget for the time. Before you sign off on a goal, estimate the hours. Merging several hundred duplicate pairs, for example, is slow, careful work, and it competes with year-end gift processing. If the hours don’t fit, shrink the scope or move the deadline rather than quietly missing it.
Also check whether Altru can produce the measurement you’re planning to use. If you’re not sure a field is tracked, or a query can return what you need, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before the goal is final. Finding out in October that the data was never captured is a hard conversation.
Make the tracking cheap
A goal you have to measure by hand each month tends to stop being measured by spring. A few habits help:
- Save every measuring query with a clear name and the goal it belongs to, and keep the query definitions stable all year.
- Record the baseline in January in a simple spreadsheet, along with the date and exact criteria used.
- Put a recurring calendar reminder on the same day each month to run the queries and log the numbers.
- Share the log with your director so progress isn’t a surprise in either direction.
Tie each goal to someone else’s outcome
The “relevant” letter is where development operations earns its seat at the table. Each goal should finish the sentence “this matters because…”: finance closes the month on time, donors get thanked while the gift is still fresh, the membership team can trust its renewal lists, the board report doesn’t need a footnote. When you can say that plainly, the goal is much easier to defend at budget time, and much easier for the team to care about.
Quick answers
How many SMART goals should a development operations team have?
Three to five for the year is plenty for most small and mid-sized teams. Fewer goals that are actually tracked beat a long list nobody checks.
Should goals be individual or team-wide?
Both can work. Team goals suit shared outcomes like batch deadlines; individual goals suit owned work like a specific cleanup project or training plan.
