By Austin Elliott
During my years as a leader and manager in healthcare fundraising shops, I have watched a lot of gift officers come through the door. The ones who grew the fastest were rarely the ones with the most natural talent. They were the ones who treated their own development as part of the job, not an extra.
I saw it in myself too. Some of the biggest shifts in how I approached this work did not come from another year on the job. They came from a conference session, a webinar, or a conversation with a consultant who had seen a version of my exact problem before. The Association for Healthcare Philanthropy hosts the Madison Institute in Madison, Wisconsin every year, with tracks built around the different roles inside a philanthropy department. I attended several times over the course of my career, and I can still point to specific sessions and say, that is where something clicked.
Talent gets you in the room. Development keeps you in it.
Most new gift officers are naturally good with people. That is usually why they were hired. But being good with people and knowing how to build a major gifts pipeline, structure an ask, or navigate a complicated family dynamic around a gift are very different skills. Nobody arrives already knowing the second part. You either learn it slowly through years of trial and error, or you learn it faster by seeking out people who have already done it.
As someone who sat on the leadership side, I always paid attention to which gift officers chose the second path. They were the ones I bet on. The research backs that instinct. Industry surveys of frontline fundraisers have found that professional development opportunities rank among the rewards gift officers value most, ahead of compensation.
Conferences are where you learn what you don’t know you don’t know
The value of something like the Madison Institute was never just the sessions on the agenda, even with tracks built specifically around different roles in a philanthropy shop. It was the hallway conversations. A gift officer sitting next to a peer at lunch and hearing how they handled a situation that sounded exactly like one they were struggling with. Realizing an entire strategy existed that they had never even considered.
You cannot Google your way into that kind of insight. You have to be in the room.
Webinars and outside expertise fill the gaps your organization can’t
Most foundations, especially smaller ones, do not have the internal bandwidth to train someone from scratch on every part of this job. That is not a knock on any organization. It is just reality. A webinar, a peer network, or a mentor outside your own walls can fill that gap, and the gift officers who seek those things out tend to move faster than the ones who wait for training to come to them.
I encouraged this on every team I led. If someone felt behind on a skill, I wanted them looking outside our own walls for the answer rather than waiting for us to build it internally. It is a retention issue as much as a performance one. A Chronicle of Philanthropy study found 51 percent of fundraisers expected to leave their jobs within two years, and investing in someone’s growth is one of the few levers a leader actually controls. It is also part of why GOBEL builds major gift officer training directly into our client engagements, so a foundation does not have to choose between developing its people and everything else on the plate.
This is a long game, and development compounds
Nobody becomes excellent at this work overnight, and nobody does it entirely on their own either. Every strong gift officer I have worked with has a mentor, a conference, or an outside voice they can point to as the thing that leveled them up at a critical moment.
If you are early in this field, do not wait for someone to tell you it is time to invest in yourself. Go to the conference. Take the webinar. Find the mentor. Some of the best material is free, including the webinars, white papers, and research GOBEL publishes for professionals in this field. Having sat on both the foundation side and now the business development side at GOBEL Group, I can tell you the return on that investment shows up for years, no matter which side of the table you are on.
Common questions about gift officer professional development
What training does a new major gift officer need?
Beyond relationship instincts, new gift officers need structured training in pipeline building, qualification, ask strategy, and navigating complex gift conversations. Those skills rarely develop through trial and error alone. Formal training, mentorship, and role-specific conference tracks compress years of learning into months.
Are fundraising conferences worth the investment?
For healthcare fundraisers, role-specific events deliver two kinds of value: structured sessions built around your actual job, and peer conversations that surface strategies you did not know existed. The second is often worth the registration by itself.
How can healthcare fundraisers keep developing between conferences?
Webinars, white papers, industry research, and outside mentors fill the gaps between events, especially at smaller foundations without internal training capacity. GOBEL maintains a free library of webinars and research for healthcare philanthropy professionals, and offers major gift officer training for teams that want structured development.
GOBEL provides major gift officer training and grateful patient program consulting for hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers, alongside free webinars, white papers, and research for professionals in the field. Explore the resource library or connect with our team to talk about training for yours.
