Donor Stewardship Is Running on One FTE. Here’s What That Costs.

Finding #1 from the 2026 AwardSpring Donor Stewardship Benchmark: 46% of higher education foundations are running their entire stewardship operation on one full-time person or less.

That number, on its own, reads as a staffing observation. Put it next to the rest of the data, and it becomes a root-cause explanation for nearly everything else we found.

The capacity-quality connection is direct

When we asked 125 foundations to rate the quality of their own stewardship materials on a 1–5 scale, the average came back at 2.66. Fewer than 20% said they felt genuinely confident in what they were producing.

That number is uncomfortable. But it isn’t mysterious.

A single FTE managing dozens or hundreds of donor relationships — annual reports to produce, fund statuses to track, student letters to coordinate, compliance reviews to complete — cannot do all of it to a high standard. Something has to give. Usually it’s quality. And when quality slips, so does donor confidence. And when donor confidence slips, renewal rates follow.

The 2.66 average isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a math problem that shows up in the materials.

The staffing breakdown by institution type

One of the more surprising findings from our research was which segment was best-staffed: community colleges.

This runs counter to the common assumption that larger, better-resourced four-year institutions have the staffing advantage in advancement. In our data, community colleges — often treated as the lean-operations segment — came in as the best-staffed for stewardship. Private foundations, despite their focus on donor relationships, frequently operate solo.

The implication is significant. Stewardship capacity doesn’t follow the prestige gradient we might expect. The institutions that feel the most pressure — smaller, more donor-dependent, with fewer advancement resources overall — are often the ones carrying the most stewardship weight with the least support.

The role perception gap

The raw staffing numbers don’t fully capture one of the more striking findings from our data.

When we broke down quality ratings by role, Advancement respondents rated their own stewardship materials at 2.38 out of 5. Donor Relations respondents rated the same work at 2.94.

The people who depend on those materials for fundraising — who use them in renewal conversations with donors — are significantly less satisfied than the people producing them. That gap isn’t just a perception issue. It’s a signal that the work being produced isn’t meeting the standard the relationship requires.

When Advancement rates quality lower than Donor Relations, something in the system isn’t connecting. Reports are going out. They’re not landing.

What high-performing programs are doing differently

The foundations in our survey that outperformed on quality weren’t necessarily the best-staffed. They had two things in common.

They had systems that handled volume work. Report templates. Fund status alerts. Structured workflows for coordinating student letters. The repeatable, high-volume parts of stewardship — the parts that consume a disproportionate share of time — were handled by process and technology rather than by human effort every cycle. That freed capacity for the relationship work that actually requires a person.

They measured what they sent. Not just whether the report went out, but whether the donor received it, read it, and responded in some way. Foundations that track even basic engagement signals have something to improve against. Foundations that measure only output have no feedback loop — and no way to know whether their stewardship program is strengthening or slowly eroding donor relationships.

The gap between a 2.66 average and something meaningfully better isn’t usually a resources gap. It’s a systems gap.

What the data means for the field

46% of programs running on one FTE or less isn’t a fact about those institutions. It’s a fact about the field.

Stewardship, at most higher education foundations, is structurally undercapitalized — not because leadership doesn’t value it, but because the case for investment hasn’t been made clearly enough. When foundations can see exactly where they stand relative to their peers — on staffing, quality, measurement, and AI adoption — the conversation about investment becomes more concrete. The question shifts from “should we invest in stewardship?” to “what would it take to close this specific gap?”

This is one of five findings from the 2026 AwardSpring Donor Stewardship Benchmark. The full report — all five findings (and more) with detailed cross-tabs by institution type, role, and program size — releases at NASFAA on June 29. If you want it the day it’s published, get on the waitlist by watching the on-demand webinar.