Development Officer Job Description

A Development Officer in education raises private money for a school, college or university by getting to know the people who might give it. The office may be called advancement, development, institutional advancement or a separately incorporated foundation that receives gifts on the institution's behalf, but the core assignment is the same: a named list of prospects, and a goal for visits, proposals and dollars closed against that list.

The portfolio

Each officer carries a portfolio assigned by a prospect manager. Names come from alumni records, parent lists, past giving, event attendance and research done by a prospect research team. The officer's first job with a new name is qualification: a visit or call that answers whether the person has the interest and the capacity to make a significant gift, and whether they belong in the portfolio at all. Qualified prospects then move through cultivation, solicitation and stewardship, a framework fundraisers call moves management. Unqualified names go back to the annual fund or a different officer.

Visits and the ask

The visit is the unit of work. A good officer arrives knowing the prospect's class year, major, giving history, family ties to the institution and anything the prospect has said in earlier conversations. The meeting may have a narrow purpose: hearing what the donor cares about, introducing a dean or faculty member, touring a new lab or residence hall, or presenting a specific proposal. The ask comes when the relationship supports it, and the proposal names an amount, a purpose and how the gift will be recognized.

Working inside the institution

A development officer in higher education may serve one academic unit, such as a college of engineering or a law school, while reporting to central advancement. That dual line means working closely with the dean, who is the face of the unit's priorities, and with central offices that handle gift processing, donor records, gift agreements and compliance with donor intent. In independent K-12 schools the officer may cover parents, alumni and grandparents at once and work directly with the head of school. At a public university, gifts may flow through an affiliated foundation, and the officer learns that foundation's gift acceptance policies.

Stewardship and the long game

Once a gift closes, the officer makes sure the donor sees what it did: a scholarship recipient's letter, an endowment report, a dedication event, a visit with the faculty member the gift supports. Stewardship sets up the next conversation, and a campaign gives the officer a reason to return to donors who already trust the institution with a bigger idea. A development officer who keeps clean visit reports, meets agreed deadlines and follows through on what the institution promised is protecting future gifts, not only the one in hand.

Education

BLS lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for fundraisers, and says fundraisers may have a variety of academic backgrounds. Common fields of degree, according to BLS, include communications, business and social science. A master's degree is optional for an officer role; some officers add a nonprofit management or higher education administration degree once they are in the field. As a rough guide, people move into a frontline officer role after two to five years in annual giving, alumni relations, admissions, prospect research or a related nonprofit job.

Experience employers look for

BLS notes that employers may prefer candidates with related experience, such as from working with a nonprofit organization in an internship or as a volunteer. For a frontline officer job, a strong candidate can show that they can secure meetings with strangers, hold a substantive conversation about money and mission, and follow up in writing. A track record in phonathon management, reunion giving, admissions travel or sales can all translate. For major gift roles, the useful evidence is gifts closed and visits completed, not years served.

Credentials

Two fundraising credentials are relevant. The Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE), awarded by CFRE International, is a professional certification for fundraisers in any sector and awards points for education, months of employment as a professional fundraiser and professional performance, plus an exam. The Advanced Certified Fund Raising Executive (ACFRE), a program of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), is an advanced credential; AFP's application calls for at least ten years of full-time professional fundraising experience. Neither is a license. Professional development through the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), the association for advancement staff at schools and colleges, is one way to learn conventions specific to education fundraising.

Skills and tools

The skill set mixes conversation and administration:

• Relationship building: listening, asking good questions and remembering what donors care about across years of contact.
• Writing: visit reports, proposals, gift agreements and stewardship letters that are clear and specific.
• Systems: daily work in the advancement office's CRM database, plus reading prospect research profiles.
• Gift-planning literacy: enough knowledge of bequests, charitable remainder trusts, gifts of appreciated securities and donor-advised fund grants to recognize an opportunity and bring in a planned giving specialist.
• Judgment and discretion: handling confidential financial and family information about donors with care, and knowing when an ask is premature.

Comfort with travel, evening events and long sales cycles is part of the job in practice, and so is the patience to work a relationship for years before a gift comes.

Projections

BLS projects employment of fundraisers to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, with about 10,000 openings a year on average over the decade. BLS says many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force. The figures cover all fundraisers; BLS does not project development officers in education separately. In the OOH's breakdown of where fundraisers work, educational services, state, local and private, accounts for 25 percent of jobs.

Pay context

The education band on this page comes from the BLS Educational Services row, which counted 28,960 fundraisers in May 2025. For comparison, BLS put the national median for all fundraisers at $72,550, and the median in the narrower Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools row at $79,120.

Giving to colleges and schools

The money development officers raise is still arriving. CASE estimates total voluntary support to U.S. higher education at $78.8 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 4% increase from the prior year. In the same CASE survey, funds received increased 3.9% and new funds committed rose 6.6%. CASE also found the largest gifts coming from an even smaller number of donors. Independent K-12 schools show the same pattern: CASE's 2025 independent school findings say total dollars raised surpassed the previous high-water mark set in 2022 while the number of donors continues to decline. That report found the total number of advancement staff grew by 4.3 percent over the last four years, and the median advancement staff at responding schools was 7.0 full-time equivalents.

Tax law that changes the conversation

Pub. L. 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, rewrote several rules that come up in donor meetings. For 2026 tax returns filed in 2027, the IRS says eligible taxpayers who do not itemize may be able to deduct up to $1,000 of qualifying cash contributions ($2,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly). For individual donors, the law also added a floor: charitable deductions are allowed only to the extent contributions exceed 0.5 percent of the taxpayer's contribution base, for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2025. Officers who talk with donors about timing, bunching gifts or using appreciated stock need to understand both changes and to bring in the donor's own advisers.

The same law set a tiered excise tax on the net investment income of certain private colleges: 1.4 percent, 4 percent or 8 percent depending on student adjusted endowment, with the 8 percent rate for institutions whose student adjusted endowment is in excess of $2,000,000. The change applies to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2025. The tax reaches only the private colleges and universities the statute defines: those with at least 3,000 tuition-paying students in the preceding taxable year that also meet its other tests.

Where the career goes

A frontline officer can move to senior or principal gifts work, lead a unit's development team, specialize in planned giving or corporate and foundation relations, or rise to director of development and vice president for advancement roles.

Dear Ms. Okafor,

Please consider me for the Development Officer opening in the College of Arts and Sciences at Brookhaven State University. For the past four years I have worked in annual giving at Larkspur College, and for the last eighteen months I have carried a small portfolio of leadership annual fund prospects. I am ready to make face-to-face fundraising the whole of my job, and the college's plans for its new humanities center are the kind of project I want to raise money for.

At Larkspur I learned that the first visit matters less than the third. I took over a list of reunion-year alumni who had given small gifts for decades and had never been asked in person. I met with as many of them as would see me, listened to what they remembered about the college, and wrote every visit report the same day. By the end of the cycle several of those alumni had moved into the leadership giving range, and two asked to meet our dean of students, a meeting I arranged and prepared her for.

I also know the less visible parts of the work. I draft my own proposals, I work closely with our gift processing team to make sure gift agreements match what we promised donors, and I keep our CRM records clean enough that a colleague could pick up any relationship from my notes.

I am completing coursework toward the CFRE and I volunteer on the scholarship committee of my local alumni club. I would welcome the chance to talk about how I could help the College of Arts and Sciences build its donor base.

Sincerely, Daniel Reyes