Prospect development has operated without field-wide benchmarks for too long. The 2026 Prospect Development Benchmark Study—a partnership between Kindsight and Apra International—set out to change that. Here’s what we found, why it matters, and what practitioners should do with it.

For decades, prospect development leaders have faced the same problem: when it’s time to make the case for staffing, technology, or budget, there’s no shared data to anchor the conversation. You’re left with intuition, anecdote, and whatever you can piece together from conference hallway conversations. That’s a tough position for a function built on research and evidence.

We designed the 2026 Prospect Development Benchmark Study to fix that. Between Kindsight and Apra International, we surveyed 500 North American organizations—higher education, healthcare, independent nonprofits, community foundations—about how they staff, spend, and structure their prospect development work. We asked about pipeline mechanics, research frequency, portfolio health, and revenue influence. And we built a Prospect Development Maturity Index (PDMI) to measure operational maturity across five self-assessed practices.

What came back is, to our knowledge, the first large-scale, data-driven benchmark designed specifically for prospect development professionals. And the findings tell a story that’s both encouraging and challenging.

The Field at a glance: What’s “normal” in prospect development?

The median research shop runs on 0.75 FTE with an annual budget of $50,000. More than half of respondents—54%—have only one to two major gift officers. Nearly 39% operate as what we’d call micro shops: less than half a research FTE and one to two gift officers. This is the modal configuration of the field.

Those numbers might feel familiar if you’ve ever been a one-person prospect research team doing everything from wealth screenings to profile writing to data hygiene. If that’s you, you’re not an outlier. You’re the norm in this dataset.

But here’s what the data also shows: how organizations use their resources matters at least as much as how many resources they have.

Maturity predicts revenue and it’s not just about size

The study’s strongest statistical finding is the relationship between organizational maturity and self-reported revenue influenced by research. The correlation (ρ = 0.453, p < 0.001) is the strongest in the entire study, and it holds after controlling for organizational size (ρ = 0.294, p < 0.001).

In practical terms, Emerging-tier organizations report a median of $50,000 in research-influenced revenue. Leading-tier organizations report $750,000. That’s a 60-fold difference. Scale explains some of that gap, but maturity—the consistency with which organizations log research, track their pipeline, act on findings, and demonstrate ROI—contributes independently.

The PDMI itself demonstrated strong internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.761), confirming that its five component practices measure a coherent underlying construct. For a first-wave instrument, that’s a meaningful validation.

The pipeline tells the sharpest story

When we looked at conversion rates across the fundraising pipeline, the maturity gradient was dramatic. Among the 328 organizations that track all four funnel stages—qualification, assignment, solicitation, and close—we computed compound conversion rates by tier.

Leading organizations convert qualified prospects to closed gifts at 33 times the rate of Emerging ones. Every stage of the funnel widens with maturity, but the close rate shows the steepest gradient: 2.5% for Emerging organizations versus 27% for Leading. That’s not a staffing difference. That’s an operational discipline difference.

Just as telling: not every organization tracks every stage. 23% of respondents don’t track solicitation rates, and 30% don’t track close rates.  So the compound analysis is limited to the 328 that report all four. Among Leading organizations, those figures drop significantly. Tracking itself is a maturity signal. Organizations that measure their pipeline can see where it breaks and, increasingly, fix it.

What actually changes between tiers

One of the study’s most useful findings is that the four PDMI tiers describe meaningfully different types of organizations, not just different scores.

The jump from Emerging to Developing happens with virtually no change in staffing or budget. Both tiers have a median of 0.25 FTE and $12,500 in annual spend. What changes is behavior: research frequency increases, and the presence of a dedicated research role doubles. Maturity can improve before the budget does.

The jump from Developing to Advanced is where the first full-time research FTE appears. Spend rises to $50,000, the MGO count grows, and revenue influenced climbs from $50,000 to $300,000.

The jump from Advanced to Leading is less about adding more staff and more about operational discipline: tracking the pipeline, acting on research, and demonstrating impact. Thirty percent of Leading-tier organizations still have only one to two gift officers. What separates them is consistency.

That through-line matters for practitioners at every level: behavioral change can precede, and sometimes substitute for, resource investment.

The staffing ratio: Not what most people expect

Among all 500 respondents, the median research-to-MGO ratio is 1:6. Leading organizations invest at 1:3, nearly twice the research capacity per gift officer. But here’s the nuance: the ratio predicts maturity and output volume, but not unit economics. Investing proportionally more in research doesn’t reliably lower per-prospect costs.

What does predict maturity almost as well as headcount? Research frequency. How often you research (ρ = 0.417) matters nearly as much as how many people are researching (ρ = 0.425). A half-time researcher who checks every donor before every meeting may contribute more to operational maturity than a full-time researcher producing quarterly profiles that sit in a shared drive.

Portfolio hygiene: The field’s biggest gap

The weakest practice across all 500 organizations is portfolio hygiene, regularly removing low-quality prospects from portfolios. It’s the only PDMI item where the mean falls below 3.3 on a 5-point scale, and it remains the weakest item even among Leading-tier organizations.

The reason is structural. The other four PDMI practices are things research teams can largely drive on their own: logging outputs, providing actionable deliverables, tracking pipeline movement, reporting on impact. Portfolio hygiene requires coordination between research, relationship management, and frontline fundraising. It requires someone to identify the stale prospects and a process to act on that identification. That makes it harder but also makes it a high-leverage area for cross-functional improvement.

What this means for you

If you lead a prospect development function, this data gives you something concrete to bring to your next budget conversation. Not “we think we need more staff” but “our research-to-MGO ratio is 1:8, the field median is 1:6, and Leading organizations invest at 1:3.”

If you’re a CDO or VP of advancement, the maturity-revenue relationship should inform how you evaluate your prospect development investment. The organizations seeing the greatest return aren’t just the biggest, they’re the most disciplined.

If you’re a one-person shop, the finding that behavioral change precedes resource investment should be genuinely encouraging. You don’t need a bigger team to start improving. You need consistent practices: log your work, track your pipeline, do lookups before every meeting.

And if you want to see where your organization falls, we built a free PDMI self-assessment tool that lets you compare your practices against the full benchmark dataset.

This is just the beginning

Five hundred organizations gave us honest, statistically significant data about how they operate. That trust built the first edition of something we hope will grow, deepen, and evolve. Future waves should explore portfolio dynamics more directly, capture longitudinal change, and incorporate perspectives from relationship management professionals alongside research teams.

We’re grateful to Apra International for championing this work and connecting it to the community it serves. And we’re grateful to every practitioner who took the time to respond. You gave the field something it hasn’t had before: evidence.

Read the full report here.