Top 12 Chief Development Officer Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today’s crowded talent pool, a Chief Development Officer (CDO) needs a resume that doesn’t just list duties. It should hum with results, show range, and telegraph how you grow revenue, relationships, and reach. Below are the top 12 skills that matter most—and how to sharpen them so your story lands with force.
Chief Development Officer Skills
- Fundraising
- Donor Relations
- Strategic Planning
- Salesforce CRM
- Financial Management
- Grant Writing
- Leadership
- Market Analysis
- Raiser's Edge
- Project Management
- Communication
- Data Analysis
1. Fundraising
Fundraising is the disciplined, creative pursuit of voluntary financial support—major gifts, annual giving, campaigns, grants, and digital drives—aligned to an organization’s mission and growth plan.
Why It's Important
Without reliable, diverse revenue, vision stalls. Fundraising fuels programs, scales impact, and stabilizes the future so strategy can breathe.
How to Improve Fundraising Skills
Relationship depth over volume: Build long arcs with donors. Personal notes. Timely callbacks. Tailored asks that reflect their interests and values.
Modern tooling: Use a capable CRM, email automation, and campaign dashboards to track moves, segment audiences, and test messages.
Data-led targeting: Analyze giving history, engagement signals, and capacity indicators to craft precise portfolios and pipelines.
Diverse revenue mix: Balance major gifts, grants, corporate partnerships, events, planned giving, and online campaigns to reduce risk.
Transparent storytelling: Show impact with specifics—budgets, outcomes, lives changed. Trust compounds when donors see results.
Professional growth: Encourage team training, peer cohorts, and campaign post-mortems. Skills sharpen in motion.
Annual plan, quarterly tune-ups: Set targets, calendars, and owner roles; refine with performance data and board input.
How to Display Fundraising Skills on Your Resume
2. Donor Relations
Donor relations is the art and system of keeping supporters seen, informed, and excited—stewardship, recognition, impact reporting, and meaningful touchpoints that spark repeat giving.
Why It's Important
Loyalty beats acquisition costs every time. Strong stewardship raises retention, increases gift size, and opens doors to legacy giving and referrals.
How to Improve Donor Relations Skills
Know their why: Capture motivations, preferences, and milestones in your CRM; tailor outreach accordingly.
Personalized cadence: Handwritten notes, quick videos, curated updates—choose formats that fit each donor.
Planned stewardship: Build tiered plans for top segments with clear timing, owners, and touchpoint variety.
Impact that lands: Share stories plus stats; show before/after. Tie outcomes directly to the donor’s gift.
Invite them in: Events, site visits, advisory roles, volunteer spots—connection deepens commitment.
Ask for feedback: Short surveys and candid conversations reveal friction and fresh ideas.
Recognition with care: Celebrate publicly when welcomed; protect anonymity when preferred.
Ethics first: Clarity, consent, and respect underpin trust and long-term support.
How to Display Donor Relations Skills on Your Resume
3. Strategic Planning
Strategic planning defines where the organization is headed and how development accelerates it—goals, choices, sequencing, resources, and the metrics that signal progress.
Why It's Important
It aligns board, leadership, and teams around priorities. It clarifies trade-offs, focuses scarce effort, and keeps revenue-building tied to mission and market reality.
How to Improve Strategic Planning Skills
Start with clarity: Mission, value proposition, and outcomes—plain, testable, shared.
Invite voices: Cross-functional leaders, frontline staff, donors, partners. Better plans come from broader input.
Scan the landscape: Strengths and gaps in-house, opportunities and threats outside. Be honest; act accordingly.
Set measurable goals: Specific targets with timelines, owners, budgets, and dashboards.
Roadmap the work: Break big goals into initiatives and sprints. Sequence for quick momentum and compounding wins.
Review, adjust, repeat: Quarterly health checks, leading indicators, and course corrections. Strategy is alive.
How to Display Strategic Planning Skills on Your Resume
4. Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM centralizes relationships, revenue, and engagement—your hub for pipeline visibility, marketing alignment, service history, and analytics that steer development strategy.
Why It's Important
It unites teams around clean data and clear processes, enabling targeted cultivation, smarter forecasting, and personalized stewardship at scale.
How to Improve Salesforce CRM Skills
Customize the core: Align objects, fields, and page layouts to your moves management and gift processing flow.
Automate the mundane: Use Flows and automation to remove repetitive tasks and enforce consistency.
Harden data quality: Establish validation rules, duplicate management, and scheduled data hygiene. Consider trusted enrichment sources when appropriate.
Integrate systems: Connect email, marketing automation, finance, and events. MuleSoft or native connectors can unify the picture.
Level up analytics: Build dashboards and use CRM Analytics (formerly Einstein Analytics/Tableau CRM) for trend, cohort, and predictive views.
Mobile and on-the-go: Configure mobile layouts so gift officers log updates fast after visits.
Drive adoption: Role-based training, simple workflows, and champions who model good habits.
Explore Data Cloud thoughtfully: When scale demands, unify signals from multiple sources for richer segmentation—governance first.
How to Display Salesforce CRM Skills on Your Resume
5. Financial Management
Financial management blends planning, budgeting, forecasting, controls, and reporting so development strategies are well-funded, efficient, and sustainable.
Why It's Important
It keeps cash predictable, investments smart, and risk contained—freeing teams to execute without costly surprises.
How to Improve Financial Management Skills
Sharpen FP&A: Rolling forecasts, scenario planning, and unit economics that tie spend to outcomes.
Modern systems: Solid accounting and planning tools with integrations to your CRM for gift reconciliation and revenue recognition.
Cash vigilance: Monitor inflows/outflows weekly; line up reserves and credit options before you need them.
Stakeholder fluency: Clear, concise reports for boards, donors, and investors—no jargon, just insight.
Risk mapping: Identify concentration risk, compliance gaps, and cost volatility; hedge or diversify where needed.
Culture of stewardship: Train teams on budget ownership and cost-benefit thinking; celebrate efficiency wins.
How to Display Financial Management Skills on Your Resume
6. Grant Writing
Grant writing packages strategy into a compelling case—needs, methods, evaluation, and budget—aligned tightly with a funder’s aims. Precision and persuasion, together.
Why It's Important
Grants can anchor new programs, de-risk innovation, and stabilize core work—often unlocking matching gifts and partnerships.
How to Improve Grant Writing Skills
Research with intent: Target funders whose priorities map to your outcomes. Candid (formerly Foundation Center) is a helpful reference point.
Tell the change story: Problem, evidence, approach, and scale—grounded in data and human outcomes.
Design strong objectives: Specific measures, timelines, and evaluation plans that prove learning and results.
Budgets that breathe: Accurate costs, justified assumptions, and thoughtful indirects; align narrative and numbers.
Peer review: Fresh eyes catch jargon, gaps, and loose threads before submission.
Post-award excellence: Deliver on milestones, report cleanly, steward the relationship—renewals often hinge here.
How to Display Grant Writing Skills on Your Resume
7. Leadership
Leadership rallies people around a horizon, clears blockers, and builds momentum—then protects the culture that sustains it.
Why It's Important
Teams mirror their leaders. Vision, empathy, and accountability translate directly into revenue traction and partner confidence.
How to Improve Leadership Skills
Paint the picture: Explain the why, the stakes, and the win conditions. Repeat until it sticks.
Communicate with spine: Clarity, candor, and listening in equal measure. Conflict handled early, with care.
Empower and expect: Delegate outcomes (not tasks), give resources, set standards, and coach in real time.
Develop others: Growth plans, stretch projects, and feedback loops that make people better fast.
Model resilience: Decisions under uncertainty, calm in the pocket, visible learning after misses.
How to Display Leadership Skills on Your Resume
8. Market Analysis
Market analysis sizes demand, tracks trends, maps competitors, and segments audiences—turning noise into direction for growth plays.
Why It's Important
It prevents guesswork. With sharper insight, you position offerings, pick channels, and price intelligently—then adjust before the market does.
How to Improve Market Analysis Skills
Dig into data: Blend internal performance with external benchmarks and credible industry reports.
Segment with intent: Define priority segments by needs, value, and cost to reach; build personas that guide messaging.
Listen continuously: Surveys, interviews, social listening, support tickets—signals pile up fast; review on a cadence.
Competitor tear-downs: Product, pricing, positioning, partnerships—track moves and find white space.
Test in the wild: Pilots, A/B tests, and landing pages beat opinion every time.
Turn insight into action: Feed findings into roadmaps, campaigns, and development priorities.
How to Display Market Analysis Skills on Your Resume
9. Raiser's Edge
Raiser’s Edge (including NXT) is a donor management and fundraising platform built for nonprofits—pipelines, portfolios, events, and analytics under one roof.
Why It's Important
It standardizes development operations, clarifies ownership of relationships, and enables targeted outreach that actually converts.
How to Improve Raiser's Edge Skills
Formal training: Invest in team onboarding and advanced courses; set standards for data entry and usage.
Data hygiene: Routine audits, deduping, and clear field definitions. Clean data is faster fundraising.
Automate and integrate: Connect email, events, and finance; use workflows to eliminate manual busywork.
Smart segmentation: Slice by affinity, capacity, and behavior to tailor appeals and stewardship.
Dashboards that matter: Pipeline health, officer activity, conversion rates—metrics that drive action.
Feedback loop: Quarterly sessions with users to refine processes and surface training needs.
How to Display Raiser's Edge Skills on Your Resume
10. Project Management
Project management turns strategy into shipped work—scopes, timelines, budgets, risks, and stakeholder alignment held together with crisp execution.
Why It's Important
It protects resources, prevents drift, and delivers outcomes on time. Momentum loves good structure.
How to Improve Project Management Skills
Right-sized methods: Borrow from Agile, Scrum, or Kanban as needed; keep ceremonies lightweight and useful.
Single source of truth: A shared tool for tasks, owners, dependencies, and status. No mystery work.
Risk early, risk often: Identify, rank, and mitigate; escalate before blockers calcify.
Stakeholder rhythm: Clear updates, demo days, and decision checkpoints prevent last-minute chaos.
Retrospectives: Short, candid reviews to capture lessons and improve the next sprint or project.
How to Display Project Management Skills on Your Resume
11. Communication
Communication for a CDO means shaping messages that move people—board, team, donors, partners—and keeping information flowing cleanly both ways.
Why It's Important
Alignment reduces waste. Clear messages attract support, settle nerves in change, and speed decisions.
How to Improve Communication Skills
Active listening: Reflect back what you hear; ask short, sharp questions; confirm next steps.
Audience-first: Tailor tone and detail. Executives want headlines and risk; staff want specifics and support.
Simple beats clever: Cut jargon. Use numbers and examples. One page over ten.
Feedback channels: Surveys, office hours, and anonymous inboxes surface what’s unsaid.
Digital fluency: Master your core stack—CRM notes, email, video, and collaboration tools—to keep signals from getting lost.
Emotional intelligence: Read the room, pace the message, and acknowledge realities without sugarcoating.
How to Display Communication Skills on Your Resume
12. Data Analysis
Data analysis turns raw inputs into insight—patterns, drivers, forecasts—so decisions stop guessing and start compounding.
Why It's Important
It sharpens targeting, improves ROI, and reveals which levers actually move revenue and retention.
How to Improve Data Analysis Skills
Govern the data: Define sources, owners, and rules. Accuracy and timeliness are non-negotiable.
Modern toolkit: Comfort with spreadsheets plus BI platforms; for advanced teams, add Python or R for deeper modeling.
Visuals with purpose: Dashboards that answer “so what?” and drive action, not just decoration.
Experimentation mindset: A/B tests, control groups, and lift analyses to validate ideas before scaling.
Share the insight: Narratives that tie data to decisions—assumptions stated, limitations noted, next steps clear.
Build a data culture: Make metrics part of weekly rituals; reward curiosity and evidence-based pivots.
How to Display Data Analysis Skills on Your Resume
