7 Career Lessons From a Veteran Fundraiser

CHRONICLE PHOTO BY JULIA SCHMALZ

Mamie Jackson Williams learned the meaning of “development” when, as a freshman at Sweet Briar College, she asked the dean what the institution planned to do for Black History Month. “She rightly asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ " Jackson Williams recalls. She left the dean’s office with marching orders: “You need to stop by the development department.”

What’s that? Jackson Williams wondered. “In my mind, ‘development’ meant constructing a building.”

But raising money for Sweet Briar’s Black History Month programming more than two decades ago introduced her to what’s become a lifelong career. Jackson Williams, 41, is now vice president for development at Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Her path has been shaped by happenstance, hard work, attentive mentors, management challenges, professional triumphs, and changing personal circumstances. Here are some of the lessons she’s learned along the way.

The Making of a Fundraiser

Fundraisers share their strategies for career advancement and happiness in a field where the rules aren’t always clear.

Pay your dues, but think about the next step. Jackson Williams grew up in Northern Virginia with a mother who worked long hours as a computer scientist. She and her brother routinely sacked out on the floor of their mother’s workplace. “We saw that hard work is not a bad thing,” she says.

In her first postcollege job, as a project coordinator at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, in Atlanta, Jackson Williams took a starting salary of $26,000. “My role at the time was very grass-roots: doing fundraising and recruiting volunteers for walkathons, bowlathons, you-name-it-athons,” she says. “I thought, What else is out there? Especially when it’s July in Atlanta, and you’re got a bolt of fabric on one shoulder and a rolled-up carpet on the other for a silent auction.”

The best place for you might not be where you think it is. As she studied for a master’s degree at what’s now Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Jackson Williams hunted for work at a historically black college but struck out. Instead, she applied for a spot in the development office of Purdue University’s engineering school and, to her chagrin, got it. Purdue’s flagship campus is in West Lafayette, Ind., and she worried she would feel isolated in small-town Indiana. The former philosophy major also knew nothing about engineering.

But Purdue turned out to be a professional idyll. “I will tout the Midwest all day long: It produces some amazing fundraisers,” Jackson Williams says. Colleague Margarita Contreni taught her how to be part of a team of competitive fundraisers. “She said, ‘Mamie, there’s always going to be someone better and faster than you. And just accept that. But you try to be better and faster than them, and you’ll get what you need to get.’ That’s a mentality I’ve always kept with me.”

Over three years at Purdue, Jackson Williams secured money for a professorship in nanotechnology and raised funds for a nanotechnology building and for minority scholarships.

She considers Purdue the turning point in her career: “If people can see it done right early in their career and know that they’re witnessing it being done right, I think that gives you a great launching pad.”

Professional development is part of the job. At Purdue, fundraisers were expected to attend conferences. “You’re supposed to network. You’re supposed to know your colleagues at the university and beyond the university,” Jackson Williams says. “I was truly a road warrior. I literally had three suitcases in my house. I would come in, leave one, pick one up, and head out.”

Learn how the big decisions are made. A few years later, Jackson Williams went to the University of Maryland, helping the institution expand its fundraising among West Coast alumni. Elizabeth Mitchell, her supervisor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, told her that to understand an organization’s strategy and the politics involved in decision making, “someone needs to let you behind the closed door.”

“Elizabeth let me be a silent partner. She said, ‘Sit in that chair, keep quiet, but listen and take in what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing.’ "

“That’s when I realized I could be an executive,” she says. “I was watching her moves, thinking, Oh, that was a good decision, or, Maybe I would have done that a bit differently.”

Giving junior employees exposure to the board or other leaders is the responsibility of individual managers, not the organization, Jackson Williams says. “The manager has to be confident in who they are and that they can see themselves as being a coach or mentor,” she says. “You have to have that confidence to not think, Oh, someone’s on my heels.”

Be a leader, not a boss. In 2009, Jackson Williams snagged that long-coveted dream job at a historically black higher-education institution. At Spelman College, while being considered for a position as associate vice president for development, she attended a convocation ceremony and still gets emotional recalling it.

“To see these young women who looked like me, that were coming up along the line, hearing their stories. Jennifer Holliday performed — they always get amazing people. I thought, I gotta be here.”

But the dream job gave way to a challenging reality. “Spelman is where I developed my skill sets on managing people. Fifty percent of my job was hanging out in HR, and 50 percent fundraising,” she says ruefully. The takeaway: “You can’t always come in with a big stick. If you want people to follow you, you have to meet people where they are.”

Keep your connections current. While in Atlanta, Jackson Williams married a man who lived in Washington. In 2012, she followed him to D.C., taking a position as an associate director of development at the Smithsonian Institution. About a year later, her former boss at the University of Maryland got in touch, offering her a spot as executive director for development at George Washington University’s School of Business. “That’s why you always have to treat people right,” Jackson Williams says. “You never know how things will come back around.”

Choose a mission in line with your values. While at George Washington, she gave birth to a baby girl. “When major milestones like that happen, you start to think,” she says. “I knew I had to work, but I wanted to work in a place that aligns with my moral compass.” She also wanted to justify the time away from her daughter by working somewhere with a mission that deeply resonated with her. So she pursued her current job at Planned Parenthood, in part because “its services changed the lives of many of my friends.”

In the role now for two years, Jackson Williams is happy with her choice. “This is probably the best decision I could have made in being back centered again, balancing my home life and work,” she says. “Because working here, I know I’m working for my little girl.”