As Nonprofits Shed Jobs, Some Fundraisers Are Getting Pink Slips

Lisa Chmiola has worked in fundraising for more than 18 years, but losing her job as director of gift planning at the Catholic Community Foundation in New Orleans was a first.

“I’ve fundraised through post 9/11 and the 2008 recession and spent a lot of my fundraising career in the Houston area, which has a lot of fluctuations because of the oil and gas industry. But I never worried for my job,” she says. “This has been a completely different experience.”

In the year and a half she worked at the community foundation, Chmiola ran a women’s giving circle; helped supporters establish donor-advised funds, gift annuities, and endowments to support their favorite church, school, or ministry; and assisted other Catholic organizations that didn’t have planned-giving expertise in house.

Jeff Fitlow

Aside from management fees for DAFs, annuities, and endowments, none of those things raised money for the foundation’s operations. “When a crisis comes up like this, where operational funds are needed, we weren’t necessarily structured in that way,” Chmiola says.

As the pandemic continues to disrupt lives and the economy, some fundraisers say they’re facing uncertainty about job stability unlike any other time in their careers.

It’s tough to say how many fundraisers are included in the record-high unemployment figures. In a survey of Association of Fundraising Professionals members conducted in May, 2 percent of respondents said they had been laid off. One-fifth said their organization had laid off staff, 23 percent said they had instituted furloughs, and 18 percent had cut staff pay.

Groups that have long relied on in-person fundraising events or revenue from ticket sales are making tough decisions about which fundraising roles are indispensable.

Organizations haven’t eliminated fundraising positions at the same pace that they’ve laid off people in other departments, says AFP president Mike Geiger.

“So far, our numbers are really low in terms of fundraisers’ being laid off,” he says. “I think that is because organizations understand the importance of keeping revenue-generating positions. Fundraisers are the bridge between the donor and the cause. If you break that bridge, if you destroy that bridge, you lose that connection. I think that a lot of CEOs get that, and they might get it now more than they ever did.”

AFP has also had to lay off several staff members, temporarily furlough others, and institute pay cuts throughout the organization. The group also plans to downsize its office space to cut costs.

Fundraiser layoffs may be more likely at organizations that were already struggling before the pandemic. In Chmiola’s case, foundation staff are employees of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which was facing its own financial challenges even before the pandemic. But those issues were exacerbated when stay-at-home orders went into effect. Initially, Chmiola, two other frontline fundraisers, and two support staff were furloughed just after Easter. About a week later, the archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A few weeks after that, the foundation eliminated four fundraising positions — including Chmiola’s.

New Orleans was an early epicenter of the virus, and most people were staying at home by mid-March, not attending services, and not making their weekly contributions to their churches. “It probably sped up the process of what was already going to happen later in the year with the bankruptcy filing,” Chmiola says.

This was not the way she thought she would leave her organization. Her supervisor took the lead in sharing the news with key volunteers and donors. Some reached out to Chmiola personally. A few even shared job leads.

After she received the news, she took some time to reflect on what she wanted to do next with her career. “I really wanted to step back and take a little bit of a sabbatical or retreat to think about what was next and to grieve the transition, frankly, because it is a loss.”

She tried not to take the layoff personally. “It’s a business decision,” she says. “You have to look at cutting expenses, and fundraisers’ salaries are probably some of the higher salaries in the organization.”

Budget Holes

What is clear is that some organizations and fundraising teams have been harder hit than others.

The American Cancer Society laid off around 1,000 staff in June. About 200 of those people were fundraisers, says Mike Neal, senior executive vice president of field operations for the charity. The group, which has long relied on large in-person fundraising events, expects to bring in around $200 million less in 2020 than it had forecast in pre-Covid times. Revenue from Relay for Life, its fundraising walks, has been dropping since 2008, but the event still brought in almost $162 million in unrestricted funds in 2019.

But as events had to be postponed and ultimately canceled or shifted online, the Cancer Society quickly realized it would have to cut costs. The charity didn’t go to personnel right away, Neal says. First, it looked to reduce expenses for things like meetings and travel, and postponing events like the Relay for Life walks resulted in some cost savings.

But eventually it became clear that staff whose primary focus is event planning rather than direct fundraising would not be needed in the same numbers. Leaders have continued to step up major-gift fundraising, a strategy the organization has leaned into in recent years. They’re also increasing the number of donors in the portfolios of fundraisers who work with supporters who gave to peer-to-peer events.

“We are in unprecedented times,” says Neal, who’s been with the charity for 23 years. “We’ve gone through staff reductions and staff changes and reorganizations over the years due to a variety of different reasons. But in my experience, this is the biggest we’ve gone through.”

New Assignments

When fundraisers leave their posts — even when it’s not their choice — organizations must decide how to inform donors and grant makers to ensure continuity in those relationships.

After almost four years as chief development officer at Breakthrough New York, Laura Amerman was laid off. It happened on Zoom, as close to a face-to-face conversation as you can have during a pandemic, she says.

Courtesy Laura Amerman

Last year was a record fundraising year for the group, which provides educational support and mentoring to middle-school, high-school, and college students from low-income backgrounds. Still, Amerman had a hunch it might be coming. “My Spidey senses started tingling a few months ago,” she says.

Amerman recommended that her boss contact the foundation staff with whom the organization has close relationships. When several major donors reached out to Amerman directly, she spoke with those. She says she wanted to transfer those relationships to colleagues as quickly as possible. She gave her boss a list of other donors to contact.

Amerman was very careful in her conversations with donors. She didn’t want to communicate that she was angry that her livelihood was in jeopardy.

“I did anger for a little bit, but I settled on being heartbroken,” she says. “I was profoundly sad. It was because I was not going to be working with a really awesome team, and I was not going to be working with the remarkable students that we served and their families. I’m still really sad about it.”

In the five weeks after learning she would be laid off, Amerman took some unused vacation days and worked to tie up loose ends. She created transition documents for her team, with information like the status of major donors and engagements with corporate partners, and wrapped up performance reviews for her staff. One of the last things she did was put the finishing touches on the spring direct-mail appeal.

“It’s kind of like my swan song,” she says.

‘Lifeboat Ethics’

Cherian Koshy is director of development at Des Moines Performing Arts, an organization that presents visiting plays and other performances — all of which have been canceled or postponed indefinitely. Despite “exceptional” fundraising in recent months, there’s no way around the fact that the organization’s business model is partially driven by the money it earns from ticket sales.

“Even with a lot of fundraising that has happened over the course of these last few months and the generosity of our donors, it’s not enough to keep our entire staff at that total 100 percent, especially when we don’t have a date to reopen,” Koshy says.

So far, he hasn’t had to lay anyone off, but he has had to cut hours. As of July 1, his development team of five people is working the equivalent of 3.5 full-time jobs.

There’s no right way or easy way to make decisions about furloughs and layoffs, he says.

“When we talk about lifeboat ethics, there’s no good decision about who needs to be tossed off the boat and who gets to stay on,” he says. “Everybody’s roles are essential in some nature; otherwise, they wouldn’t be on the boat in the first place.”

In conversations with staff about potential belt tightening, it was important to say that no one, from senior leadership all the way to part-time staff, was immune from steps like reduced hours and pay, says Koshy. After that, he and his colleagues looked at potential scenarios from several perspectives.

If the organization lays off staff, certain things wouldn’t get done for the next several months. What activities are essential in the near term, and who does the group need to do them? Then there’s the longer term view of what resources the organization needs to have in the future to be able to open its doors again. That, says Koshy, is a tough balancing act.

“It’s not just who can be on and who needs to get off, but how long can you stay afloat with the people who are still on?” he says."The ideal scenario is that nobody gets cut, but the challenge that we would face from a fundraising perspective is if at some point we kept too many people on early, that could result in nobody being able to be on later.

“At a certain point,” Koshy says, “even though fundraising is important and essential, we’d have to have the money to pay those people and be able to come out of the crisis, which is at this point interminable.” Leaders also have to consider how institutional knowledge is stewarded through the crisis and as staff leave.

Leaders throughout the organization also considered who on their teams could be “a utility player” and add value in other areas.

“We’ve sort of said everybody in the organization at this point is a fundraiser,” Koshy says. “It’s all hands on deck, where specialization doesn’t truly matter in this day and age.”

It’s impossibly hard to make these decisions, and there’s no way of doing it without hurting someone, he says. He’s also sensitive to what layoffs and furloughs mean for colleagues who are people of color.

“One of the challenges that I feel most acutely generally is just this professional loneliness being a person of color in the fundraising space,” he says. “There’s an element of already being isolated, and then when you have to go through some of these decisions, it can compound that effect.”

For managers who might have to make tough staffing decisions as the pandemic drags on, he recommends being transparent with staff about what might be coming down the road. And continue giving them professional development and training that will help them find another job if that becomes necessary.

During this uncertain time, the personal relationships you’ve built with your team are critical, he says. “That’s the best thing that carries you through these conversations.”

New Opportunities

On the bright side, some fundraisers who lost their jobs during the pandemic have seen searches for new roles progress. Others have lined up part-time consulting work to pay the bills while they look for new staff positions.

Barbara Perlov was laid off from her position as director of foundation and government relations at the Boys’ Club of New York at the end of March. The organization has historically relied on wealthy individuals and events, but Perlov was leading the charge to increase support from institutional donors. Even through the pandemic, she saw great potential. She had been working to build relationships with grant makers.

Getting the news of her layoff “was shocking,” she says. “No doubt about it.”

“Just getting my head wrapped around the fact that my job was ending was pretty emotional,” she says, “not to mention, the personal things going on in my life that I needed to address: what I was going to do about health care, about applying for unemployment.”

But as she started to look at job boards, she was encouraged to see positions that sounded like a good match for her expertise, she says. “I was really happy to see that there were positions.”