Diversity Isn’t Enough: New Book Offers Guide for Inclusion in Fundraising

Angelique Grant and Ron Schiller both spent decades working in advancement before beginning their work as consultants at the search firm Aspen Leadership Group. Since its founding seven years ago, the firm has been committed to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in nonprofit and higher-education fundraising.

Their new book, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Advancement, doesn’t aim to make the case for the importance of DEI — though the personal stories of diverse fundraisers sprinkled throughout certainly do. Instead it seeks to help readers move beyond awareness to meaningful action — particularly in creating more inclusive workplaces. The book draws on the latest research and the experiences of advancement professionals and offers tools and strategies for making real progress.

“Our numbers of diverse professionals in fundraising and advancement are quite low. And everyone’s still having this conversation: How do we make it more attractive to not only new professionals entering the field but those who are currently there?” Grant says. “A lot of it has to do with inclusive cultures.”

How to Fix Fundraising’s Inclusivity Problem

Nonprofits have learned the hard way that if fundraisers of color don’t feel welcome, they won’t stay. Some organizations are working hard to become more inclusive. Read more:

• Diversity Is Not Enough in Fundraising Offices
• Nonprofit Created Its Own Fundraising Pipeline
• What Nonprofits Are Doing to Increase Diversity in Fundraising.
• How to Keep Women of Color From Leaving the Fundraising Profession (Opinion)
• Where Does Fundraising Go From Here? Black Development Leaders Offer a Guide

Inclusion is not a natural consequence of diversity, she says. “We hear a lot of people say they want to diversify their teams,” she says. “But if no one feels included, whether they’re diverse or not, you’re never going to change the environment they walk into.”

Grant and Schiller spoke with the Chronicle about their recommendations on how to improve recruitment and retention and create more inclusive fundraising workplaces.

The book is filled with the personal stories of diverse fundraisers. They share anecdotes about challenges they have faced and continue to face. You both also included your own stories of feeling marginalized. Why did you decide to do that?

Schiller: Part of the thesis of the book is that the whole industry has been talking for decades about diversity and has been talking for decades about equity. But we think that there has not been sufficient attention to inclusion. Even successful recruitment efforts and diversity have ultimately failed because of lack of retention due to a lack of inclusion. In a way, including so many voices in the book is a way of modeling inclusion. It’s really saying that the pathway through this is getting many perspectives rather than just having one person or a small group of people try to fix it or try to solve it.

Grant: Here’s the thing: We can talk about DEI, but it’s a different story and a different narrative when you have hundreds of other diverse professionals out there echoing and endorsing and almost giving an “amen” that, yes, these challenges still exist.

You write about why creating a DEI statement that articulates an organization’s values is important to create an inclusive culture, both internally and in terms of how organizations engage with donors and volunteers. Why is that statement important? Based on your work with clients, do you get the sense that many organizations have done this?

Grant: Typically, when I see teams that have started on the DEI journey, they started with activity versus developing a purpose or what is it that they’re going to do as it relates to DEI. Sometimes they jump into activity without having a clear understanding as to why they’re approaching this, why they’re deciding that this is important. The statement helps you to have a little bit more clarity in terms of the “why.”

Schiller: Having that statement also means that you’ve gone through the process of assessing where you are in your DEI journey. You’ve actually thought about strategies and thought about goals and measurable objectives. That speaks volumes, particularly in search, to candidates. We ask for these statements for every search that we do, and my guess is probably only one in 10 organizations actually has one. Most of them provide something that is a very outdated equal-opportunity statement that could have been written 30 or 40 years ago.

Teresa Earnest, Aspen Leadership Group

If you can connect DEI to your mission, then your staff members and your volunteers understand that it’s actually central to the work. Our mission demands that we engage all of our constituents rather than just some. Our mission demands that we be able to raise money from all of our potential donors, not just some. If each organization thinks about why strengthening diversity and inclusion actually makes a difference in delivering on the mission, then everyone understands that it’s just part of the job and it’s part of everything that I do as opposed to that activity that we do on Wednesday afternoon or that training that we have to have next month.

You write that one of the most effective ways to create and sustain an inclusive workplace is to establish an inclusion council — a group of employees who help their organization make the best decisions by tapping into the perspectives offered by a diverse team. What are a few specific things that people involved in inclusion councils can do to make sure that their colleagues stay focused on DEI efforts?

Grant: It’s always good for the inclusion council to have a charge. They’re the group that, one, takes the lead on DEI with everyone participating, and, two, they’re the accountability partner for the organization. Inclusion counsels shouldn’t be delegated all of the work of DEI — that should be everybody’s work. But they could be the ones who help provide a resource or support or encouragement or reminders around goals. They help all of us stay accountable to the goals that we all set together.

Schiller: Partly what we’re trying to do here, all of us collectively, is to change behavior and change habits. And when we get busy with trying to meet that fundraising goal or trying to get that alumni board meeting scheduled or get that event off the ground, we can fall back into old habits and forget to take the time to put that new idea through the DEI lens. The inclusion council, if it’s charged to do that, can help keep people from falling back into those habits by reminding them of what the DEI goals are.

If an inclusion council is charged with helping with recruitment, they might recognize that a hiring manager is actually only involved in hiring somebody every three years or so. That hiring manager may not necessarily keep up-to-date on the most inclusive approaches to search or the most inclusive language for job descriptions — the practices around recruitment that will yield stronger results in diversity and equity. And so an inclusion council could be that go-to resource. They could be looking across the whole organization and have that expertise to help all hiring managers, for example.

You write about the importance of considering “nontraditional candidates” when recruiting and hiring fundraisers. Have you found that institutions have a hard time changing their way of thinking about this, especially as the field has professionalized?

Schiller: We often laugh with each other and our team members because really none of us came to fundraising right out of school thinking that that’s what we were going to do. In a way, nontraditional has been traditional for decades in this profession.

As we’ve matured as a profession, there are people who very quickly forget that they themselves and most of their team members came from other fields where they had developed the skills and abilities that they needed, and they only want to hire somebody who already has five or 10 years of fundraising experience. That certainly gets in the way of increasing diversity in the field if we’re only hiring from within a field that’s not particularly diverse. We’re encouraging our clients to think about their own experiences coming into the profession.

Grant: A lot of organizations are open to having this discussion, but sometimes they’re a little hesitant with hiring at the end of the day. We do need to be a little bit more open when it comes to candidates with those core competencies — whether it’s strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, relationship building, etc. — and help to support candidates who are coming in with transferable skills. Some of that you can train; it’s just taking the time to do that.

You write that adding a new team member means that the whole team is new in some ways and suggest that the entire team be involved integrating a new hire into the organization. What does that look like when done well?

Grant: We found that onboarding is one of those keys to retention. There’s a statistic that 90 percent of employees decide whether they’re going to stay within the first six months. Onboarding actually starts right after the candidate signs the offer letter and before they actually even arrive.

Teresa Earnest, Aspen Leadership Group

Orientation is different than onboarding. Orientation is a great time to sit down and learn about your benefits and spend eight hours in one room, whereas onboarding could be 90 days, six months, up to a year, because it’s that full transition of connecting this new employee, especially if they’re a diverse employee, with members of the team who can help support them along the way — mentors both within the organization and outside.

Now that they’re there, diversity is representation, and inclusion is the participation piece. So it makes sense to have everyone become part of the onboarding part, the inclusive part where you’re creating these opportunities for them to connect and identify and see themselves within the organization.

Schiller: Employees are much more likely to stay, not because of a loyalty to the institution per se but to people. Maybe it’s to the leaders of the institution because they really like them and respect them. Maybe it’s the people who are being served by the organization because they feel a connection or a passion for that work. Maybe it’s because of their supervisor. Maybe it’s because of their team members. Everybody on the team can contribute to a new employee’s sense of stickiness.

We’ve been polling people when we do presentations about the book, and whereas most of them have at least some kind of orientation program, only about a third, and always less than half, report that they have a robust onboarding program. Maybe a third don’t have any at all. It’s one of those things that’s not that difficult to do and can have a very powerful impact on inclusion and on retention.

Can you talk about the idea of “stay conversations,” which aim to keep employees engaged, reinforce their value, and identify challenges that could lead the employee to leave? Why those are especially important in the context of DEI? What kind of questions can managers ask in those conversations to get a sense of whether the people they manage feel included?

Schiller: Just the way we do it with our volunteers and with our donors, when we really respect them, we ask them “Why are you here? Why are you giving so generously to this organization? Why is it important to you?” When we learn that, we’re so much better equipped to engage them and to propose gifts to donors that they will really enjoy giving. It’s the same thing with staff and team members. If we really understand why they’re there and what they’re trying to get out of it and what they care about, we can do a much better job including them at the right moments, in the right meetings, and the right conversations.

It really shows that idea of partnership, that we depend on you and you depend on us to have success on this team. They’re just going to feel that they have something valuable and important to contribute and to learn.

Grant: When you think about retention of diverse professionals, trust is a huge factor. You oftentimes have conversations with supervisors and they’re not as supportive as you’d like. And so the stay conversations are beneficial to help build that trust and enhance that relationship.

A lot of the best practices you talk about in the book seem applicable to a variety of fields beyond fundraising. But the chapter about campaigns explains why those moments present a unique opportunity to make strides in inclusion in fundraising. Why is that?

Schiller: Campaigns are a moment of a lot of energy, and usually some additional resources are going to be available, and so there is an opportunity to accelerate the things you can do outside of a campaign. All of these things we’ve been talking about you can do whether you’re in a campaign or not, but a campaign can get you that concentrated energy and focus and extra resources and extra attention on the part of leaders, on the part of donors, volunteers, everybody.

Grant: Campaigns are a moment where everyone is involved, but traditionally we’ve not really approached our campaigns with inclusion at its core. Now it’s time to break the mold and tweak it and question everything along the way — look at it from a marketing and communications perspective. What images are we using? Are we truly being inclusive as it relates to our campaign leadership? Are we leaving out some really key players and volunteers who can make a huge impact on the campaign because of the “give and get” policy or because of something else that we may have embedded in our minds?

Each chapter ends with a list of action items to help fundraising teams move from awareness to action. But there are other important steps in between, right?

Schiller: A lot of our work in this profession has been around awareness building. That’s very important, but it’s not enough. DEI trainings are very important, but they’re not enough. Reading books and building knowledge is important, but it’s not enough.

Springing directly from awareness to activity is something that is to be commended because it means people are awakened and they want to do something. But activity that is isolated or disconnected or not springing from an assessment and a plan doesn’t stick.

It really is important to take the time to assess where you and your team and your organization are on your journey to get honest feedback about that from your volunteers and donors and others. And then make plans and set measurable goals so that you can move forward in a sustained way. You need that full range from awareness to assessment to aspiration to action and having accountability.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.