During her years leading fundraising efforts at Harvard, Tamara Rogers has worked with some stellar development officers. Her staff helped raise $9.6 billion, the most ever accumulated in a comprehensive campaign. But even the likes of Harvard finds it challenging from time to time to fill fundraising slots.
Usually those jobs are claimed by people with extensive experience in development. But sometimes the right person comes from another industry or specialty entirely, she says, and that is one way to work around the perennial shortage of top-flight fundraisers.
You need to put in the time. Do they have that work ethic to slow-cook it and not look at the microwave?
“It does feel like broadening the pool is one solution, instead of the endless iterations of the same people all the time,” says Rogers, who is stepping down this month after 12 years in her role.
Nonprofits that struggle to attract seasoned fundraisers because they can’t afford to pay top dollar are especially turning to nontraditional candidates, suggests Aly Sterling, who leads a fundraising consulting company in Toledo, Ohio, that also helps clients find development professionals.
Groups that look outside the profession often want to avoid recycling the same fundraisers who hop from job to job in their communities, Sterling says. “They want someone who’s doing it for the right reasons and is not going to use it as a turnstile.”
4 Key Traits
When evaluating anyone who aspires to a fundraising job, Sterling says, employers should focus on four traits:
Attitude. “They have that energy that other people are naturally attracted to.”
Aptitude. The candidate has the ability to learn the nuts and bolts of fundraising.
Attention to detail. “You can’t forgo that,” Sterling says. “Fundraising is so uniquely personal, and we can do so much harm if we don’t have that attention.”
Empathy. This is the most important trait of all, the consultant says. “We joke in our office and call it the ‘empathy chip.’ If someone doesn’t have it, we can’t work with that. They’ll come across as a salesperson selling a widget. And we’re not selling widgets.”
Marketing, sales, and communications fields often yield good candidates, Sterling says. But retired executives, especially veterans of the C-suite, can make great fundraisers. “They have great networks. They can put energy behind it like I’ve never seen,” she says. “I would take that candidate every day over any other one.”
Ira Madin, executive vice president of PNP Staffing Group, says he often gets pressure from the boards of his clients’ organizations to hire from other industries, such as finance.
“Finance is really very difficult,” says Madin. “It’s too black and white, and fundraising is very gray. They’re too buttoned up. You have to be an ebb-and-flow type person in fundraising.”
He is more skeptical than Sterling or Rogers of candidates from nonfundraising backgrounds but says fields where building relationships is paramount can yield good candidates — public relations and advertising, for instance. “Human resources is a good one,” Madin says. “If you’re working in HR, you’re trying to create relationships, fill jobs, negotiate contracts.” Such skills may translate well to the business of cultivating and negotiating gifts.
Questions to Ask
So what should a recruiter ask of candidates for a fundraising job when they have no fundraising background to explore? Here are some suggestions:
Why this job? The candidate can apply to any of dozens of charities. Why this particular one? “In fundraising, no matter how junior or senior, you are going to be asked about that elevator speech,” Madin says. “Every dollar you raise can change somebody’s life.”
Because fundraising is so dependent on storytelling skills, a recruiter should be listening for candidates to talk about their connection to the cause.
Why did you move on from your previous jobs? As with a candidate who comes from a fundraising background, a careful look at the time spent at previous jobs can help weed out chronic job hoppers. Durations of less than two years should raise red flags, Madin says, especially since building relationships with donors requires long-term cultivation. “You need to put in the time,” he says. “Do they have that work ethic to slow-cook it and not look at the microwave?”
Tell us about your biggest success — and your biggest failure. Since you can’t ask about how candidates secured gifts, you need to find the equivalent in their field, Sterling says. What were the factors that contributed to the success? And what lessons did they take from the failure?
Do you work in a team? Candidates who are used to collaboration are more likely to be collegial in a development office, says Rogers, who once worked as a search consultant. Beware, she says, of people who take full credit for successes. This is equivalent to fundraisers boasting that they alone secured a big donation — which is rarely how it actually happens.
Have you ever had to make a case for something? “It could be with a staff person, with anyone,” Rogers says. Walk through that: How did they do it? How did they think about it?
How have you overcome a “no” answer? “You need to be relentless, because it takes 20 ‘no’s’ to get to a ‘yes’ in fundraising,” says Madin. The candidate’s answer should reveal how that person strategizes and implements that strategy.
What constituencies do you work with in your current job? Are there challenges? How do you deal with them? “Frontline fundraising is so much about working with people, establishing motivations, and having the judgment when things turn in a direction you didn’t expect, which happens all the time,” Rogers says.
Tell us about a large, significant purchase you’ve made. What happened? This question, Sterling says, is also good to ask job candidates who have lots of fundraising experience. Ask how they researched, whom they sought advice from, and what the transaction and follow-up were like. “What we’re trying to communicate to them is that a charitable gift is no different: It’s an investment, and the donors have all the same tools at their fingertips,” Sterling says.
How do you volunteer your time? “We try to, without getting too personal, ask about any family causes they support,” Sterling says. You’re looking here for personal stories and signs of empathy, not just a recitation of board memberships.
“I always ask about what they find rewarding in their volunteer work because that can be particularly revealing,” Rogers says.
Setting Up for Success
Once a nontraditional candidate is hired, managers need to keep in mind the ways in which the new staff member’s previous job differs from fundraising and help create an environment where they can succeed. This goes beyond providing training in the nuts and bolts of raising money, experts say.
For instance: Rogers, who moved to a fundraising position at Harvard after years in the university’s admissions office, says she needed to get up to speed on financial matters when she started. New fundraisers whose previous jobs did not require them to work with money may also need that help.
Soon after she started in development, Rogers says, “one of my volunteers who was in finance sat me down and just walked me through a lot of finance stuff: What was the difference between a hedge fund and private equity?”
The lessons stuck: “I started reading the Wall Street Journal so I could better understand the world from which many of our donors were coming.”
People from a sales or marketing background, Sterling says, may struggle with the notion of selling a mission rather than a tangible product.
All nontraditional hires, she adds, will need a clear, early idea about how their performance will be evaluated. “Don’t leave them to their own devices,” Sterling says. New fundraisers may need you to check in on their progress more often, perhaps once a month if the standard for more experienced development officers is quarterly or annually.
Also, people coming from other fields may need help organizing their time. When nontraditional hires don’t succeed, Sterling says, it’s often because they come from a job where they performed a diverse set of tasks during their day or week and find the narrow scope of a gift officer’s job frustrating.
“The organization has to make their job as closely tied to the mission as possible,” Sterling says. The new hires need to be immersed in the charity’s programs, for instance, and to collaborate with its leaders.
Otherwise, she says, “it can be deflating for a fundraiser who thought they were going to be part of the pulse of that nonprofit. It happens a lot, and it can become a very dull line of work if you are just dialing and meeting with [donors] and aren’t allowed to become part of the inner workings of that organization.”
