Ambitious, multiyear fundraising campaigns require lots of fundraisers — but not just any fundraisers. What’s essential are the skills development professionals bring and how managers deploy their talent.
More organizations than ever are running multiyear campaigns with eye-popping dollar goals. But as donor interests change and competition for fundraising talent grows more intense, many organizations are rethinking the smartest ways to raise such big dollars.
Arthur Ochoa, senior vice president for advancement at Cedar-Sinai, the Los Angeles medical center, completed a $615 million campaign last June and is preparing for another. He quotes a now-departed colleague who helped assemble the campaign team there, on the need for skilled fundraisers, more than sheer numbers of them: “I want Seal Team 6, not the Russian Army.”
And yet such high-skill fundraising jobs are notoriously hard to fill and to keep filled. Between the pressures to raise more and more, the prevalence of poaching, and the financial rewards for fundraising’s top talent, turnover is rife. Fifty-nine percent of organizations struggle to hire and keep enough staff, according to a study released last May by GuideStar, the newly merged organization now called Candid.
Where can organizations find the fundraisers they need to raise millions or billions? Increasingly, they are nurturing their own talent.
Following the pioneering lead of the University of Michigan, which started an internship program more than a decade ago to introduce undergraduates to development work, and followed it up with other mentorship programs, more higher-education institutions are starting their own talent-management offices to find, groom, and keep fundraisers.
“We were spending a lot of money on search firms to manage the vacancies, and we got a lot of résumés over the transom. We needed a staff to manage that business,” says Michael Eicher, who has led $3-billion-plus campaigns at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Johns Hopkins University, and Ohio State University, where he is now president of the foundation.
At Ohio State, the vacancy rate on the fundraising staff averaged 20 percent from 2013 through 2016. In the last two fiscal years, Eicher says, that rate has dropped to single digits, thanks largely to the five-member talent-management operations.
No More ‘Post and Pray’
Rutgers University Foundation, now in the planning phase for a future campaign, opened its talent-management office nearly four years ago with the arrival of veteran recruiter Tahsin Alam. At the time, jobs at the foundation to support Rutgers’ fundraising had a vacancy rate of about 18 percent, a figure that has been cut in half, Alam says.
“Before we built a talent-management shop, the options were basically twofold: One was what I like to call ‘post and pray’: You post a position and pray someone comes in. Or it was, you hire a search firm at an extraordinary price point,” says Alam.
His now 10-member unit completes searches for the foundation’s 267-member staff in an average of five months. It’s built on the “four legs” of services he saw on a research trip to the University of Michigan’s talent-management department:
- Recruitment: finding candidates from entry level to the vice president
- Training, education, and other retention strategies
- Basic human resources, such as payroll and benefits administration
- Organization development, which helps leaders and managers make strategic choices about staffing. For instance, Alam says, “if you’re going to grow a team for a campaign, how are you going to grow it?”
100 Prospective Candidates
When a vacancy opens at the Rutgers foundation at the director of development level or higher, Alam says, the talent-management team first “scopes” the job, determining exactly what that department needs for that position. Then it scours LinkedIn and other sources to identify 100 people who fit that profile. “And then we will reach out to all of them,” Alam says.
“The concept of, we have a vacancy, let’s get an ad up right away, doesn’t exist here,” he says. “You’re only going to find candidates if you proactively go out and find them.”
The in-house team also maintains a database of potential candidates at all times: “We have basically mapped every single development professional in the state of New Jersey into our recruitment system.”
Investing in Everyone
To help keep new hires happy, the foundation’s talent-management office has adopted changes aimed at nurturing employees’ personal and professional lives, Alam says.
Previously, the foundation didn’t allow flexible schedules or much telecommuting; both are now available to employees. It also introduced “summer Fridays,” which let workers take off seven Fridays in the summer without using up vacation time as long as they make up the time on other days.
To enhance professional development, Alam says, the foundation rolled out a training program with 42 classes a year for all advancement staff. The entire program takes three years to complete and covers topics from basic Excel to understanding sophisticated planned-giving vehicles.
The investment in employees’ expertise has paid off, Alam says. “Even administrative assistants are required to take those classes. That has gone a long way toward retaining people.”
Strategies at Every Size
Not every nonprofit has as many fundraisers or resources as the Rutgers University Foundation does. Alam offers some suggestions for organizations of every size that want to hire and keep the best talent.
Big organizations. For staffs of 200 employees or more, “you either get on the talent-management bandwagon now or risk getting left behind in the next three to four years,” Alam warns. He points not only to Michigan but also to Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, the University of Florida, and the University of Washington, among others, as examples of institutions with in-house talent-management shops. Such organizations are saving money by forgoing outside recruiters and finding top fundraisers at a time when, Alam says, “the supply isn’t changing just yet.”
Midsize groups. For organizations with staffs of 80 to 200 workers, he says, “invest in a full-time recruiter and a full-time training and education person.”
Avoid a mistake common to groups at this level, he warns: “Don’t think that you can recruit by having your managers network and call people they know. If it was that easy, I wouldn’t have a career. My recruiters are required to punch out 35 calls a week, or they can find another job. It’s just like annual giving.”
Small organizations. Under 80 staff members? “Put your human-resources department’s feet to the fire. If what you’re doing is posting-and-praying, it’s not going to cut it, especially if you’re in a remote location.”
Collaboration between nonprofits that are not competing for the same donors, such as regional colleges with different alumni bases, could help smaller groups compete in recruitment.
“What if five private schools in New York City, say, threw in $20,000 a year each to hire a shared recruiter and a shared training person?” he asks. “Why not, when your alternative is vacancies for a long time, hiring the wrong people because you get desperate, or shelling out an enormous amount of cash to a search firm?”
