Over the next five years, the University of Florida will add at least 40 frontline fundraisers to its payroll. Most will probably be seasoned pros but not all. Some are likely to be teachers skilled at tending toddlers, not the wealthy. Coaches and former athletes could be part of the mix, and a few may even come from Disney World, just down the road.
It might seem the height of folly to recruit fundraisers from the Magic Kingdom, but Florida officials have a plan. They are methodically building a system to identify the DNA of good fundraisers, then find people from all walks of life who fill the bill. Their early research suggests they’ll find talent in unconventional places, including Mickey Mouse’s headquarters.
Urgency, if not alarm, drives Florida’s work and efforts like it elsewhere. For the better part of a decade, nonprofits have grappled with a shortage of fundraisers that has damaging second-order effects: inflated salaries, marathon hiring searches, and frequent turnover as staff members get poached. The supply-demand imbalance is no better today, observers say, if only because the pressure to raise money grows exponentially.
“What organization or institution is not either planning a campaign, going into a campaign, or in a campaign?” says Lois Lindauer, a Boston recruiter. “There just aren’t enough fundraisers to go around.”
Many nonprofits wring their hands at their plight, then ransack budgets to pay top dollar. Even that doesn’t assure a good hire, as the thin pool of talent means well-credentialed candidates often prove duds.
Left at the mercy of this fickle market for years, some groups are fighting back. They’re trying out new ways to attract, groom, and retain talent, some borrowing ideas from business. Many are for the first time thinking hard about the job of fundraising and its practitioners. What are the personal qualities of good fundraisers? What are their secrets to success? What motivates them and makes them feel fulfilled?
It’s hard to know whether these new strategies will help Florida and others that need talent immediately. Yet in the long run, they hold the potential to change the profession itself.
War for Talent
The corporate world arrived at a similar crossroads in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following research by McKinsey & Company that foresaw a “war for talent” as a paucity of human capital threatened American business. From these concerns emerged “talent management,” a strategy in which a company assesses its long-term personnel demands and then makes it a top company priority to answer its most critical needs. In their most robust form, corporate talent-management offices oversee and design everything related to the hiring, professional growth, and retention of essential employees.
Ideas of talent management soon found their way into the nonprofit world. The University of California at Los Angeles opened an office of strategic talent management in 2008, hiring Amy Rueda, a veteran corporate recruiter, as its director. University officials, Ms. Rueda says, were concerned that the shallow pool of fundraising talent would affect the upcoming campaign to mark the university’s centennial.
Today, with the $4.2-billion campaign under way, Ms. Rueda’s office conducts about 25 advancement searches a year. The best candidates, she says, “are likely going to be passive candidates: They will be in their jobs, with their head down, raising money. And that’s who I want.”
Ms. Rueda’s staff includes someone who handles candidate research and marketing, a recruiter, and a budget manager who doubles as “candidate concierge” to manage the travel details of a prospect’s visit and ensure what Ms. Rueda calls “a white-glove, high-touch product.”
Other universities are revving up recruitment as well — an acknowledgment that fundraisers are critical to their mission. The University of Texas system recently hired a seasoned recruiter and aims to pursue top fundraisers as aggressively as it recruits talent for the classroom, labs, and athletics. “If we want a star scientist or a star faculty member or a great football coach, we put the resources together and make it happen,” says Randa Safady, the system’s vice chancellor for external relations. “You don’t cast a net; you go after the ones you really want. We have to look at development in the same way.”
Searching Within
Such high-octane recruitment is only a piece of the talent-management puzzle, and one that many nonprofits can’t afford. Still, across the industry, groups big and small are turning inward to improve how they manage, develop, and nurture fundraising talent.
This is new for a field once staffed by an informal network of cocktail-party regulars and country-club veterans, says Charles Katzenmeyer, vice president for institutional advancement at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Forty years ago, nobody decided they would go into fundraising. It was sort of, ‘You can play golf; you’d be a good fundraiser.’”
Though a movement to professionalize fundraising has been building for some time, it’s now accelerating as an answer to the talent shortage. “Across the industry, we’re recognizing that investing in the professionalization of philanthropy can have a big effect,” says Mr. Katzenmeyer, who heads the development section of the American Alliance of Museums.
Research consistently suggests that high turnover rates stem from a less-than-professional approach to management. A survey of 660 frontline fundraisers by the consulting firm Bentz Whaley Flessner found that poor leadership and “unrealistic expectations” were key drivers of dissatisfaction. Because their field lacks natural career ladders, major-gift officers — particularly those not interested in management positions — often jump to new jobs to find new challenges and opportunities for growth, says Cynthia Schaal, who leads philanthropy research for the Advisory Board Company, a consulting firm for health care and higher education. “They’re hungry for advancement and recognition.”
In response, many nonprofits are retooling management structures. To ease incoming fundraisers into their jobs, chief development officers and their new hires are setting performance measures together, often phasing them in over the first 18 months to two years. Organizations are also mapping out career paths; top gift officers are being offered chances to informally mentor others, for instance, or manage transformational gifts — a role that puts them in coveted partnership with an institution’s top leaders.
Many nonprofits are answering the call for talent management by creating in-house professional-development programs. These programs help organizations stand out from the crowd, demonstrating to job candidates that the staff is valued. But groups are also betting that investment in training will help promising talent blossom and give top performers opportunities for growth.
“Organizations are looking at what they don’t yet offer fundraisers,” says Penny Hunt, a principal with the Marts and Lundy consulting firm. “And employee-satisfaction surveys time and again rate professional development as a major interest.”
United Way Worldwide introduced basic fundraising coursework two years ago, and it’s grown nearly threefold to draw some 900 people. In Chicago, nine museums brought together more than 100 fundraisers for a conference featuring discussion with top donors, sessions on corporate- and foundation-relations strategies, and examples of how to work with auxiliaries.
Fifteen health-care systems are creating a fellowship program in which rising fundraising stars will learn from the best. Bill Littlejohn, chief executive of Sharp HealthCare Foundation in San Diego, wants to build a veritable farm system that will produce more health-care-savvy fundraiser candidates than can be found in the marketplace. He says outside executive-search firms, while helpful, tend to trot out the same pool of candidates time and again. He has hired fundraisers from universities, but they struggled to master the work for a large, complex health-care institution. None stayed long. “You have to grow your talent more than recruit it,” Mr. Littlejohn says.
The University of Texas system recently launched an “advancement academy” that aims to groom talent for the future, with training for all levels of its 880 development officials. But the academy is also viewed as a hothouse where top performers at each of the system’s 15 institutions can feed off each other’s ideas and energy and find room to grow. One recent seminar brought together 55 fundraisers to learn strategies for transformational gifts and how to work with academic leaders to create a center or program.
At many sessions, the academy brings in a national expert for training tailored to a large public university. “We’re able to put our fingerprint on the content of the seminar,” says Kevin Foyle, vice president for development at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “With the big conferences, you’re at the mercy of those organizations to drive the content.”
An ‘Entrepreneurial Spirit’
Tom Mitchell, vice president for development at the University of Florida, has been building a vast talent-management system since he arrived in 2010 from the University of California at Irvine. It’s envied across higher education, with features such as an in-house recruiter; coursework on gift planning, corporate and foundation relations, and more; and an advisory group of outside experts who include an alumna who leads talent acquisition for Nationwide Insurance.
Recently, Florida began studying its top performers and figuring out what makes them tick. The effort posits that, like with fighter pilots, there is a “right stuff” for greatness. Mr. Mitchell hired an outside firm to interview the best gift officers at Florida and determine their shared skills and personal attributes. That research yielded what he believes are eight “core competencies” of top fundraisers, including “tenacity,” “strategic thinking,” and “entrepreneurial spirit.”
Other organizations profiling top fundraisers include United Way Worldwide, which has come up with five core competencies to guide the chief executives of its nearly 1,200 chapters as they hire fundraisers; and the Advisory Board, which surveyed major-gift officers and chief development officers to rank the value of 10 core competencies. Interestingly, these efforts hit common themes. Each, for example, contends that great fundraisers are results-driven people.
At Florida, the talent-management office is using the core competencies in its search for new fundraisers. Given the dearth of proven talent, it is looking outside development to fields that might have individuals with the potential to be great.
In its first efforts, Florida may try to recruit active alumni (with either strong giving or volunteer records) who are coaches, former athletes, or schoolteachers. Educators, Mr. Mitchell says, have transferable skills and attributes that might make them excellent fundraisers. “They’re typically very well organized. They’re typically excellent communicators. They have to stand up in front of a classroom and exhibit leadership skills. And they’re very good at relationship building.”
The shortage of fundraisers is so dire that many organizations have no choice but to shop outside the development arena, says Marian DeBerry of Campbell and Company, a Chicago-based executive recruiter. “No matter what your resources are, you can’t add to the development profession as fast as people are needed.”
In its search to hire a senior director of major gifts, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has asked its outside recruiter to consider candidates from sales. “The really talented professional fundraisers are all locked up by academia and hospitals,” says Ray Hord, chief development officer. “It’s less important for me to have someone straight from the nonprofit arena than that person has a passion for selling ideas.”
Fundraisers in the Pipeline
Perhaps the biggest solution to the fundraiser shortage may lie in a collective effort to draw millennials and Generation Z into the field. A small band of nonprofit leaders came together this spring as Philanthropy 2030, a quasi-think tank to consider how to expand the pipeline of fundraisers over the next 15 years. The group is studying how to raise the profile of fundraising as an honorable, exciting profession pivotal to solving society’s problems.
Tom Mitchell, however, can’t wait until 2030 for an influx of talent. The University of Florida’s last campaign, completed in 2012, raised $1.7-billion, and the goal for the next one, now in its quiet phase, will undoubtedly be higher. To fill out his ranks of fundraisers, he’s working every angle.
Recently, he even consulted with coaches of the university’s powerhouse basketball and football teams — a group that has quite a few insights about talent management, he says.
Will all this effort net more fundraising dollars? That’s the bet Florida is making, Mr. Mitchell says. “We’ve decided to be an organization that values talent and builds talent. If we can manage the people side of our business, we believe the numbers will come.”