Twentysomething fund raisers find age poses a challenge in dealings with co-workers and donors
Daniel Musher was 24 when he began his first job as a fund raiser at a small community-development organization.
When his boss began to tease him about his age and said he was young enough to be her son, at first he laughed along with her.
“I really did not consider it to be a bad thing,” he says. “I thought the border between mother and mentor was pretty blurry, and I just went with it.”
But the jokes got old.
“After a while it got, like, ‘Okay, I’m not a kid anymore,’” he says.
As their professional relationship progressed, Mr. Musher, now 27, says he realized his boss was treating him like a child in other ways. He says she was very controlling, micromanaged him, and did not seem to trust him to do his job. Eventually, his strained relationship with his boss caused him to leave the charity. He is now director of development at the Animal Rescue League of Western Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh.
College Recruiting
Like Mr. Musher, many fund raisers younger than 30 say their age is a problem, particularly in dealings with older board members, co-workers, executive directors, and donors.
The number of young fund raisers is likely to grow fast in coming years. A dearth of fund raisers has already led many charities to seek out young workers, plus many organizations expect a large number of fund raisers to retire over the next decade or so as the first wave of baby boomers turns 60 next year.
The Association of Fundraising Professionals is so concerned about the shortage of fund raisers that this fall it will open nine new collegiate chapters at Indiana University at Indianapolis and eight other cities and towns where colleges or universities offer nonprofit courses. Members of each chapter will select a project or cause to raise money for and get help from older, more experienced fund raisers. The students will receive instruction and training in fund-raising ethics, solicitation techniques, and related topics from their older colleagues.
“We are seeing a graying of the profession, and we want to bring folks into fund raising,” says Lori Gusdorf, the association’s vice president for membership.
Different Types of Experience
Young fund raisers tend to come from a background very different from older development officers, who often turned to fund raising after leaving other careers.
Many young people have made deliberate efforts to prepare for nonprofit careers, in part because more academic programs are available to them. The number of colleges that offer nonprofit-related courses to undergraduates has jumped 83 percent in the past decade, from 72 to 132, while the number of colleges and universities that offer degree programs in nonprofit management (graduate or undergraduate) has jumped 46 percent, from 179 to 262, according to Roseanne M. Mirabella, a Seton Hall University researcher.
Many new graduates with such degrees are pursuing fund-raising positions. Not only are job openings plentiful, but a fund-raising career can also mean a high salary compared with other charity jobs. It is not just the educational background of young fund raisers, however, that can cause culture clashes in fund-raising offices.
Youthful impatience and a working style that differs from that of older colleagues can also cause trouble, says Chad Linzy, 34, a Kansas City, Mo., fund-raising consultant who worked with young fund raisers at the Kansas City Art Institute. Their mind-set, he says, “can conflict with that of older generations, whose philosophy may be, ‘You do it because I’m telling you to do it. You don’t question why.’”
He says that managers of young fund raisers can help prevent such conflicts by taking time to provide their younger colleagues with additional information and offer them training opportunities. And young fund raisers can often take steps themselves to turn around difficult situations.
Following are some of the biggest challenges young development officers say they have faced, as well as a look at how they overcame them:
Lack of respect. Many young fund raisers say that co-workers or donors often mention their age, and in some cases, colleagues ask them point-blank how old they are.
While such comments and questions may seem harmless, fund raisers interpret the comments as a sign that they are not being taken seriously. Amie Latterman, 28, a fund raiser at Child Family Health International, in San Francisco, says she resents being asked her age by older colleagues, “mainly because there is no way in heck I could turn around and say, ‘What’s your age?’”
In other cases, young development officers say they are shut out by older donors or board members. Matthew Fieldman, 26, who in July left the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington to take a fund-raising job at Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, says he knew of at least one donor at the federation who avoided working with him because of his age, which he found out about from his supervisor.
“Occasionally, a donor will go over my head to my supervisors, who they relate to better or they think understands them better,” he says, adding that he tries not to take such situations personally or let them interfere with his on-the-job confidence.
He says young fund raisers “shouldn’t be afraid to have important, high-level meetings with 75-year-old donors to talk about endowment funds and bequests and stuff like that,” he says. “No one is more qualified to talk about the next generation than the next generation.”
Fund raisers like Mr. Fieldman say they can look past the remarks from donors -- it is disparaging comments from co-workers and board members that are difficult to handle.
“It’s definitely hard to be taken seriously, and not so much from our donors but from our colleagues,” says Jennifer Phelps, 29, director of development at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Beachwood, Ohio, who began her fund-raising career 10 years ago when she spent the summer after her freshman year at Butler University working at a small arts-education organization. “There’s this mentality of, ‘You’re young, and what could you possibly know?’ That has never been an issue for me with donors -- it’s always been an internal issue.”
While such a working environment can undermine a young fund raiser’s self-confidence, Ms. Phelps says, it is also a sign that he or she may need to be more assertive.
“The best way to prove yourself is to do just that: Prove yourself,” she says. “Take on additional responsibilities, follow projects through, and prove that you’re capable and have ideas worth listening to. Once you start speaking up and people start hearing you, it’s amazing how quickly they turn around.”
She recalls doing that at her first postcollege job at WFYI, a public-broadcasting station in Indianapolis, where she says she was hired at a low salary to do data-entry and administrative work. However, she made an effort to prove herself by asking for more responsibility and more tasks, and within less than a year, she had been promoted twice, finally to director of major gifts, corporate gifts, and grants. She says her attitude “earned me additional respect from my well-seasoned peers.”
Low pay. Young fund raisers tend to make significantly less money than their older colleagues, in part because they have less experience but also because they tend to work at small charities. A survey of 664 fund raisers released this year by the Association of Fundraising Professionals found that those aged 25 to 34 earn an average salary of $53,054, compared with an $80,685 average for fund raisers of all ages.
But charities that pay young people too little may soon be left scrambling, even for entry-level positions, when baby boomers start exiting the work force, says Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University and director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution.
“Young Americans do not expect to spend much time at any given job. They don’t have much loyalty to any employer,” he says. “Nonprofit organizations can’t expect people to stay because they love the job, because there are bills to pay at the end of the day, including those college loans we impose on young people.”
Many young fund raisers say they are resigned to leaving their current jobs to get a decent pay increase.
“I have been told, ‘You need to leave in order to get paid more,’ or ‘You have a lot of years ahead of you. You’ll make the pay when you deserve it,’” says Carrie Keller, 28.
Ms. Keller took the advice and left the American Diabetes Association, where she solicited planned gifts, to move to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, where she says she makes 60 percent more than she did at her old job. She says her new position is similar to her old job.
Lack of fund-raising experience. Young people with limited experience in development can have a tough time landing their first fund-raising job, even when they have college degrees that taught them how to manage nonprofit organizations.
Elizabeth Kritz, 25, a fund raiser at St. Tammany Hospital Foundation, in Covington, La., graduated with a human-services management degree from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Many of her courses exposed her to the “nitty-gritty of nonprofits,” Ms. Kritz says. She learned how to create new nonprofit organizations, complete nonprofit financial statements, and plan fund-raising events. She also helped organize fund-raising events at her sorority.
But when Ms. Kritz began seeking a fund-raising job, she says that many large charities told her she didn’t have enough experience, even for an entry-level position. She says she got her current job because the foundation is fairly new and small and because she set up an informational interview to meet her future boss before any position was available, a tactic she says “showed that I was driven, that I took initiative.”
Would-be fund raisers who earn master’s degrees in nonprofit management often face a double challenge from potential employers: a perceived lack of experience while at the same time being judged as overqualified.
Toby Fox, 29, who received a dual master’s degree from Indiana University at Indianapolis in nonprofit management and public administration in the spring of 2004 -- in addition to having held nonprofit jobs that involved program administration, event planning, and some grant-proposal writing -- says her search for a development position was frustrating.
“Many entry-level jobs didn’t want me and assumed, sometimes erroneously, that because of my education I wouldn’t work for the salary offered,” she says. At the same time, she said, when she applied for middle-to-upper-management positions, she was turned away because of a lack of practical experience.
She eventually landed a fund-raising job at a small organization, the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center, in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Fund-raising experience is critical, says Ms. Phelps of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. Almost one year older than Ms. Fox and a classmate of hers in the Indiana University master’s program, Ms. Phelps had spent seven years in fund raising, starting with a paid internship as a development assistant with a small arts organization, before entering the master’s program.
Ms. Phelps says that she started fund raising early, not only to advance her development career but also to make sure she enjoyed working at nonprofit organizations before spending the time and money to get a master’s degree. She says she chose to get her master’s degree to improve her chances of becoming a chief fund raiser or an executive director of a nonprofit organization. Even so, “the hands-on experience is still the most appealing to people,” she says.
Age-related work habits. Differences in working styles between younger and older workers sometimes create tensions in development offices, says Mr. Linzy, adding that some young fund raisers he worked with came across as impatient, even impudent, to older colleagues.
Mary Matlock, 25, who raises big gifts at the University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, says impatience is a quality that many young people share and a trait that is particularly hard to tame in a fund-raising job.
“We’re living in a society that pushes people to produce results very quickly,” she says. “People are looking for instant gratification. That’s a very common trait that people my age and younger have. But when you get into fund raising, it’s a slow process. Very slow.”
“Development work requires patience, because you’re not on your schedule,” says Mr. Linzy. “It’s the donor’s schedule. And when you have an older donor in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, they’re not going to make this decision quickly.”
Ms. Matlock says she has overcome her own impatience by finding small achievements to celebrate, such as teaching a potential donor something new about the college or conveying to donors what the institution has accomplished with their gifts. “You can celebrate a lot of things through stewardship or feel rewarded because you make someone feel good about something they’ve done in the past,” she says.
Another characteristic some managers have noted about younger people in the so-called “Generation Y” -- those born from 1980 to 1994 -- is the tendency to ask “why?” in response to work they are asked to undertake. In his book, Employing Generation Why?, Eric Chester writes: “Generation Why wants answers, not commands. They demand reasons and rationale, so the traditional ‘because I said so’ isn’t going to cut it.”
Like other young fund raisers, Ms. Kritz, of St. Tammany Hospital Foundation, says she has made mistakes and become frustrated as a result of not getting complete information. “Being younger, you’re expected to learn as you go,” she says. “If people would take the time to teach you or to explain one thing here and there to you, you’d learn much more quickly. You can really help the organization if you get the big picture.”
Mr. Linzy says young fund raisers’ questions, while they may irritate older colleagues, bode well for their organizations.
“It shows a lot of interest and passion about what they’re doing -- they want to learn more,” he says, adding that he encourages young fund raisers to ask questions but to phrase them in a respectful way to avoid conflict on the job. He advises: “You say ‘Listen, I really want to learn. Explain to me why I’m doing this, so next time I know how to do it better.’”
Holly Hall contributed to this article.