Dearth of senior-level applicants is taking a major toll on charities
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a small advocacy group in Washington,
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searched in vain for more than a year for a fund raiser who could get big gifts.
Princeton University spent 16 months looking for a development officer to seek five- and six-figure contributions. The university offered the job to three different qualified fund raisers but none of them accepted, despite a generous salary and good benefits.
Those organizations are not atypical. As more and more charities seek large donations from individuals, the demand for senior fund raisers has exceeded the supply. That is not only thwarting charities’ ability to expand their fund raising; it is also driving salaries up. Even fund raisers with little experience are commanding $70,000 or more, making it all but impossible for many small groups to compete for large gifts.
Richard Page Allen, president of RPA Inc., an executive-search and consulting firm in Williamsport, Pa., has witnessed the effects of the tight job market. “You used to be able to give out six names, and they’d hire one and you’d collect your fee,” says Mr. Allen, whose company has conducted 26 national searches for senior fund raisers in as many months. “Even four years ago, it was fairly easy. We were making 100 calls per search. Now we never have a search that requires less than 500 phone calls. In one, we made 1,200 calls.”
Some headhunters have stopped doing fund-raising searches altogether. Kristine Morris, president of Morris Berger, a Pasadena, Cal., recruiting firm that works with charities, says that, with rare exceptions, she will no longer handle fund-raising positions. “We turned down 25 to 30 searches last year,” she says. “They are just too difficult.”
To deal with the worsening shortage of qualified fund raisers, some non-profit organizations, including the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, are training current employees to ask for big donations. Other charities, with mixed results, have started recruiting people from fields such as corporate marketing or sales. Still others hope to entice fund raisers with incentives like paid sabbaticals or bonuses for staying on the job for a set amount of time.
Fund-raising experts point to a number of trends behind the job-market crunch, including government cutbacks that have caused scores of institutions like public schools and libraries to go after private donations in earnest.
In addition, health charities, religious groups, environmental organizations, and others are moving away from fund-raising methods like direct mail and special events and starting major-gifts programs and capital or endowment campaigns. And at institutions accustomed to seeking big gifts, particularly colleges and universities, the frequency -- and monetary goals -- of such campaigns have exploded.
“We have a collision of campaigns in this country,” says Sue Washburn of Washburn & McGoldrick, a Latham, N.Y., fund-raising firm that advises educational institutions. “If they are not having one, they’re talking about it. This has increased the need for bodies.”
Another factor just beginning to affect the supply of fund raisers: Foreign institutions are looking to the United States for experienced fund raisers.
“There are more and more opportunities for fund raisers overseas,” says Manny Berger, director of Isaacson, Miller, a Boston recruiting firm. “The English marketplace, for instance, is really starting to come alive. Elite institutions on down are starting to get serious about fund raising, but they do not have the talent in those countries.”
With the demand for fund raisers so high, charities are competing for a shrinking pool of people who have a track record of winning big gifts.
“When you’re trying to find a person with a high level of experience, the ethical approach to fund raising, and all that, it’s a very short list that comes to mind,” says Tim Seiler, director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis.
When the center conducted a nearly year-long search to find a director of development, Mr. Seiler recalls, “I would call other colleagues and ask them if they had any ideas. They’d say, ‘No, I’m doing a search myself and having a difficult time.’”
Charity executives say they are dismayed by the lack of experience and motivation among many of the candidates they are forced to consider when no one else applies for high-level fund-raising openings.
Compared with eight or nine years ago, says Garvin Maffett, associate dean for development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, in Baltimore, fewer and fewer candidates have worked with donors from the beginning to the end of solicitations for large gifts.
“They’re everywhere from being at the end of a solicitation to just being in the office and hearing about it,” says Mr. Maffett, who recently spent a year looking for a fund raiser to seek gifts of $50,000 or more and has interviewed dozens of candidates in recent months.
“The depth and breadth of experience are not there,” he says. “They’ve been in some part of the continuum, but they are not really face to face with the donor through the whole process of making a decision to give.”
Another common characteristic of candidates for senior fund-raising jobs bothers Mr. Maffett: Many applicants are so focused on their own personal goals that they show little interest in his organization.
“The one thing going through their mind is that they’re looking for a highly regarded employer or an excellent location,” Mr. Maffett says. “You’d be surprised at the number of people who apply for jobs here just because we’re near the Chesapeake Bay and they like sailing.”
Problems with applicants’ attitudes and level of experience are usually much worse for small or little-known groups, where the pickings are slim indeed, officials say.
“I put an ad out, and I get calls from people who cannot even spell development,” says James Stott, chief fund raiser at the Catholic Church Extension Society, a Chicago charity that raises about $19-million annually for church programs that help the needy.
Ironically, the lack of qualified candidates for senior development jobs comes at a time when there is an unprecedented number of people who regard themselves as professional fund raisers.
The National Society of Fund Raising Executives now has more than 20,000 members, almost four times the number it had in 1985, when there were only 5,400 members. The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the group for fund raisers in higher education, has seen similar growth.
But just having lots of fund raisers to choose from doesn’t mean that they have the skills charities need to win substantial gifts. Says Pam Malumphy, another recruiter at Boston’s Isaacson, Miller: “In terms of experience, there is not an enormous amount of people out there. The real talent is a fairly thin layer.”
As a result, some charities are turning to other options, such as training employees in other departments or hiring someone from an entirely different field. Several months ago, for example, the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, hired a former college-admissions officer to be a senior fund raiser.
But some charity officials are skeptical about hiring professionals from other fields. There are many lawyers who understand estate planning and think they are qualified for planned-giving positions, says Elizabeth Roberts, director of development at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston. “But you’ve got to be able to convey why people should part with their money,” she says, and that’s not the same as helping clients preserve assets and pass them along to heirs.
Even fund raisers who lack the experience charities want are demanding -- and getting -- big salaries.
“People without very good experience are getting $90,000 when they were getting $70,000,” says Henry Goldstein, president of the Oram Group, a New York fund-raising firm that also helps some institutions fill fund-raising positions.
“I’ve had to kick clients into offering more money because they cannot get anyone in the door for $70,000,” he says.
But many groups on a tight budget cannot afford to pay that much. And even if they could, some officials say, it would be unfair to their other employees.
“Decent, but not even the best, fund raisers are getting $70,000, but for a non-profit like ours, that’s too high a price,” says Joshua Horwitz, a lawyer with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which had been offering a salary of about $45,000. “We are not trying to build an empire here. If you offer someone new a fantastic deal, it is not fair to other people on staff, and it hurts morale.”
Yet low pay is the chief reason why many small charities cannot hold on to the fund raisers they hire, says Mr. Stott of the Catholic Church Extension Society. Since starting a major-gifts program five years ago, Mr. Stott’s charity has hired and lost four different fund raisers, three of them lured away by higher salaries at other organizations. Since it takes a fund raiser about three years to start bringing in big gifts, none of the departing employees even came close to reaching his or her potential, he says.
The turnover has other disadvantages. “When people leave so fast, I cannot plan for any succession to move people from major gifts to planned giving to director of development,” says Mr. Stott. And, he adds, that interferes with the development office’s ability to build lasting relationships with donors and to benefit from a stable operation.
Non-profit institutions, experts say, could help widen the pool of affordable, available, and experienced fund raisers by doing a better job of providing mentors, training, and other assistance to entry- and mid-level fund raisers who want to move into senior positions. In fact, that may be the only way that some charities will ever get a qualified development officer, observers say.
Defeated in their attempts to find a development director, officials at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are now training an entry-level fund raiser, who formerly did recordkeeping in the development office, to work with the group’s most-generous donors. A fund-raising consultant is spending about three hours per week training the aspiring fund raiser.
“The first year will cost us about $50,000, with the consultant and the employee’s salary,” Mr. Horwitz says. “But I will have an employee who is very well-trained, who’s made commitment to be here a couple of years, and is not yet commanding $70,000.”
Other charities are taking a similar route. Some pair an employee with a board member selected for his or her fund-raising expertise. The board member serves as a mentor to the up-and-coming fund raiser.
Still, at most charities, people who handle annual gifts, direct mail, or special events have little or no contact with other fund-raising programs, let alone training from major-gifts and planned-giving officers, says Charlie Brown, chief fund raiser at the Guggenheim Museum.
“Cross-fertilization is a real problem for most organizations,” he says. “People get pigeonholed into something like direct mail or annual giving, and the only way to advance is to leave. But I do not buy the idea that someone who’s good in direct mail would not be good in major gifts.”
Mr. Brown says he put that belief to the test in a $125-million campaign he ran while at the Lawrenceville School, a private institution in New Jersey. One example was a man he hired in 1992 to work on annual giving. The man was promoted to director of major gifts at the end of the campaign in 1997 and stayed for two more years before leaving to become a director of development at another private school.
“He would have left after three years otherwise,” Mr. Brown says.
Some fund raisers have different ideas about how to improve the career paths of their junior colleagues. Mr. Maffett, of the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, for example, says that non-profit groups in the same geographic region should try collaborating to improve the skills of local fund raisers, who typically move from smaller to larger institutions.
“We need a bridge between fund-raising offices at community-based charities and larger ones in the same area,” he says. “Our colleagues here in the area may not be working at a large institution yet, but they know the community,” and local charities would benefit by keeping them in the region.
For example, says Mr. Maffett, if his department were providing on-site training, he could contact smaller colleges, independent schools, and other charities and invite their fund raisers to attend at no charge. “This is the kind of partnering we need more of in the field,” he says. “It would help build up the pipeline of future candidates for larger institutions and, at the same time, contribute to the abilities of fund raisers in smaller organizations.”
Non-profit officials might worry about large institutions trying to steal their entry- and mid-level fund raisers, Mr. Maffett says, but they should realize that those same fund raisers could become qualified to step into more-senior positions at the smaller organization before eventually moving on.
Experts say that Mr. Maffett’s idea, if pursued, could improve the long-range prospects of many charities now struggling to find experienced development officers.
There is a small group of top fund raisers who are recognized nationally, says Ms. Morris, the California recruiter. “But there’s just not enough of a second tier,” she says. “There’s not a lot of bench.”