Take Action Early to Avoid Getting Trapped in a No-Win Fund-Raising Job

Fund raisers can often avoid getting stuck in a bad job by taking the following steps before accepting an offer, say veteran fund raisers and executive recruiters.

Among their suggestions:

Check out the organizational culture. Beth Gazley thought she had landed the perfect job as director of development at a small women’s college in Georgia, but soon found herself butting heads with her bosses over behavior she considered sexist and racist. She was dismissed after four months, the day she completed the college’s most successful telethon to date.

As unpleasant as the experience was, Ms. Gazley says she learned a valuable lesson from it about looking critically at a potential employer before taking a job.

“If the chemistry is poor, and your own values and ethics are not consistent with those of the organization, it doesn’t matter how talented a fund raiser you are,” says Ms. Gazley, who spent 15 years in fund raising and is now an assistant professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University at Bloomington. “You just won’t give the organization what it needs, and it certainly won’t give you what you need.”

Evaluate the organization’s financial health. Rod Miller, senior vice president for marketing and development at the University of the Sciences, in Philadelphia, urges fund raisers to obtain three years’ worth of the organization’s annual financial reports and Form 990s, the federal informational tax return that charities are required to file annually with the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Miller, who has been a fund raiser for 21 years, says he has learned that the people who are hiring him often don’t realize what problems might crop up for fund raisers: “The folks who are recruiting you are looking to you to have the knowledge and understanding of what would make the difference in success on the job.”

The forms tell him how big the organization’s endowment is, what income streams it has, and what its debt is. Some fund raisers say that last question is especially key now, as many universities and other big charities are struggling to restructure their debt as interest payments have doubled or tripled, and many banks are less willing to refinance.

Mr. Miller says he wants to have good answers to the kinds of questions that donors will ask of a fund raiser seeking multimillion-dollar gifts.

“Most donors will look for an assurance that the organization knows how to manage its books, that it has a record of managing and overcoming challenges,” he says. They may also ask specific questions, like how much debt the organization is carrying, he says. “Those are the kinds of questions the donors whom you will be going to have lived by all their lives,” he says. “Most smart donors don’t give their money to sinking ships.”

Assess the fund-raising abilities of board members. Ask whether board members have ties to wealthy or influential people and whether they are willing to use those relationships to help seek big gifts.

Most important, say executive recruiters, is learning whether board members want the fund raiser to do all the work.

“If their expectations are that they’re bringing in a hired gun, and that person is going to single-handedly go out and raise all this money, then the fund raiser is doomed,” says Jay Berger, an executive-search consultant in Glendale, Calif.

Mr. Berger advises candidates to talk directly with board members and ask about their past involvement in fund raising as an indicator of how much they will be willing to do. “Maybe they aren’t comfortable making the ask, but are they comfortable sharing their Rolodex and making introductions?” he says. “That’s the important thing.”

Learn about your boss. The development director at a small human-services agency in the Northeast says that her board and other staff members are ready to take a more active role in raising money. The executive director, however, is not.

“Everyone understands the steps that need to be taken, except her,” says the development director, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Among other things, the executive director, who doesn’t call or visit donors, has barred the fund raiser and the board from doing so.

“I’ve been told that our donors don’t want anyone to talk to them, and we don’t have the budget for follow-up calls and visits,” she says. “They just want to donate once or twice a year.” Nor can board members call donors to thank them for their gifts, because that “bothers” donors, she was told.

Although the fund raiser also met other staff members before taking the job, she says she realizes now they did not feel comfortable speaking freely because the executive director was also present. In hindsight, she says, she should have suspected something was wrong.

“When the 13 people brought in for your interview just stare at you, you might want to clue in on that,” she says.

Steven Ast, an executive-search consultant in Stamford, Conn., says to look for cues about whether the boss is a micromanager. He advises asking about such things as how he or she communicates (if he uses e-mail, that’s often a sign of a highly involved manager who will expect immediate responses, Mr. Ast says) and what meetings are like.

“If they require group meetings where they ask for reports and give assignments, that’s a clue that they’re watching every step,” he says.

Other recruiters suggest asking whether your boss will allow the fund raisers to have direct access to trustees.

“Very often, the senior vice president doesn’t want development working with the board,” says Colette Murray, an executive-search consultant in Indio, Calif. “The No. 1 reason people leave jobs is dissatisfaction with the direct supervisor, when your access to the board is stifled.”

Determine the skills of people you supervise. M. Starita Boyce, former vice president for institutional advancement at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, says that soon after she took her job, she learned that the state was making cuts and she would not be able to fill positions that were vacant. Because she had been planning to hire many new fund raisers, she hadn’t paid much attention to who was already there, she says. Ms. Boyce says in the future she plans to learn about the backgrounds of all employees she will supervise so she can assess how much she will be able to do for an organization.

“You don’t want to make all these promises you cannot deliver on,” she says. “Looking for my next job, I will definitely ask to meet the staff, and I will also ask to see their résumés.”

Mr. Miller suggests that the fund raiser ask for details about how the organization evaluates its employees. The response will help determine not only whether those employees have the skills he wants, but also whether the organization sets clear, reasonable expectations for its staff. That makes a difference when it comes to retaining or hiring people, he says.

“When you’re in a manager’s job, one of your biggest challenges is how you’re going to recruit your volunteers and staff,” he says. “Unless you know you’ve got some basis for bringing in good staff, you’re going to be the solo flier, and you’re going to be the one that’s hung out to dry.”

Ask donors and volunteers for their views. Mr. Miller of the University of the Sciences says he always asks to talk to leaders of the alumni association or other volunteers and supporters before considering a job offer. “Donors will tell you what’s really going on in the organization,” he says. “You can ask them about the way people interact, the pitfalls you should be looking out for, the opportunities that have been missed. What’s driving the place? What do people care about? What are the things that cause people to come to work? What makes people top performers?”

Talking to volunteers helped Mr. Miller decide against one job, after he learned that the former president of the organization was still intimately involved in fund raising, creating a conflict with the current president. As a result, Mr. Miller says, he was told there was a “poisonous” atmosphere in the development office.

Make sure your approach to fund raising jibes with the organization’s. Walk through the fund-raising process with the leadership to make sure you and the charity envision it the same way. Does the organization’s approach to fund raising fit with yours?

Dee Vandeventer, a fund-raising consultant in Cedar Falls, Iowa, says she talked to a charity that wanted to run a capital campaign but did not want the volunteers or fund raisers to ask anyone for a specific amount of money, out of fear they might offend a potential donor.

“After talking with the board and the executive director, we parted ways, because I thought they would be at a disadvantage and end up not being successful, ” Ms. Vandeventer says. Several years later, the organization has not met its goal, she adds.

Figure out how your performance will be evaluated. Mr. Miller says he would ask for copies of the performance evaluations of all the people who would report to him, in order to get a handle on how the organization might evaluate him.

“You know that you’re going to be assessed on the same basis that others are. Why would you put your efforts and career at risk in a situation that has no parameters?” Mr. Miller says.

A reputable organization should refuse to provide such confidential material to a job candidate, he says, but its response to his question will tell him a lot about how it treats employees. “Do they have [an evaluation] process?” he says. “They shouldn’t give them to me, but if I follow up and ask what are the criteria for evaluating employees, that tells me whether they’ve got a system.”

Set realistic expectations. Fund-raising veterans say it is important to make sure that the measures of success will be fair. For instance, they suggest avoiding institutions that look only at how much money a fund raiser brings in.

“Even though it sounds reasonable to create those goals, it’s so dependent on the market and the campaign environment that I see those as red flags in terms of expectations,” says Mr. Ast, the executive-search consultant. Better, he says, if the organization measures things like how many visits fund raisers make to potential donors.

A. David Scholder says that when he was offered a job eight years ago to move across the country and start an effort to seek planned gifts for a charity on the East Coast, he wanted to be sure the organization understood that most planned gifts — especially bequests — take a long time to materialize.

“I laid out in an interview how a planned-giving program works,” he says. “I said that unless they were willing to invest in the process for 10 years, they should offer the job to someone else. Their response was, You’re just kidding. We’ll give you more money, we’ll find your wife a job, we’ll take such good care of you, you’re going to be like a movie star.”

Fearing his message had not gotten across, Mr. Scholder asked five officials of the charity to sign an agreement promising that he would have 10 years to get the planned-giving effort working at full steam. Two years later, he was asked to leave. “It was a horror story, because I had changed my entire professional career for the sake of an organization that made promises it had no intention of keeping,” he says.

Because he had a written agreement, Mr. Scholder won a settlement from the charity that enabled him to move back to California, where he returned to his former job as senior director of estate and gift planning at the Los Angeles office of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. But Mr. Scholder says that he partially blames himself for what happened. He should have known the charity wasn’t serious when it made so many lavish promises and offered such a big salary increase.

“The moral of the story is, buyer beware,” he says. “If it sounds too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”