How Best to Deal With the Shortage of Top Fund Raisers?

To the Editor:

In The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s August 9 issue, Holly Hall’s article, “Fund-Raising Frenzy,” and its accompanying articles documented the existence of a nationwide shortage of fund raisers who can solicit big gifts from individual donors. She described the ways in which this phenomenon threatens the ability of many nonprofit organizations to raise funds to support their work.

This was followed by a Chronicle online forum in which development professionals and others confirmed that the problem has reached crisis proportions and discussed ways to retain current staff and find experienced fund raisers to fill open positions.

Missing from most of those conversations was meaningful discussion of how the profession can address the shortage of qualified staff long term and on the kind of scale that’s needed.

Given the severity of the problem, it is high time that development leaders, along with others knowledgeable about the field, including executive recruiters like myself, come up with solutions.

The shortage Ms. Hall describes goes beyond major-gift officers and includes all areas of advancement staffing, including alumni relations, annual fund raising (that, when well done, creates the pipeline for major gifts), corporate and foundation relations, planned giving, and stewardship.

Indeed, there is virtually no area of the advancement profession where an acute shortage of staff — not to mention talent — is not affecting institutions negatively.

The efforts of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Association of Fundraising Professionals, New York University, and Columbia University in launching programs to train, mentor, and coach fund raisers are laudable.

However, these efforts must be coupled with large-scale initiatives to bring fresh, new talent in the form of new recruits at all levels into the profession.

More development leaders need to open their minds to the possibility of making exceptional hires from outside the profession. Their reluctance is understandable, but misguided. After all, today’s professional fund raisers were yesterday’s nontraditional hires.

Hiring people without fund-raising experience doesn’t need to be the last resort of the desperate. In fact, some of the best recent hires I know about have been bright, energetic, thoughtful, personable, mission-driven individuals from other walks of life.

In contrast, the well-documented labor shortage in the field (and, some would add, the overzealous efforts of paid recruiters) has led to a phenomenon of recycled mediocrity, where unsuccessful fund raisers hop from job to job, each time boosting their compensation but failing to build a track record of solid accomplishment.

An egregious example of abuse was discovered in recent years, when an experienced major-gifts officer was discovered to have taken a job at an independent school without first resigning from his job as a major-gifts officer with a large university. He managed to keep up appearances enough to retain both jobs, collecting two paychecks, and doing a mediocre job in each place. Luckily, his ruse was discovered, and he was fired from both jobs, although he is believed to have subsequently found employment as a fund raiser elsewhere.

Nonprofit organizations deserve, and can do, better. To hire the best fund raisers, hiring managers should look across a wide spectrum of professions for qualified candidates.

Talented people who possess the core competencies to be successful fund raisers exist not only in sales and banking, but also in teaching, scientific research, marketing, law, athletics, and entrepreneurship, to name just a few. Moreover, many such talented people are attempting to transition from other careers into fund raising, but finding formidable obstacles to getting so much as a pinky toe in the door.

During the Chronicle’s online discussion in August, Scott Nichols, vice president for development and alumni affairs at Boston University, responded to one such job seeker with the observation that “development is a tough enterprise to break into.”

I agree, but I also know that an increasing number of hiring managers are discovering the benefits of hiring nontraditional candidates.

In order to solve the staffing crisis in advancement, institutions must pioneer searches to identify, attract, and recruit fresh talent from other fields into advancement.

As recruiters who do this, we find that it’s possible to reduce the perceived risk of hiring the “inexperienced” by carefully analyzing the positions we seek to fill and developing detailed profiles of the core competencies required to excel at such functions as major-gift fund raising, annual-fund management, and corporate and foundation relations.

Aside from the much-sought-after skills of relationship building, examples of these competencies include an orientation toward serving others while achieving results; the constellation of characteristics that the psychologist Daniel Goleman has identified as constituting emotional intelligence; and an ability to move other people outside of their comfort zone.

We focus on needed behaviors rather than job titles, and help institutions hire people who possess the passion and sometimes the relevant subject-matter expertise to apply their competencies to the work of fund raising.

Typically, these hires already reside in the area where the job is located, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming relocations. And, because less-traditional candidates are intent on working for mission-driven organizations, they find entry-level development salaries acceptable. Finally, because they are already exceptional professionals and eager to transition to more meaningful work, their process of on-ramping to development work isn’t as arduous as many of us fear it will be.

Leaders in the advancement field face unprecedented challenges in accomplishing their fund-raising missions. With ever-larger comprehensive campaigns on recurring cycles, the dearth of effective fund raisers is growing more acute because the number of development jobs is expanding rapidly each year. In this hyper-competitive environment, traditional approaches to identifying and recruiting top talent are no longer sufficient. Thoughtful and careful recruitment of top performers from other walks of life is the only effective large-scale solution.

Katina Leodas
Leodas Search Group
Cambridge, Mass.

To the Editor:

Your article struck a chord with me and helped reinforce my theory that midcareer sales professionals are a viable segment to consider when recruiters or hiring managers are formulating their recruitment strategies in this tight nonprofit fund-raising market.

My own experience adds strength to this idea. I transitioned to nonprofit fund raising from a sales career in the for-profit sector several years ago and I have thankfully had very good success as a major corporate-gifts officer for the Indiana State Museum and now the Indiana Historical Society.

I know from experience that the sales process for any product or service is basically the same as the process for all fund-raising scenarios. Many of my colleagues, including my boss in membership and development, are quite accomplished individual major-gift fund raisers themselves and agree with me on this.

I was at midcareer when I made the jump to nonprofit fund raising. In my 20-plus-year sales career, I first sold advertising and then later business-enterprisewide software programs to manufacturers, so I became an expert in two disparate sales categories.

I had reached a point in my sales career when I had no passion for what I was doing. I became tired of the constant month-to-month pressure and constant changes to my compensation package, and one day my wife suggested to me a career in nonprofit fund raising.

My wife holds an M.P.A. in nonprofit management and also has been a nonprofit chief executive officer for the last seven years, so when she talked about this I listened. The decision to transition over to the nonprofit sector has been the best decision of my professional life because I now have true passion for my job. I am able to marry my heart to my job. In my opinion, passion is the reason anyone ever truly enjoys anything.

Most of my beliefs about this theory are based on my small slice of life experience and, although I have no hard data to back up my claim, I challenge any hiring manager or recruiter out there to try something different.

Why not run an employment ad in one of your major newspapers’ classified sections under the sales category? My suggestion would be to word the ad something like the following: “Are you tired of being good at what you do but not being excited about doing it? Would you like a competitive compensation program with a bonus incentive that is consistent from year to year? Then consider a position at __________ raising funds from __________ to help support our mission, etc.”

You might be surprised at the response you get, and you can be sure that the folks looking in this category don’t have nonprofit recruiters wooing them away. I may be an exception to the rule, but my guess is that there are a lot more people like me, who don’t have the traditional nonprofit fund-raising training, who are expert door openers, plus have a vast business network and are not afraid to ask, ask, and ask.

Frank Eagan
Director, Corporate Relations
Indiana Historical Society
Indianapolis

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To the Editor:

You’ve documented there is a shortage of development professionals. True, some of that is due to new and dramatic demand for qualified professionals. But more than a little of it is due to the many failures of people who are the employers of these fund raisers.

I believe that an organization that sets things up correctly by supporting their team members, giving them the right tools to do their jobs, offering a bit of encouragement from time to time, and paying them a reasonably competitive salary, will find the talent they need.

Once word gets around it’s a good shop to work in, the talent will be calling them and asking if they have any openings. I regret to say there are some very, very well-known and highly successful (in terms of dollars raised) institutions that are not in that place.

Patrick D. Sheehy
Sheehy & Associates
St. Paul