Banking on Corporate Experience

Charities look to the for-profit world to fill senior fund-raising slots

When Uri D. Herscher was hiring a top development officer for the center on Jewish history and culture he founded, he gave the recruiter conducting the search an unusual instruction: Find candidates who aren’t professional fund raisers.

Mr. Herscher — a rabbi and former college official who raised much of the $90-million needed to start the Skirball Cultural Center, in Los Angeles — says he’s always believed that his own “strength in fund raising is that I’ve never read a book on it.” When he interviewed job candidates from the charity world, Mr. Herscher says, his eyes would glaze over as they showed him charts and talked about things like “donor pyramids.”

So instead of hiring any of those candidates, Mr. Herscher picked a vice president of a big insurance company, Jocelyn Tetel. Four years later, the two are still working together and have raised $160-million for the center.

Requests like Mr. Herscher’s — to look to the corporate world to fill top fund-raising jobs — have started to become more common in the past year or so, executive recruiters say.

One reason is that the number of openings for senior fund raisers far outstrips the number of experienced professionals. With good candidates at a premium, corporate leaders on some nonprofit boards have encouraged search committees to consider business executives.

Nonprofit groups of many types — including the Girl Scouts of America and United Ways, as well as museums, religious groups, and universities — say they are now more willing than before to consider people from outside the nonprofit world for such jobs.

Fund raising “has been a closed sector, but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” says Jerold D. Kappel, a longtime fund raiser and director of development at the American Association of Museums. “There’s more openness to outsiders.”

The mid- and late-career shifts by corporate executives to nonprofit fund-raising jobs often work out well for both employee and employer, says Tim Seiler, director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis. “Many people in the corporate world are very good at fund raising because they know how to build relationships and ask people to become involved,” he says. “That’s essentially what effective fund raising is.”

Seeking ‘Risk Takers’

Most charities, however, would still prefer somebody with a proven track record of raising dollars.

But not Mr. Herscher. When he was hiring, he says, he was most concerned about finding someone who cared about the center’s goals, didn’t have too narrow an area of expertise, and was willing to do more than just raise money. Whether candidates had fund-raising experience or not didn’t make much difference.

To find someone with those qualities, Mr. Herscher believed for-profit companies were the best place to look. “I have an immense respect for people of the business world,” he says. “I think they’re risk takers and they have incredible imagination.”

The Skirball center’s board was somewhat less enthusiastic at first, says Melvin Gagerman, the board’s treasurer and secretary, who participated in the search. “The norm is to go after somebody who’s an experienced fund raiser,” he says. But as a “board of business people,” Mr. Gagerman says, the members soon “really embraced the whole concept.”

Mr. Herscher was interested in Ms. Tetel the minute he saw her résumé. He liked that the 35-year-old had spent 11 years at one company, Johnson & Higgins, working her way up to vice president. He wanted somebody who was “good at what they did in the profit world, passionate about it.”

During his interview with Ms. Tetel, Mr. Herscher found the questions she asked — Who’s your audience? What potential do you think we have to go beyond that audience? — to be “refreshing.”

Ms. Tetel says she had decided to make the career switch after experiencing a “soul-searching” moment that made her realize she wanted more meaningful work than selling insurance. She’d served on three local nonprofit boards and had brought in money for each through her insurance contacts. Those successes, she says, had provided a much greater thrill than closing insurance deals.

The job with the Skirball center had special appeal, says Ms. Tetel, because it offered the chance to work directly with the center’s “visionary” founder. In the corporate world, “you don’t get that opportunity to touch the people at the top that often,” she says. She also liked the center’s mission: to help visitors of all backgrounds understand and learn from Jewish history and culture. Ms. Tetel, who is Jewish by birth, says she has never practiced Judaism and had felt isolated from it.

Compensation, which can often be a sticking point in job negotiations between charities and corporate executives, did not end up being a major issue in this case. Ms. Tetel says the center was able to come close to matching her previous salary. And while she did have to give up the additional income she’d been receiving through bonuses and commissions, as well as accept a less-generous retirement plan, Ms. Tetel decided the job made the trade-off worth it. (In 1999, Ms. Tetel earned $85,000 at the charity, according to the Skirball Cultural Center’s tax records.)

Learning Curve

After being hired as the center’s director of advancement, Ms. Tetel found the learning curve steep. Her job included overseeing five employees, and in addition to fund raising she was in charge of public-relations and marketing for the center.

She decided to start with what she knew. Ms. Tetel called on her contacts from her insurance job to try to persuade companies to rent the center’s meeting rooms for events, as a way to bring in money, introduce the center to new people, and make use of rooms that had been standing empty after regular business hours.

Ms. Tetel held a party at the center for many of her former clients, including executives at M.A.C. Cosmetics and Bank of America Corporation. After the event, several of the businesses made grants of between $10,000 and $50,000 from their affiliated foundations. Some also rented rooms at the center for board meetings and other events. Rental fees range from $200 to $4,500, not including use of the center’s catering facilities.

Ms. Tetel also found other untapped sources of income, including city and state grants and on-the-job campaigns run by the local United Way. For example, she convinced the Los Angeles County Arts Commission to give the center grants of $10,000 to $35,000 each year to help pay for a summer concert series that showcases artists from outside of the United States. Previously, Mr. Herscher had focused on individual donors and private family foundations.

During Ms. Tetel’s first years with the center, Mr. Herscher says he took pains to help her avoid a problem novice fund raisers often have: losing sight of a charity’s mission by focusing too much on bringing in dollars.

He said he made sure the charity’s mission figured prominently in all fund-raising discussions. For example, in talks about renting space at the center to companies, Mr. Herscher says he encouraged Ms. Tetel to seek out companies that were also doing charitable or social work, such as M.A.C. Cosmetics and its support for finding a cure for AIDS. “It’s important the center is not a place for commercialism,” he says.

One skill Ms. Tetel says she picked up very quickly: writing grant proposals. “It’s like writing a sales proposal,” she says, “knowing how to make the ask, set the stage, create the opportunity.” Her biggest success: a grant for $2-million a year, for the past three years, from the State of California for construction. But she tries to go beyond simply applying for grants.

Other parts of her work have involved hitting the phones and calling companies that might be interested in paying for exhibits. Many fund raisers find such cold calls the most difficult part of their job, but Ms. Tetel says her experience of calling up insurance customers prepared her well. For an exhibit on Jewish weddings that opens in August and cost $300,000, Ms. Tetel called large local bridal stores and national chains. An owner of a Los Angeles store agreed to visit and ended up donating $10,000 to the exhibit.

Ms. Tetel says the biggest difference she has found so far between selling insurance and seeking donations is that the rejections now “go a little deeper” and are harder not to take personally.

Different Approaches

Differences between nonprofit and for-profit cultures have meant that Ms. Tetel and Mr. Herscher have had to make a few adjustments along the way. For example, Ms. Tetel thinks it makes good business sense to start seeking planned gifts — bequests and other donations that offer significant tax and other financial benefits to donors — but her boss isn’t as keen on the idea because few such donations materialize quickly into revenue.

“He wants the money now, not 20 years from now,” Ms. Tetel says. They have agreed to begin working on it. “We’re treading very slowly,” she says.

But for the most part, Mr. Herscher says, Ms. Tetel’s skills provide just the right complement to his own. “She and I couldn’t be more different,” he says. “She loves meetings. I find no pleasure in them. She is brilliantly patient” with the process of applying for grants.

Mr. Herscher says he prefers one-on-one encounters. At a corporate holiday party he and Ms. Tetel attended to meet prospective donors, he says, he “felt like a total alien” but “she was so natural there.”

An added benefit of her background has been that Ms. Tetel communicates easily with the center’s board members, Mr. Herscher says. Many nonprofit organizations only hear from their board members four or five times a year, he says. But the Skirball center is “living daily” with somebody who thinks like a board member.

Mr. Herscher says that as a former business woman, Ms. Tetel is much more likely to raise bottom-line questions about the impact and effectiveness of proposals than most charity executives, who tend to be reluctant to offend. A staff member, for example, might talk enthusiastically about linking an exhibit to dance, music, and a lecture series, Mr. Herscher says, but Ms. Tetel would be the one to say, I’m not sure anybody’s going to like this, who would fill the seats? “It ruffles some feathers,” he says, “but it’s a healthy tension.”

Mr. Herscher says Ms. Tetel’s background makes her a pragmatist who is good at executing ideas. Given an exhibit or special event, he explains, “she’ll say, ‘This audience will go for it, and this industry may be interested in funding it.’”

For example, Ms. Tetel accurately predicted that Merrill Lynch, the investment brokerage, and Work/Life Benefits, which administers benefit programs for companies, would be interested in financing an educational forum on how the lives of the elderly have changed in recent decades. Merrill Lynch gave $5,000; the benefit company, $1,000.

While such donations have been rewarding, Ms. Tetel says she now wants to find ways “to be more successful in opening the doors to bigger donors.” Aside from the state grants, Ms. Tetel has raised no contribution greater than $100,000.

In part, that has been because Ms. Tetel has focused on finding the money to pay for new exhibits and events, while Mr. Herscher has concentrated on building up the center’s endowment and paying for construction of new buildings through gifts from major donors.

But Mr. Herscher says he has no doubts Ms. Tetel will achieve her goal of getting big gifts in the future. He says she has laid the groundwork, building support for the charity by bringing in numerous small gifts from people and organizations that previously had never heard of the Skirball Cultural Center.

The fund-raising program “is in the infant stages of development,” he says. “She’s planting the seeds, and those seeds will bear fruit.”