For Fund Raisers, the Job Market’s Warming Up—but It’s Not Hot Yet

Many recruiters say that it’s a much better hiring environment now than it was in the past two years, when organizations not only stopped adding positions but also laid off fund raisers or left open positions that had been vacant.

“It’s a good time to be a candidate,” says Jill Lasman, senior vice president of Lois L. Lindauer Searches, a 14-year-old Boston company that recruits fund raisers for colleges, hospitals, and other nonprofits. “We are busier than we’ve ever been in our entire history. Things have really turned around.”

The search firm is doing close to 40 executive-level searches this year, compared with fewer than 30 last year.

Among other signs that jobs are more plentiful:

• The Association of Fundraising Professionals says job postings have nearly doubled since this time last year.
• The Council for Advancement and Support of Education says job postings from November through February more than doubled from the same period two years ago. About 80 to 90 percent of those recent job postings are fund-raising related.
• The Association of Healthcare Philanthropy posted 22 percent more fund-raising job ads online in January than at the same month in 2010 and 16 percent more in February than in the year before.

While those are encouraging signs, fund-raising experts say that many nonprofits continue to proceed with caution when it comes to expanding fund-raising offices.

Nobody expects the hiring frenzy that marked the years before the recession, when job offers were plenty and fund raisers could hop from job to job and get big raises with every move.

“It’s not a hot market by any means, but we’re not having any more layoffs,” says Bruce Flessner, principal at Bentz Whaley Flessner, a company in Arlington, Va., that advises charities on fund raising and hiring.

Even when charities do decide to hire more fund raisers, they can’t always find the people they most want. Job experts say job seekers are apprehensive about moving, prompting employers to focus their searches on candidates who live nearby.

Some fund raisers aren’t sure whether their houses will sell in a relatively weak real-estate market. Many have spouses who aren’t able to transfer easily to jobs in other cities. “It remains a challenge,” Mr. Flessner says.

Shifting Budget Money

Organizations preparing for capital campaigns are among the groups doing the most hiring.

Norm Potter, vice president for development and alumni affairs at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, says he is attempting to hire 16 fund-raising employees as the hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., prepares for a multiyear capital campaign.

During the recession, the hospital decided not to fill seven full-time fund-raising positions and instead began to use the equivalent of the salaries, some $800,000, to rejigger its development office by taking steps to increase its pool of potential donors, which had gotten much smaller before the recession.

For the past three years, while not hiring, the hospital identified former patients who might be prospects and bought database systems to help the hospital find wealthy people who might give.

Now that those efforts are in place, he says, it’s time to hire people who can solicit the newly identified potential donors. “It’s time to invest in key people,” Mr. Potter says.

Jeffry George, executive director of Cantata Singers, a 44-member Cambridge, Mass., choral group, hired a fund raiser in July 2010 to help the arts organization develop fund-raising events yearly and for its 50th anniversary in 2014.

The fund raiser, James K. Marko, has already produced results, heading an auction that raised $52,000 in February.

No Experience Necessary

Nonprofit organizations aren’t hiring just for senior jobs but also people who are new to fund raising and others who can help support the work done by veteran fund raisers.

For the last few months, the University of Texas at El Paso has been hiring aggressively since it’s in the middle of a $200-million campaign, says Sylvia Acosta, associate vice president for development and alumni relations. It hired three fund raisers recently to add to its six other development officers and plans to hire four more people who will focus on major gifts, the annual fund, and basic administrative and other tasks.

But qualified fund raisers are hard to come by locally, so Ms. Acosta is hiring people regionally and nationally, as well as others who don’t have traditional fund-raising backgrounds, like those in pharmaceutical sales.

“We did go for a little while without hiring,” she says. “But over the last few months, we’ve been ramping up and going ahead and filling up those positions that were open that we hadn’t filled.”

Victoria Gutierrez is one of those recent hires. Last summer the 31-year-old El Paso native was hoping to leave her job in youth services and find a position in higher education.

She quickly received three job leads through word of mouth from her friends and acquaintances. Two job offers materialized in a few months, one to be chief executive of a local branch of a children’s charity and the other to raise money for the university. Since becoming director of development at the university’s College of Science in November, she has been asked to raise $38-million for the campus’s 2014 centennial fund-raising capital campaign. So far, the college has raised $9-million.

“I really do think I got lucky,” Ms. Gutierrez says. “I was just in the right place at the right time.”

Bidding Wars

A dearth of good candidates has caused some bidding wars.

Within the past year, Peter Hayashida, vice chancellor for university advancement at the University of California at Riverside, has already hired five fund raisers and is hiring four or five more as the institution prepares for a capital campaign. He recently made offers to three candidates, who accepted the jobs in conversation but then backed out when their employers countered with better offers or when one accepted another job offer from somewhere else.

He surmises that the employers of the two who stayed with their posts were worried about the high cost of replacing them.

“I was a little taken aback,” Mr. Hayashida says. “It’s a troubling statement about integrity. I was surprised and disappointed that people were willing to put their reputations on the line that way.”

Mr. Hayashida says it’s been hard to find candidates willing to move to California for a job at a public university.

“We advertise nationally,” he says. “But right now, it’s very difficult to get someone to think it’s a good idea to move here because of the state budget. People that are here are less likely to be anxious about the budget.”

Other nonprofits, though, had the opposite experience: too many top-notch candidates to choose from.

Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Mass., hired a development director last month after searching for five months.

“I would say that we got very few applicants who were not qualified people,” says Wyona Lynch-McWhite, the organization’s executive director.

She had a pool of two dozen candidates to winnow. The organization had been without a fund raiser for about a year and a half.

Ms. Lynch-McWhite had taken over fund-raising duties during the recession. “It took forever,” she says, “because on paper, the majority of people had development experience, but it took more time to find the right fit.”