Fundraisers’ Association Launches Women’s Mentoring Program

A new pilot program from the Association of Fundraising Professionals aims to help women fundraisers build leadership skills and bring more innovation to development work.

As part of an effort, created last March by the Association of Fundraising Professionals to close the gender gap in fundraising leadership, the group announced Friday that it has started a new mentoring and education program. The effort is being tested this year, with plans to expand in 2020.

The Women’s Impact Initiative, part of an overall focus by the association on innovation, diversity, equity, and access to opportunity and resources, or IDEA for short, aims to address the fact that women make up roughly 70 percent of the development field but only about 30 percent of senior-level positions.

Female fundraisers are also subject to challenges their male counterparts are less likely to face, including a persistent gap in pay for similar jobs and sexual harassment. A study by Harris Poll on behalf of the association and the Chronicle, released last April, revealed that one in four female fundraisers has been harassed, compared with 7 percent of their male peers. Donors were usually the culprits, according to the survey.

In talking to fundraisers as part of its work, however, Women’s Impact Initiative officials discovered things that challenged the association’s traditional view of leadership.

“One thing that we’ve uncovered, and that we’re hoping to highlight, is that not every woman has a desire to lead at the senior level,” says Tycely Williams, chair of the effort and vice president for development at YWCA USA. “There are many women who enjoy being able to make meaningful contributions wherever they’re planted. They’re looking for ways for us as an association to use our human and financial resources to cultivate their ideas, to position their work so it is recognized and valued.”

Coaching and More

In early October, the Women’s Impact Initiative started requesting applications for its new mentoring project. Applicants suggested ideas and innovations that were related to fundraising or to the work of the program.

One of the projects that was ultimately chosen for the new mentoring program, was pitched by Daina Porte, who works at Lakeside Health Foundation, in Oshawa, Ontario. Porte wants to develop a case study based on her experience to show how female-led fundraising teams can exceed multimillion-dollar goals.

Another project chosen for the program was pitched by Nur Rashidah Binte Abdul Rahman, a fundraiser in Singapore. She wants to create and promote a formula for running fundraising events entirely with volunteers.

The first participants were chosen from more than 100 applicants, she says. The pilot program is intended to offer something that the association’s traditional, job-focused mentorship programs, scattered among 116 of its 241 chapters, does not.

“The aim is not to position someone to achieve a promotion,” says Williams. “The aim is to empower women to actualize their ideas by creating something tangible that they’d like to gift to the profession and to the greater movement.”

The pilot of the mentoring program includes five women assigned to five mentors with whom they’ll work for 10 months. In addition to the guidance they’ll receive from those relationships, the program’s participants will also get a one-hour coaching session with a certified executive coach and free registration to the 2019 Women’s Impact Summit, an association-sponsored event to be held October 5 and 6 in Phoenix. Also, CFRE International, the governing body of the Certified Fund Raising Executive credential, will waive the certification fee for the participants if they take the CFRE exam within two years of completing the Women’s Impact Initiative program.

Mentors will receive similar benefits, along with leadership education designed for experienced professionals. The five projects the mentors and their mentees work on will be unveiled at the October summit.

Officials at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University will measure its impact on participants. The association plans to double the number of participants in 2020.

Note: This article has been amended to include a sentence about CFRE International’s contribution to the new mentorship program.