September 4, 2008 | Read Time: 4 minutes
To find or hold onto a development job in a tough economy, executive recruiters and others offer fund raisers the following advice:
Work hard. Employees are often told that they need to “work smarter,” says Henry R. Maly, a Ponte Vedra, Fla., recruiter who seeks senior fund raisers for higher-education and medical institutions. “But you have to work smarter — and harder — now.”
If a fund raiser has been making five calls to prospective donors a week, and people are holding back and making smaller gifts now, Mr. Maly says, the fund raiser needs to make more calls. It’s also important for fund raisers to do enough research on the potential donors to make their appeals successful. “The game has changed, and you have to change with it,” he says.
Talk about achievements. “Fund raisers should be judged on the number of asks they make, not the dollars raised,” says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, a Washington fund-raising consultant. In a bad economy, she says, “I would be constantly communicating about fund-raising activity, so there is not the sense that you are just sitting on your hands.”
Involve others. Mid-level managers and other staff members are likely to be nervous when they hear that money is tight, says Ms. Stamatopoulos. “This is a good time to train staff on how to be a fund-raising ambassador for the organization, to talk about how great the organization is and to promote giving to the organization,” she says. “That way folks don’t feel helpless. Make everyone part of the solution.”
Know the numbers. When money is tight, some organizations place unrealistic demands on their fund raisers, says Nancy Racette, chief operating officer of Development Resources, an Arlington, Va., fund-raising consulting and recruiting company. When that happens, development officers must be prepared to argue against unrealistic fund-raising goals, Ms. Racette says.
To that end, she says, fund raisers should immerse themselves in their organization’s finances as well as giving statistics such as the number of people who give to the organization each year, how many new donors are recuited annually, their average gift, and so on.”Sit down with your chief financial officer and talk about what is realistic,” says Ms. Racette. “It is unrealistic to think that the average gift will jump by 50 percent in this economy.”
Invest in yourself. To keep advancing, especially in a bad economy, Ms. Racette says, fund raisers often need training in management and other topics offered by organizations such as the Association of Fundraising Professionals or the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, But, she says, “I hear a lot of people say they cannot join AFP or CASE because their organizations won’t pay for it.”
In such cases, she says, fund raisers should shoulder the costs. “My organization wouldn’t pay, so I did it myself,” says Ms. Racette, recalling her decision to get training early in her career. “I made it a point to learn about managing. Networking and learning from others in the field are really important.”
Widen your contacts. Heidi Gider starts a new job this month as development director of Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco charity that promotes women’s rights. She says that efforts to expand her professional network led to the interview that resulted in her job offer.
Ms. Gider sent out an e-mail to dozens of colleagues about her interest in finding a new job in San Francisco. She also used LinkedIn, a social-networking Web site that focuses on job-related connections, to learn more about people who knew her colleagues, friends, and alumni of her college.
One of the people Ms. Gider contacted, a male acquaintance who works on social-justice issues, sent her the listing for her new job and recommended that she apply.
Ms. Gider’s cover letter to the organization mentioned the person who passed on the job listing — and noted that he did so because he thought the job would be a good fit for her skills and experience.
“The board member with whom I interviewed said that my cover letter stood out because I had a recommendation from someone in the field,” she says.
Monitor yourself online. To present a professional image, fund raisers looking for work should be careful about the type of online content about themselves they share on social-networking and other sites.
“Be conscientious about what you have on your Facebook or MySpace page,” says Ms. Gider. “People think of this as their private space, but that is not necessarily the case.” These days, she adds, the first thing many employers and executive recruiters do is search the Internet for information about job candidates.
