Red, White, and Green

Joanne Donahoe loved her fund-raising job at San Diego State University, but after eight years of working on the annual fund, accompanying trustees on fund-raising calls, and undertaking a range of other duties, she felt a familiar tug.

Part of a well-traveled military family, Ms. Donahoe says she missed living overseas. So in 2006, at age 34, she swallowed hard and made a tough decision: She quit her job and gave herself a year to look for a fund-raising job in Europe. In June 2007, after much research and many informational interviews, Ms. Donahoe accepted a job as associate director of development at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton in England. Nearing the end of her second year there, she has just signed a contract to spend another three years at the center.

Demand Exceeds Supply

Ms. Donahoe is one of a growing number of North American fund raisers who have moved overseas to work at foreign institutions, where the demand for experienced development officers still far exceeds the supply of qualified candidates — even amid the global economic downturn. Colleges, hospitals, and other large institutions outside the United States, particularly in Australia, Great Britain, and Hong Kong, have been raising private money for many years. But now nonprofit groups around the globe are stepping up their fund raising and turning to North Americans for advice.

“The whole idea of expanding fund raising is international now,” says Young Dawkins, an American who became chief fund raiser at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. “It has just exploded.” One sign of the increased interest: Mr. Dawkins says he has recently been invited to speak about fund raising in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia.

Like many North Americans, he remembers hearing that the Scotland job would be challenging. “I was warned: ‘Be careful, there is not a culture of giving.’” But, he says, “I found that there was not a culture of asking. They had just not put together the structure behind it.”

Putting that structure together is one of the biggest challenges facing North American fund raisers as they take jobs abroad.

Charities outside North America often shun conventions that fund raisers regard as essential, such as enlisting board members in seeking and making gifts. Tax deductions for donations are not offered in many countries, or they are far more limited than in the United States or Canada. And aside from bequests, long-term giving options such as charitable annuities and trusts are not typically available.

North Americans also encounter trouble when they adopt approaches that are considered vulgar or pushy.

Brett Rierson, an American who has worked as a fund raiser throughout Asia over the last 20 years, says he has frequently witnessed such problems. He points to a recent occasion when he accompanied a wealthy Asian woman on a visit to a charity that fights poverty in rural China. The woman asked Mr. Rierson, who is fluent in Mandarin, to read an e-mail message she had just received from a North American fund raiser working on behalf of the charity.

“It said, ‘Here are the categories you could come in at: $1.5-million, $3-million, or $5-million,’” Mr. Rierson recalls. “You could see the shock on her face. Instead of trying to get a feel for the donor’s level of interest or how she would like to be involved, all of a sudden here is this e-mail before she had even seen what was going on in the field.” Mr. Rierson says Asian charities need more professional fund raisers, “but most of the Americans and nonprofit organizations who are eyeing overseas markets are culturally not attuned, especially to donors at high-net-worth levels.”

Sharp Differences

Cultural differences, even in two countries that share a language, such as Canada and Great Britain, can run deep.

Jon Dellandrea, a seasoned Canadian fund raiser who was hired in 2004 by the University of Oxford to oversee its $2.5-billion campaign, abruptly left his post last summer, just two months after the drive went public.

While Mr. Dellandrea told The Chronicle that “a lot of headway” was made during his tenure, he left Oxford amid widespread speculation in news reports that he had butted heads with Michael Moritz, a Welsh venture capitalist who donated $50-million to the campaign.

Moyra Doyle, a London headhunter who has recruited dozens of North American fund raisers for charities in Europe and Australia, says that even the most carefully screened fund raisers sometimes underestimate how daunting the challenges of working in another country can be. She says that about a third of the Americans she has placed have difficulty acclimating; only about half have stayed in their jobs for more than three years.

Statistics like those make some experts wary about hiring fund raisers from North America.

“After being here a while, I did not want to hire any U.S. personnel who were interested in a European experience and then would go back home,” says Mary Blair, an American who spent seven years leading a successful campaign for the London School of Economics that ended in 2007.

“I want to focus on training more U.K. talent,” says Ms. Blair, now a fund-raising consultant working in London for Grenzebach Glier and Associates, a Chicago consulting firm.

Still, when the assignment is right, an overseas development job can be more personally and professionally rewarding than any other, according to North American fund raisers.

Denise Nuehring, a fund raiser from Eureka, Mo., who spent three years working for the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre, in London, says she didn’t always agree with the organization’s approach to fund raising and was told more than once “to tone down my American enthusiasm.”

But in the end, she says, “it made me a better fund raiser, thinking about things from another culture’s view. I’m more receptive to doing something that is not ‘best practice.’ I learned it’s okay to deviate to a point.”

Other fund raisers who have worked abroad describe personal satisfaction at learning that their professional skills can sustain them, even in a different country.

“There is nothing like testing your mettle in a situation where things you assume, like a culture of philanthropy, are so completely different,” says John Coffin, chief fund raiser at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Mr. Coffin lived in the Netherlands for four years, until 2002, helping the University of Groningen start a capital campaign.

The job was particularly challenging. The Dutch have little stomach for supporting colleges, because they are heavily taxed to pay for universal access to education and health care, he says.

Tim Dolan, an American who became director of development at the University of Sydney, in Australia, in January, also says the experience has been a career highlight. “One of the greatest points of satisfaction is seeing the potential, when they see that they can double, triple, or quadruple their returns,” he says. “I’m enjoying this gig by a factor of four more than any other job I’ve had.”

First Timers

But however enjoyable, raising money overseas is bound to be harder for North Americans than any job they have held at home. In many cases, they are introducing fund raising for the first time in an organization’s history.

When Tom Young, vice president for development at Gustavus Adolfus College, in Saint Peter, Minn., helped lead a capital campaign to raise about $50-million for Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the midto late 1990s, “we were introducing a comprehensive campaign in unploughed ground,” he says. “It was an opportunity to be a pioneer for philanthropy.”

The three-year campaign was a success, although — unlike most North American campaigns — the smallest amount came from individuals. But in the beginning, because Chalmers officials had little grasp of how to seek donations, “we had to create the language of how to talk about fund raising in Swedish,” Mr. Young says. He was able to handle that challenge, in part because he speaks the language fluently. Most of his relatives are from Sweden and he spent part of his childhood there.

“Almost anyone in Sweden under age 65 speaks really good English, but my observation about language is that it has to do with cultural respect,” he says. “It was a distinct advantage to speak the language. It brought trust, and we got a lot further than we would have had it not been in Swedish.” Mr. Young was recruited by John Kelly, president of Brakeley Limited, the London offshoot of the U.S. fund-raising consulting firm, Brakeley John Price Jones, now known as Brakeley Briscoe. Mr. Kelly says he has recruited several Americans to assist clients with fund-raising campaigns in foreign countries.

But, he adds, “I have had more success in recruiting people born in the country who have been exposed to U.S.-style fund raising than I have with Americans who go overseas. They find it harder to fit in, and there have been more failures.”

Steady Expansion

Mr. Kelly, an Englishman who has been a fund-raising consultant since 1990 — after learning the profession in the United States and from American colleagues in Britain — says that interest in fund raising has grown so steadily that his firm has expanded beyond Europe into the Middle East and Asia, with offices in France, Germany, Sweden, and Hong Kong.

Most of the interest has come from universities, cultural institutions, and medical centers that want to mount campaigns or seek large gifts, says Mr. Kelly. But, he says, other types of charities, such as international-aid and environmental groups, which have long raised small gifts through direct mail, telemarketing, or street solicitations, are now showing interest in hiring fund raisers.

With such organizations, it may take years before even a seasoned fund raiser can help the charity raise a significant portion of its annual budget from private sources.

Cynthia Rallis, an American who is director of development for the National Museum of Science and Industry, a family of three museums headquartered in London, has been at the institution for nearly four years.

She says the first two were spent setting up some building blocks of fund raising — an effort to garner membership dues, a giving club for people who donate at least $1,500 annually, and a legacy society to seek bequests — in addition to increasing grant-seeking efforts.

The institution only recently purchased its first software system to keep track of donors to all three museums.

“The pace of work is very different here,” says Ms. Rallis. “Things I thought would take six months took 12 months.” After four years, she says, donations are growing, but they still account for less than 20 percent of her institution’s budget.

Fund raising can be even more complicated and drawn out for North Americans working in foreign institutions that are seeking gifts in other parts of the world, says Arthur Wasserman, an American now in his third year as the chief development officer of University College London.

The college, which has raised about $200-million toward a campaign goal of $470-million, is now seeking gifts from two families in Hong Kong, who may make large gifts as a way to honor their patriarchs, both of whom graduated from the British institution in the 1950s.

“It is one thing to be an American coming to the U.K., but coming to Asia and getting comfortable is even more hotly magnified,” Mr. Wasserman says. “It is unrealistic to blow into Hong Kong and think you are going to do fund raising right away.”

Fund-raising campaigns overseas, he says, “take longer because you are building the bicycle while you are riding it.”