When Fund Raisers Go Solo

Freelance consultants offer charities expertise and savings

After watching four of its chief fund raisers come and go in five years, Mary Ann Pulk, executive director of the

Phoenix Boys Choir, wanted to try something new. “We really came to a crossroads,” she says, “and said we could either do what we have been doing, or we can go back to the drawing board.”

She had only one clear choice, she says: to split up the chief fund raiser’s job, taking over the bulk of the work herself and delegating the rest to choir employees and a freelance grant-proposal writer. The move gave the charity more flexibility, since it wouldn’t need to recruit and retain yet another full-time fund raiser, says Ms. Pulk. It also cut costs. While the chief fund raiser had been paid salary and benefits totaling $58,500 a year, the choir now spends $15,000 a year for both the freelance proposal writer and a new part-time employee to handle donor records.

The Phoenix Boys Choir is one of many organizations relying on a growing number of self-employed fund raisers. Many of their clients are small charities that must hire outsiders because they have no development staff. Larger groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are also using independent contractors, often because they seek specialized fund-raising skills, or because they have a project that doesn’t warrant adding a permanent staff member.

Even so, many charity leaders and consultants themselves agree that not every fund-raising task can be done effectively by an outsider. Lilya Wagner, author of Careers in Fundraising, published last year by John Wiley & Sons, advises nonprofit executives to make sure that the person they hire is both well qualified and a good fit.

Consulting “has become such a catch-all term that unless you know the person is truly a consultant, many of us have become suspicious,” observes Ms. Wagner, who is the associate director for public service at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. “Are they truly a consultant, or are they just calling themselves that while they look for a job?”

Consultants on the Rise

While no comprehensive figures exist, the number of fund raisers providing consulting services appears to be on the rise. For instance, the proportion of members of the Association of Fundraising Professionals who are consultants has increased from 4.6 percent in 1992 to 7.2 percent in 1999, according to the professional network’s membership surveys.

In an effort to serve independent fund raisers more fully, the association is offering its first “consultants academy” in March, preceding its annual conference in Toronto. It is holding the workshop with the American Association of Fundraising Counsel, which represents fund-raising consultants.

One reason for the increase in the number of freelancers may be the general shortage of fund raisers, says Paulette V. Maehara, AFP’s president. With fund raisers in high demand but short supply, more are opting to go into business for themselves simply because they can. Even in a tight economy, says Ms. Maehara, “the need is so great that every consultant I know has more work than they could possibly handle.” Moreover, she says, for senior professionals in high-stress jobs that demand long days, the notion of being their own boss is appealing.

Inexpensive Expertise

One of the most common reasons that nonprofit organizations use outsiders to help raise funds is to save money. Hiring a freelancer, charity leaders say, can give them access to greater expertise than they could get for the same money by hiring a staff member.

Others say they use consultants because they don’t want to hire a full-time employee for a short-term project. Earlier this year, as St. Albans School, a private school in Washington, began investigating whether to start a capital campaign, it needed someone to conduct research on 100 prospective donors it hoped to solicit for gifts of $50,000 or more. Jon McKenna, the school’s director of capital and planned giving, posted an advertisement on an electronic mailing list for people who research potential donors, and received 10 applications over two weeks. He hired four freelance researchers, who completed the work in two months at a total cost of $20,000. “It would have been hard to get a full-time prospect researcher who could accomplish that work in a six-month period,” he says.

Sometimes new charities turn to consultants because they cannot afford to add more employees. PEARLS for Teen Girls, a Milwaukee youth charity, started as a volunteer project in 1992, but did not register for tax-exempt status until 2000. Colleen Fitzgerald, the executive director, says she hopes to hire a full-time fund raiser. But she is reluctant to expand her staff too rapidly, noting that she began drawing a salary herself only two years ago. “We were very cautious about what kind of overhead and bottom line we wanted to generate as we were getting our legs underneath us,” she says. “It is real important for us now to stay as flexible as possible.”

In lieu of hiring a fund raiser, PEARLS for Teen Girls spends about $20,000 a year for a consultant to apply for grants, identify prospective donors, and draft direct-mail solicitation letters.

At the Newton [Kan.] Community & Healthcare Foundation, which has two employees, fund raising is one of several areas assigned to independent contractors, along with accounting, legal work, and Web-site design. The arrangement gives the group access to more-experienced help than it could afford if it hired permanent employees, says Loren D. Friesen, the charity’s executive director.

His group spends about $15,000 a year to retain a lawyer with expertise in planned giving. The lawyer meets once a month with potential donors to advise them on estate planning. Although people who meet with the lawyer are not required to give to the foundation, most do so. The result: Some $10-million to $12-million has been pledged in donors’ wills and in a charitable trust that generates $100,000 a year for the foundation. “My philosophy,” Mr. Friesen says, “is to be educated enough in a general sense on accounting, planned giving, and all of those things to be able to recognize opportunities and get things started, but then hand it over to an expert to finish it up.”

Limits of Outside Help

Consultants and charity leaders say certain types of fund raising are more suited than others to handling by an outsider, especially discrete projects such as grant-proposal writing or special-events planning.

Some responsibilities, however, may be best handled by an organization’s staff members — particularly when it comes to developing relationships with big donors. Asking a “hired gun” to solicit major donors simply doesn’t make sense, says Sally Bryant DeChenne, a fund-raising consultant in Los Angeles. Because employees tend to be more familiar with a charity’s day-to-day activities, they can often make a more passionate case for why a donor’s money is needed, she says. Plus, she adds, the consultant will eventually move on, leaving the group with no direct connection to the donor.

Handling Sensitive Issues

When Kelly Brault, assistant director of annual giving at the University of Detroit Mercy, hired an outside copywriter to draft an annual solicitation to alumni, she found it was more trouble than it was worth: She hired several different writers and ended up rewriting most of the copy herself. “It was difficult to get the right tone for our audience,” she says. For example, she says, the writers were unaware of sensitive issues related to the merger of the University of Detroit with Mercy College 10 years earlier.

Others say relying too much on outsiders can have unintended consequences. Charities may “continue to hunt for the perfect specialist with a magic wand, rather than get serious about developing staff potential,” says Debra Shaw, a consultant with expertise in prospect research, in Ottawa, Ontario, who has also worked for a university and a fund-raising consulting firm. That, in turn, “reinforces management’s and board members’ secret but fervent conviction that fund raising is someone else’s job, rather than a major organizationwide task that everyone has to help with.”

Selection Process

Since anybody can use the title “consultant,” charities need to be careful when they hire outside help, says George Nehme, a consultant in Providence, R.I., who has spent nearly 20 years as a fund raiser for charities, most recently as director of Brown University’s annual giving program.

“In the past, one would view a consultant as someone who is a senior statesperson, and who has a lot of experience and miles on the road, who can turn around and advise and mentor those who are coming up the ranks,” says Mr. Nehme. “But today it runs the whole gamut from those with very few years of experience to those with decades.”

While he says charity leaders shouldn’t automatically rule out a less-experienced consultant, they should evaluate the freelancer’s credentials carefully. He recommends seeking referrals from other trusted charities, especially organizations with a similar mission, or groups that have used a consultant for a similar project.

Nonprofit executives should also ask whether the consultant has experience doing the type of fund raising the charity needs, says Ms. Bryant DeChenne. “If you are hiring someone to work with your planned-giving program, you need to make sure they have planned-giving experience,” she says. While that may sound obvious, she says, charities need to remember that many consultants are generalists who may lack experience in a specialized area such as direct mail.

Others advise asking consultants for samples of past work, to assess the quality and the type of work they have performed previously. They can even test candidates’ skills, as Mr. McKenna of the St. Albans School did when he was hiring freelance researchers. He asked each of 10 candidates to research and write a description of the background, interests, and giving potential of a donor the school planned to solicit.

Once a charity selects a consultant, it should communicate clearly any expectations related to hours, fees, and other key issues, spelling out agreements in a written contract and also discussing them orally, says Mary Liz Keevers, a consultant in New Orleans.

To avoid any misunderstandings, she gives her clients a written update every 30 days, outlining the progress she has made. She submits a more comprehensive report every six months.

Similarly, Ms. Bryant DeChenne says, she lets the charity know what she expects in return, so she has the information she needs to move ahead with her own work. She says she spells out what the charity must do at each stage of a project, and assigns a deadline for when it needs to be done.

One common mistake nonprofit leaders make, says Ms. Keevers, is to think their jobs are done when they hire a consultant. “Sometimes they think, ‘Oh goody, our woes are answered now, and the money will start coming in,’” she says. “They don’t realize that they have to take an active part.”

For Ms. Pulk, of the Phoenix Boys Choir, hiring a freelancer is only a temporary fix for her group’s problem of losing fund raisers. While she may continue to use a consultant to write grant proposals, she hopes eventually to have someone take over most of the other fund-raising work.

In the meantime, however, she says assigning some of the work to an outsider and taking on much of the rest herself was a good decision. She says it taught her that her fund raiser had more work than one person could handle. But now that she has a contract with the grant-proposal writer, and other employees are handling special events and other tasks, she thinks the new fund-raising job will be more manageable.

“I don’t see this as a long-term solution for us,” she says. “But it was good for us because it made me take a hard look at what we do, and what we don’t do. That’s a real lesson for any small organization.”