Women and Minorities Lag in Appointments to Top Fund-Raising Jobs

It’s no secret that women overwhelm the fund-raising field, holding about three of every four development jobs. But they are much less likely to run the fund-raising efforts of America’s largest charities, a new Chronicle survey finds.

Fifty-two percent of top fund raisers at Philanthropy 400 organizations (The Chronicle’s ranking of the 400 largest charities by private-donation revenue) are female.

By contrast, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the industry membership group in Arlington, Va., reported in its annual compensation survey this year that 74 percent of all chief development officers surveyed are female.

That figure drops slightly, though, when organizations with budgets of at least $5-million are considered separately. Of those larger groups, 67 percent of top fund raisers are women, according to Paulette V. Maehara, the association’s president.

Large charities, especially those situated in cosmopolitan areas, need to give some thought to the face they’re presenting to their supporters, say recruiters and fund-raising experts. “What’s the right mix?” asks Claudia Looney, senior vice president for development at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, No. 229 on The Chronicle’s most recent Philanthropy 400.

“For us in Los Angeles, we need to have a work force that reflects the population of the city, because we want to relate as well as possible to our donors,” says Ms. Looney. “Every organization needs to look at what their donor mix looks like and figure out what their staffing ought to be to maximize their giving.”

‘We’re Really in Trouble’

The Chronicle’s survey also found that only 7 percent of the chief fund raisers at Philanthropy 400 charities are nonwhite. That is comparable to the percentage of minorities in fund-raising offices at charities of all sizes.

Although the Association of Fundraising Professionals does not have recent data on the percentage of chief development officers who are minorities, the group’s 2010 compensation survey found that 5.2 percent of all U.S. fund raisers surveyed reported that they were nonwhite.

Rob Henry, executive director of emerging constituencies at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, in Washington, says that, in higher education, the share of top fund raisers who are people of color is even slimmer: Only about 1 percent of “key decision makers,” as the council defines them, at college and university fund-raising departments, are nonwhite.

Mr. Henry is not convinced that the retirement of the baby boomers will make much difference in the demographics of top fund raisers, at least as far as minorities are concerned. He’s pinning his hopes on the ascendancy of the huge, diverse Millennial generation, people now in their 20s. But that changeover won’t begin to happen, he notes, for another 10 or 15 years at the earliest.

“We have talked about this topic for, what, 40 years? And I think we’re in the same place,” he laments. “I don’t look at the 7 percent number and think that’s acceptable. And I look at our 1 percent, and I think, we’re really in trouble.”

The Chronicle’s findings compare with those it uncovered last year in a study of the Philanthropy 400’s chief executives; that survey found that only 19 percent of the leaders of top charities were female (and only 6 percent were nonwhite).

The new survey of chief development officers was conducted by examining the organizations included in the 2009 Philanthropy 400. A total of 374 groups provided information about their top fund raiser; in three cases, leadership is shared, and each person was counted as an individual, bringing the pool to 377 fund raisers.

The Board Factor

Boards are the key to creating greater opportunity for female and minority candidates, say recruiters.

Ms. Looney recalls interviewing for her first nonprofit leadership job back in 1980, before an all-male board at a Southern California charity she declines to name.

“This was a group of retired CEO’s and an attorney, and the only woman they had seen in the work force at that point in time was sitting behind a typewriter in a fuzzy sweater,” she says. “It took them a great deal of angst and deliberation to hire me into that position. And it took them a bit of time to realize that I wasn’t there to get their coffee.”

The board members grew to appreciate her skill at raising money, she says, and the job started her on her current career. Now Ms. Looney is 10 years into a $1-billion capital campaign at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, for which she has thus far helped raise $926-million.

Even today, say recruiters, some boards continue to exhibit profound ambivalence about selecting someone who is female or minority to represent their organization to its wealthiest donors.

Diversity “means different things to different people,” notes Steven T. Ast, a recruiter in Stamford, Conn., who specializes in filling fund-raising positions. Sometimes, he says, boards request “diverse” candidates but “often that is for show, for statistics, for data.”

He says he presses the boards that hire him to conduct searches and request diverse candidates, “‘Will a woman be allowed to succeed in this position?’ I ask it in just this way. And sometimes they look down, shuffle their feet, and say, ‘Well, we may not be ready for that.’”

In another case, he says, a private school in the Northeast that prides itself on recruiting a diverse student body retained his firm to find a chief development officer. Mr. Ast found a black male job seeker whom he describes as a highly qualified candidate. He sent the applicant to be interviewed.

And then, Mr. Ast says, the organization’s leaders asked him, “Are you sure you want to bring a black man into this community?” The area, Mr. Ast notes, is a very wealthy one. “That was hard,” he says. “Those are the underlying issues that just don’t come out.”

Anticipating Turnover

Like Mr. Henry, Ms. Looney remains skeptical that the long-anticipated wave of baby-boomer retirements will make an impact anytime soon on diversity in senior nonprofit roles. She compares hype about the retirement wave to another questionable prediction that will sound familiar to fund raisers.

“It’s reminiscent for me of all these great trillions of dollars that are going to be passed down to baby boomers” from the World War II generation, Ms. Looney says. She thinks that the poor economy and relatively good health of many older workers will combine to slow down the expected flood of retirements. “It will take them longer to move on,” she says. “So the caveat is, there may be fewer opportunities for minorities and women.”

But others, like Ms. Maehara, say the long tenure for many current senior-level leaders may be a hidden factor in why so few women, in particular, hold jobs at big charities.

When she became a fund raiser in the 1980s, she says, most development officers were male. And today, at very large nonprofit groups, she says, “many of these individuals came into these positions in the early ’90s, maybe even before, and have been there a long time.

“They are probably close to retirement, if not soon to retire,” says Ms. Maehara, who in July announced her own plans to retire in the coming months.

The pool of people their successors will be chosen from, she says, will probably be much more diverse. And charities’ needs in the coming years, such as for greater emphasis on retaining donors, may play to the strengths of female candidates. “Women tend to be pretty good nurturers, and it’s one of the reasons they excel in this profession,” says Ms. Maehara. “And nurturing is a key ingredient of stewardship.”

But the Chronicle’s figures about the relative paucity of women in senior-level fund-raising jobs at big organizations do prompt some questions, says Janice Gow Pettey, a fund-raising consultant in San Francisco, and author of Cultivating Diversity in Fundraising. “What is it that women are seeking in order to move up the ladder, and are they finding it?” she asks. “What are the challenges they seek?”

She also wonders “if there’s some self-selection going on, where women are saying, ‘I’m happy. This is where I want to be.’ We can’t assume that every woman fund-raising professional is seeking a chief development officer position.”

Other observers think that women are vying for but being turned down for those positions.

“I know a lot of women going into consulting because they couldn’t get the top jobs,” says Poonam Prasad, a fund-raising consultant and the immediate past president of Women in Development, a professional group for nearly 800 fund raisers in the New York area.

She recalls a networking event the association held a couple of years ago: “Two young women walked up to me and said, ‘Why do we need this group when everyone we know in fund raising is a woman?’ They have not yet felt what happens at the top. For the top-paying jobs and the most prestigious, visible jobs, men are the ones most sought after.”

A Changing America

But the numbers of female and minority chief development officers at big organizations will need to rise in the coming years for those charities to engage most effectively with the rising generation of donors, say experts.

While 70 percent of American adults age 30 and older are white, that number drops to 61 percent among Americans age 18 to 29, according to federal figures. By 2032, just a generation away, most American children will be minorities, the Census Bureau projects. By 2042, the Census predicts, whites will be in the minority in the United States.

In addition, women continue to make their mark in the American economy, earning their own wealth and increasing their value to charities as potential donors. This year, for the first time ever, Department of Labor statistics showed that women outnumbered men in the work force.

“If the large organizations see these demographics changing, and they see a shift among their own donor constituency, do they want their fund-raising leadership to have that ability to identify and connect with those new constituents?” says Ms. Gow Pettey. “And, if so, what can they do to attract those candidates?”

It may be especially urgent for organizations to focus on hiring people who can engage Hispanic donors, suggests Mr. Henry, because of their rapidly increasing numbers and buying power.

“Those are audiences that will look for someone who looks like them to make those solicitations,” he says. “They will expect someone who’s going to come to their house and speak in Spanish.”

But diversity is never easy to achieve, and many organizations, feeling pressure to fill empty chairs and produce results, make it harder by rushing their hiring, says Marian Alexander DeBerry, director of talent management at Campbell & Company, a consultancy in Chicago that conducts mostly searches for fund raisers.

If commitment to casting a wide net for applicants doesn’t exist, from a group’s leadership on down, “you’ll find yourself with a continuing lack of diversity. And candidates notice. And it digs you deeper into a trench.”

One way out of that trench, she suggests, is to seek diversity of experience in candidates—for instance, she says, taking a harder look at applicants whose résumés include significant fund-raising work at health or social-service groups, even if the job being filled is in a higher-education development office. Otherwise, she says, “you could miss out on a lot of potential.”

Sheila V Kumar and Lisa Marrs conducted The Chronicle’s survey. Holly Hall contributed to this article.