How Fundraising Leaders Can Stop Perpetuating Abuse

Two issues are top of mind for all development leaders: how to meet fundraising goals and how to recruit and keep the best talent. Here’s another for the priority list — one that cannot be ignored given the rise of the #MeToo movement: how to squelch pervasive sexual harassment that has become so much more visible at nonprofits in recent years.

These topics are far more interrelated than many people realize. At the root of the problem is a destructive, cutthroat competition for donors and dollars underpinned by an overt power imbalance between staff and benefactors. These circumstances not only erode team cohesion and promote turnover, they also create an environment in which victims don’t report abuse.

Several years ago, I became fed up with harassment by donors and started researching its prevalence in fundraising. At the same time, I was also completing an article on how to retain frontline fundraisers. I interviewed fundraisers for both projects and noticed parallel themes emerging. Good fundraisers who chose to leave their organizations reported a toxic work culture and little support from their managers; women who had experienced sexual harassment in their fundraising roles — and not reported it — had experienced the same. The stakes are high when relationships lead to revenue; staff well-being can get lost in pursuit of annual targets.

Most victims of harassment said the signs of a threat were evident to them early on. Despite this, they dutifully pressed forward in pursuit of a gift and rarely reported the donor’s behavior. Uncertain of the organization’s protocol and fearful of losing a prospective donor, the women remained silent because they knew a donation was the priority of their organizations.

Safety and Dignity

Fundraising is hard work. Good fundraisers do all they can to build relationships with donors. Fundraisers are road warriors, storytellers, and matchmakers, accustomed to contacting a prospective donor seven times before getting a response. This is all part of the job. But when any threat to safety or dignity enters the picture, fundraisers need to feel they have permission to drop the prospect. And that permission needs to be explicit.

An obsessive focus on donors and dollars creates unhealthy power dynamics, both in the way staff members view donors and the way they interact with one another. These dynamics can lead to a culture of insecurity, competition, and distrust, where bullying thrives and turnover is high. It’s time to end this culture and recognize that it is actually possible to maintain ambitious fundraising goals and cultivate a supportive staff culture.

Staff well-being and fundraising revenue have a positive correlation. So it is counterproductive for fundraising leaders to say they are so busy meeting giving goals that they have no time to think strategically about developing a healthy office culture. To recalibrate cultural behaviors, leaders must encourage deliberate conversations about the role of volunteers and donors within the organization. They must signal openness and respect at all levels and provide incentives for staff members to collaborate rather than compete.

Here are some steps to take:

De-deify donors. Donors and volunteers enable our organizations to fulfill their missions; their generosity exceeds human nature, and engaging them in our work is paramount. But all too often, organizations create unhealthy dynamics around donors. They may treat them as deities or as irrational toddlers in need of handling or as flowers of a delicate yet volatile species. They may see them as a type of currency to be earned and deployed when needed. If donors are perceived as untouchable, it follows that fundraisers will be reticent to report inappropriate behaviors.

This unrealistic regard also undermines staff culture. Fundraisers vie to be assigned to cultivate donors with the highest giving potential and status. At many organizations, fundraisers who engage in this type of relentless jockeying are rewarded with greater responsibility and pay. Naturally, fundraisers working in this kind of environment will be less likely to report abuse and feel less confident that anything will be done if they do take a risk and say something.

Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, and her colleague in the business school, Boris Groysberg, recently wrote that this type of cutthroat, show-no-weakness competition within organizations is connected to higher rates of abuse among colleagues, as well as to low retention rates and lack of productivity in the workplace.

While it is strategic to assign higher-stakes donors to more experienced fundraisers, leaders need to rethink the way they regard their benefactors. Donors are philanthropists looking to have a mission-driven impact; fundraisers are philanthropic advisers who help to facilitate that impact. It’s a donor’s choice to make a gift.

The nature of fundraising — i.e., repeated phone calls with no response, last-minute meeting cancellations, and various other forms of socially degrading interactions — can leave a fundraiser feeling inadequate and somehow responsible for a donor’s behavior. When we regard donors as untouchable deities, it diminishes staff morale and creates unrealistic expectations over which a fundraiser may have little control.

Create uniform policies. Organizations must also have consistent policies in place for sexual harassment by donors and volunteers. Most human-resource offices have clear processes when it comes to harassment by other employees, but the problem is murkier — and less likely to be addressed — when it comes to people from outside the organization.

Leaders and governing boards need to have frank discussions about this issue and work with the organization’s HR office to develop a uniform policy. Once a policy is in place, leaders should firmly instruct staff members that, for the good of the organization, they must report inappropriate behavior from donors and volunteers. Anyone found guilty of bad behavior should no longer be asked for money or allowed to have any volunteer involvement.

When staff members are harassed or otherwise treated poorly and leaders don’t respond because the perpetrator is a high-capacity donor or board member, they’re sending the message that the organization is willing to do whatever it takes to secure a gift. “When people are demoralized and lose faith in leadership because they themselves are harassed or they see it happening to others, they are less likely to perform at the level of their actual ability, and the organization loses out on their full contribution, even if they stay with the organization,” said Ms. Ammerman in an email interview earlier this year.

Shift the team’s cultural norms. I am not advocating for a wholesale change in the basics of how managers evaluate fundraisers. Measuring productivity based on how well a fundraiser moves a donor from expressing initial interest to providing a gift (or larger gift) makes sense. However, since this recipe can also yield toxic power dynamics and distrust among team members, leaders need to find ways to create a culture of support among employees and insist that everyone act based on shared organizational values.

Transforming culture requires keen observation and careful social engineering. “Science tells us that there are a number of tactics leaders can employ to drive a culture shift within their organization or on the issue they care about most,” Annie Niemand, research director at the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida, told me in an interview. According to Niemand, it’s not too late for leaders to transform their office cultures, but it takes strategy and courage to do so — and change needs to come from the top.

There are some practical (albeit challenging) steps leaders can take to recalibrate their team atmosphere that will both lead to more openness among staff and combat harassment and abuse.

• The first step is to identify ways in which staff members are using their own power to create divisions. Of course, there will be clear hierarchies in title and salary. But how can we stop people from using their access to information, executives, and VIPs to create fiefdoms? It’s easy to neutralize these types of power plays by having an open-door policy and by encouraging anyone on staff to contact leaders directly with questions or concerns.
• Leaders can also set aside an hour each week to have coffee with any staff members they don’t interact with regularly; such small gestures can communicate that everyone is valued, thus helping to build a supportive atmosphere and facilitate team cohesion.
• Who receives recognition on the team, and what kind of behavior is generally rewarded? Leaders always recognize and celebrate donations, with good reason. However, the problem with only recognizing revenue is that it singles out one job type and diminishes the contributions of the rest of the team.

Leaders need to celebrate collaboration and teamwork above all — which are required for important behind-the-scenes work like conducting successful research on potential donors, crafting smart travel itineraries to meet with prospects, and arranging donor-appreciation dinners — and they need to identify staff members who work tirelessly to make these things happen. Because there are always natural hierarchies that form around dollars and donors, managers need to be mindful to create an equitable culture.

• As with most groups involving people, it is also helpful to have an agreed-upon set of values and expected behaviors to govern organizational culture, says management consultant and executive coach Jim Mueller, in a recent email interview. “My advice to any leader is to begin by establishing a healthy culture and managing that culture around core values. There’s a good deal of research that shows that when you manage and actively engage in conversation about your core values, the culture will respond and begin to form around those values.”

“I recommend that the entire staff become engaged in establishing professional behavior values, not only in their identification, but in the definition of what they mean,” says Mueller.

Once the team has agreed on its shared values, leaders should take time to recognize when staff are practicing these values and celebrate progress. Leaders may even want to identify those staff members Niemand refers to as “influencers” within the group and pay particular attention to how such influencers are (or aren’t) demonstrating the kind of behavioral norms that create team trust and collaboration.

• Finally, if leaders are asking their teams to trust one another and show the kind of vulnerability and honesty that allows them to function as a true team, they must also model that behavior. Leaders should admit misgivings and mistakes and inspire honesty. They should dismantle unhealthy social hierarchies among staff members by taking strategic opportunities to turn social (not professional) hierarchies upside down. Contrary to our fears that vulnerability will diminish credibility, staff will actually respect the courage it takes to lead authentically.

Much of what it takes to create healthy staff culture and combat abuse runs counter to closely held assumptions of fundraising leaders, who may fear that if their staff stop competing with one another, they will be less motivated to meet annual goals. Managers may worry that humanizing donors will lessen the precision with which staff manage donor events and relationships. It’s time to let go of these destructive fears and watch what happens to our fundraising revenue when our teams function well and enjoy coming to work every day.

Arminda Lathrop is an international fundraising and leadership consultant based in Accra, Ghana, where she works with organizations to build sustainable growth.