April 4, 2010 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Should fund raising be regarded as a profession?
Many fund raisers certainly think so. After all, more than 30,000 of them belong to the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and many thousands of others join professional fund-raising groups that focus on specific causes, such as education or health care.
Yet how does one qualify as a member of the profession? How does one gain exposure to relevant knowledge and skills and then demonstrate that knowledge and those skills to a prospective employer?
That is far from clear. The fund-raising profession seems to be awash with training programs and seminars, many of which are of dubious quality, are not properly assessed, and lead to nothing at their conclusion except a certificate of completion that requires only a checkbook and a pulse to obtain.
Academically rigorous programs are notable largely by their absence, and nowhere is it possible for bright undergraduate students to pursue a dedicated degree that would prepare them for a career in what might be a wonderfully rewarding profession.
What’s more, the graduate courses that are available are patchy and rarely lead to a full-scale degree. Today just a handful of institutions offer a master’s degree in fund raising.
So academic institutions certainly need to do better to serve the growing demand for strong fund raisers. But scholars like me also need to point out problems with the process now used to accredit fund raisers.
In so doing, we must acknowledge that it is easier to be critical than to make a system work, and fund raisers should be commended for putting in place an important first step, the credential known as certified fund-raising executive status, or CFRE.
More than 5,000 people have obtained this status and are rightly proud of their achievements. To qualify, those individuals must have demonstrated competence in six areas important to fund raising: conducting research on current and prospective donors, securing gifts, building relationships with supporters, involving donors, managing, and accountability.
Every profession needs to be able to distinguish its strongest members from those who care nothing for the experiences they offer their clients, and CFRE performs this role well. It should continue to do so.
But scholars and researchers can suggest some new ways to make this credential more useful as a way to guarantee that nonprofit employers are making wise choices—and to reassure donors they are working with highly qualified professionals.
After all, if I were going to run a $1-million drive for my local homeless shelter, I would turn to a group of 10 first-rate fund raisers. So when it comes to developing a system of education and accreditation, it seems only logical for fund raisers to seek a scholarly perspective.
As I look at the process, I see several flaws. The first problem is that the accreditation system fails to draw an adequate distinction between knowledge and skills and appears to confuse the two.
CFRE periodically conducts a detailed survey of professional practices and uses that study to define and update a series of skills that fund raisers should be able to demonstrate.
In the case of research on potential donors, for example, competent professionals are required to be able to demonstrate skills such as the ability to develop a list of prospective donors, analyze that list, and rate the most likely people to make big gifts.
In total, 33 skills are delineated. Skills may be added or deleted from this list on the basis of the CFRE survey, so the set of skills a certified fund raiser must possess are kept up-to-date.
The CFRE Web site refers to six key areas of knowledge, yet lists skills, or things an individual should be able to do. These definitions thus begin with verbs such as ‘develop,’ ‘implement,’ ‘rate,’ ‘design,’ etc.
That approach does not define in detail the knowledge that individuals should have to be able to perform those tasks and, more than that, perform them well.
To illustrate, one skill required of certified fund raisers is that they should be able to design donor-centered solicitation materials. This is a perfectly reasonable expectation, but what exactly would we expect people to know to perform that task well?
The scheme suggests a knowledge of donor psychology, but if that is the case, exactly what knowledge of donor psychology? Is it good old Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or might the profession do better than that, embracing modern perspectives on giving and perhaps at least one or two formal models of donor behavior?
Ask yourself which fund raiser will design better direct-mail materials—one who understands philanthropic psychology or one who uses Maslow as his or her base.
Knowledge and skills are not synonymous, and we must define both. Listing only broad “knowledge areas” (e.g., donor psychology and direct mail) is not helpful.
The second issue with the current certification stems from the first.
The failure to adequately distinguish skills from knowledge has led to confusion in the assessment regime.
The CFRE test includes a battery of multiple-choice questions for fund raisers to answer.
The problem with this approach is that multiple-choice questions are designed to assess knowledge, not skills, and knowledge that has a clear and definitive answer. So we have a curious position in which fund-raising skills are defined, yet we employ a testing regime appropriate only to fund-raising knowledge.
In education many claims are made for the utility of multiple-choice tests, but scholars have long agreed that whatever their merits, they may not be used to assess practical skills, such as the ability to develop a case for support, write a fund-raising solicitation, or analyze a list of potential donors.
And think about it: Which is more valuable from an employer’s perspective, to know that someone knows what a case for support is or to know that that person can actually write one?
Multiple-choice tests can testify only to the former; they offer no assurance on the latter. To assess fund-raising skills adequately, a new assessment regime would be needed.
The third key weakness lies in the certification system’s conception of what constitutes knowledge. For CFRE, a fact becomes accepted as professional knowledge if it has been published in two or more fund-raising books.
• Map out the body of knowledge that fund raisers must know. This shouldn’t be generic; a body of knowledge should be delineated for every major form of fund raising, and it should be regularly updated as the state of that knowledge moves on. That body of knowledge can inform the education provided to fund raisers as well as the accreditation system. The standard of all professional education can then be dragged up by the bootstraps to meet the standards of the best.
• Fund raisers must work with educational institutions to foster a proper academic route to fund-raising qualification. Just as it is currently possible for colleges to train students in marketing, so too should it be possible to study for entry into a career in fund raising, perhaps in at least one institution per state. Bright young people passionate about a fund-raising career should have the opportunity to study for a degree to prepare them for it. Professional bodies should accredit academic achievement in these programs for membership and bodies such as CFRE should consider opening their doors to graduates, albeit after an appropriate qualification period.
• Scholars and fund raisers should work together to develop a rigorous postgraduate fund-raising syllabus, informed from the best that both fund raisers and academic researchers can offer. This knowledge would outline what people without an undergraduate degree in the topic must learn. It should furnish individuals with the skills and knowledge expected by nonprofit employers, and anybody who demonstrates mastery of the syllabus should qualify as a CFRE and as a member of the nation’s professional fund-raising bodies.
• People who are successful fund raisers but who have not chosen to apply for the CFRE should be offered an alternative way to demonstrate their prowess. This assessment should not be undertaken by a multiple-choice exam. If the profession demands specific skills to qualify as a member of that profession, individuals should be able to provide evidence of those skills, such as copies of documents, fund-raising plans, reports, or letters of support. A portfolio of evidence could be assessed for those currently doing the job and who might therefore gain little from participation in a more academic process. Because CFRE already rigorously assesses whether individuals meet experience requirements, it would merely need to focus in greater detail on the content of that experience.
The requirements of the fund-raising profession have changed tremendously in recent years.
To create an environment in which donors receive the best possible experience from their philanthropy, it is time to reconsider how to provide qualified professional fund raisers who are up to the task. And if nonprofit leaders want to see a substantial increase in giving, getting fund-raising education and accreditation right must surely be the starting point.
