August 11, 2014 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Shaun Keister had barely settled into his new office at the University of California at Davis when the phone rang.
A recruiter wanted to tell the veteran fundraiser about a new job he’d be just perfect for.
Mr. Keister demurred, telling the headhunter he had just taken over development operations at UC-Davis, arriving from a longtime post at Penn State, about a week earlier.
“Well,” the recruiter ventured, “are you happy?”
Mr. Keister laughs as he recalls the scene: “I hadn’t even unpacked my boxes yet.”
But the ravenous demand for high-performing fundraisers is no joke. In the two and a half years since he began as vice chancellor for development and alumni relations at UC-Davis, Mr. Keister has hired more than 40 people in preparation for a capital campaign that is likely to be more ambitious than its last drive for $1.1-billion.
“I needed to go from zero to 100 overnight,” says Mr. Keister.
So do many other nonprofits, especially as charities set their sights higher for private fundraising.
But as the vacancies proliferate, they are proving hard to fill: It takes a median of six months to replace a development director, according to a national survey last year of more than 2,700 charity leaders and top fundraisers by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund.
To be truly great at raising money requires a rare set of skills, say charity leaders, recruiters, and veteran fundraisers. It takes listening deeply to donors, persistence, and patience with the slow dance of courtship and solicitation. It takes humility—a willingness to put a supporter’s needs ahead of one’s own career ambitions. And it takes an abiding passion and understanding of the cause for which support is being sought.
Sometimes, it takes a willingness to break the rules.
For instance, Margaret Turner, who has helped raise nearly $175-million” in big gifts for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, disdains the widely accepted practice of contacting a monthly quota of prospective donors.
Instead of “dialing for dollars,” as she calls it, she focuses on tailoring each interaction with a smaller group of potential supporters. One result: Eight of the 11 gifts of $1-million or more she’s raised for the museum have been from first-time donors to the Smithsonian.
And finding great fundraisers often requires looking in unexpected places. Many of today’s best fundraisers fell into the profession, rather than aiming for it, arriving from fields like teaching, politics, law enforcement, or the clergy.
Jeff Comfort, a nationally recognized planned-giving expert who now works at the Oregon State University Foundation, says he cycled through several professions before taking a chance on fundraising at age 30, heeding a career counselor’s surprising advice.
Helping fundraisers thrive comes down to showing them heartfelt respect, says Ashley McCumber, chief executive of Meals on Wheels of San Francisco.
And he should know: His own fundraising prowess has helped his charity double the number of people it serves while reducing its reliance on government funding.
“To keep your rainmakers, you need to trust and appreciate them,” he says.
Trusting them means giving them the support they need to succeed, Mr. McCumber adds, and then getting out of the way—allowing them to choose their own team, for example, and to follow their own ideas and strategies as much as possible.
In addition to offering autonomy and generous pay, showing appreciation to the people who raise money also means reminding them often that their work has genuine impact.
“Make sure that your development officer knows that their hard work this past year raised X amount and as a result this many more people were helped,” Mr. McCumber says.
Having such knowledge, he adds, “is what keeps people connected and keeps the work compelling for them.”
Eric Frazier, Michelle Gienow, and Holly Hall contributed to this article.
