How to Find and Keep a Great Fundraiser

The news is not good lately about how effective the head fundraisers are at nonprofit organizations. A new study by CompassPoint reveals some startling realities about the fundraiser role in the nonprofit sector:

• 25 percent of executive directors fired their last development directors
• 33 percent of executive directors are lukewarm about their current development directors
• More than 50 percent of executive directors say they can’t find well-qualified fundraisers
• 50 percent of development directors plan to leave within the next two years
• And 40 percent plan to leave fundraising altogether

That sounds like a fundraising crisis to me. And it’s just another example of why fundraising in the nonprofit sector is broken.

What I find most troubling about CompassPoint’s recent study is that it makes nonprofits sound so powerless to do anything about this deep dissatisfaction with fundraising performance. But I think it’s not staff, board or donors who are lacking — rather it’s the entire fundraising approach.

Here is how to go about finding and keeping a great fundraiser.

Hire a money head
Don’t hire someone who can just write grants or someone who can just work with individual donors. Take a look at the entire financial engine of your organization, and hire someone who can develop and execute a strategy for strengthening and growing all aspects of that financial engine. If you have significant government grants or earned income, make sure you have someone on board who understands and can work with those aspects as well as the private money that flows to the organization.

Develop a financing plan
Don’t just expect to hire someone who will magically make money appear. Your head fundraiser has to be in charge of developing and executing an overall financing strategy for your organization. And that means that you need an overall financing strategy for your organization. Without a strategy, your chief fundraiser and your nonprofit are sunk.

Pay a real salary
It amazes me how many nonprofits expect to entice a great fundraiser by offering a salary that is comparable to someone with only a few years of experience. If you don’t have the current budget to pay a market rate, raise capacity capital to fund the first one to two years of the position. Once you have a great fundraiser on board, he or she will raise his or her own salary while growing your nonprofit’s overall revenue.

Work with them
It drives me crazy how many times a nonprofit’s lone fundraiser is trying to raise all the money on his or her own. If you are going to align mission and money, you have to make sure that everyone in the organization (board and staff) understands his or her role in bringing money in the door. Create a culture of philanthropy among the staff so that even a staff member who doesn’t have dollar goals in the job description understands that talking to prospects and donors, giving tours, and writing thank-you notes are critical to keeping the organization going. And make sure the board is trained in fundraising, has a give/get requirement, and has specific individual and board money goals.

Hire enough fundraisers
The rule of thumb is that it takes one full-time person to raise $500,000, including anyone who touches prospects and donors (database manager, prospect researcher, etc.). If you are asking a single fundraiser to raise $1.5 million, there is little wonder why your fundraiser is (and you are) miserable.

Give fundraisers tools
Don’t hire a great fundraiser and then fail to give him or her a donor database, an interactive website, marketing materials, prospect research and support. It does no good to hire someone with great ideas but no way to bring those ideas to fruition. If you don’t have the budget for additional support and tools, raise capacity capital to find it.

Train your fundraisers
No one knows it all. In every other profession we expect to send employees to conferences, provide them classes, coach them along the way, etc. Don’t expect that your fundraiser automatically knows all there is to know. Provide opportunities to gain new knowledge, meet others in the field, and continue to grow his or her skills.

If you want to attract and retain someone who will develop a sustainable financial engine for your nonprofit, don’t leave your fundraiser out in the cold. Fully integrate your head fundraiser into your organization, and provide the tools, support and resources necessary to succeed.

Nell Edgington is president of Social Velocity.