With a severe shortage of experienced fund raisers nationwide, professional recruiters and senior development officers offer the following tips to help charities find and keep fund raisers who seek big gifts from individuals.
Use mentors. Syracuse University has enlisted a former director of development to come out of retirement to work one-on-one with new fund raisers to educate them about the university and its schools and colleges, accompany them on short trips to visit donors, and offer ideas for how to approach potential supporters. The part-time arrangement, which has been in place for more than two years and helped more than a dozen new fund raisers, "is working well for us," says Jake Tanksley, a recruiter with the university.
Offer flexible conditions. Jennifer Weber, a major-gift specialist at St. John West Shore Hospital, in Westlake, Ohio, says that she negotiated a no-travel condition in her previous job and also won permission to bring her two young children to work, even setting up a crib for her baby girl in her office. In her current position, she works four days a week for 20 percent less pay.
"It's not that there aren't qualified people out there with the skills to fill these positions," she says. "It's that the positions, as they are currently structured, are not appealing," especially for people with children or those caring for elderly parents.
Nonprofit organizations, she adds, "would do well to consider splitting major-donor positions in new ways."
For example, she says, they could offer two part-time jobs to one fund raiser who does the national travel and another person who does local travel and day trips. Or they could hire two people part time to work three days a week.
Create entry-level opportunities. Recruiters who work for nonprofit organizations say that it pays to concentrate on improving the skills of junior-level fund raisers so they will stay longer and can be moved into major-gift positions at lower salaries than a more-experienced fund raiser would demand.
"We do not want to be in a bidding war" over major-gifts fund raisers who get multiple job offers, says Jo Ellen Rose, a Cornell University recruiter. "It gets to be endless, and you don't get the kind of tenure you want. Part of it is looking at your own staff and developing ways for them to move along."
Chrissi Rawak, executive director of development recruitment at the University of Michigan, and her colleagues recently created a new internship program for 17 undergraduates. The students have spent the last three months working four days a week in the development office and a fifth day learning from a specially developed fund-raising curriculum. In addition to how-to information about raising money, the accredited course work includes presentations from donors, etiquette lessons on fine dining and appropriate attire, and information on the history of higher education.
Once they finish the program, the interns will work part time in the development office again next year while completing their degrees. By the time they graduate, they will have one-and-a-half years of fund-raising experience, says Ms. Rawak, who hopes to hire some of the former interns for entry-level development jobs.
"I got tired of just talking about the shortage of qualified development professionals," she says. "No one else is going to change it for us."
Look outside the profession. Recruiters say that some nonprofit executives have been too unwilling to consider people from other professions or, in some cases, even fund raisers from different types of charities.
Elliot B. Karp, chief fund raiser at a Tenafly, N.J., Jewish community center, has spent nearly 30 years raising tens of millions of dollars for Jewish causes, and is now looking to apply his expertise at a different type of charity. He is also willing to move to a new city. But despite several interviews with prospective employers, he has yet to find a position. "I have heard from several organizations that I have great experience but haven't worked in United Ways, hospitals, higher ed, whatever," he says.
Hoping to expand the number of big-gift solicitors coming from other professions, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, which represents college and private-school fund raisers, is now considering offering a "midcareer training program." It would teach fund-raising skills to sales and marketing executives, bankers, lawyers, and other professionals with skills that could be adapted to seeking large gifts.
Offer a bonus. The trickiest time for nonprofit groups to keep fund raisers from leaving is when a capital campaign is nearing its end, says Scott Nichols, vice president for development at Boston University.
"If you get within 24 months of the end of a campaign, everyone knows it's going to be successful, so people start looking beyond," he says. "This is when you lose your best people. They get courted within sight of the goal."
To overcome that problem when he was running a campaign at Harvard Law School, Mr. Nichols offered his fund-raising staff a bonus, 5 to 20 percent of their salary annually. Fund raisers received higher percentages if their work had a big impact in achieving the campaign's goals, but they did not get a penny unless they stayed for the entire drive.
"It was hugely successful," Mr. Nichols recalls. "I was shocked, because 44 people stayed and we lost only one person," who got a job offer that doubled his salary. Mr. Nichols says that he would like to use the same approach in Boston University's next campaign.
"You say to them that you will set aside $10,000 to $20,000 for the next five years," he says. "If you are here for five years, you get the whole thing. If you leave a day before, you get nothing."