Justine Weissenborn couldn’t have been more pleased with her new job. Between her undergraduate degree in kinesiology and a stint teaching health education to low-income families in Baltimore, she seemed a perfect match for the small Muscular Dystrophy Association chapter where she started as a fundraising coordinator in 2012.
It wasn’t long, however, before her excitement fizzled. Her boss quit for a new job, and Ms. Weissenborn, then 25, was left to navigate a maze of unfamiliar duties with little guidance. She found herself courting corporate sponsors and recruiting grocery and convenience stores to ask patrons for donations at checkout. She organized annual golf tournaments and galas and helped firefighters count the coins and bills from “fill the boot” drives.
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or cophelp@philanthropy.com
Justine Weissenborn couldn’t have been more pleased with her new job. Between her undergraduate degree in kinesiology and a stint teaching health education to low-income families in Baltimore, she seemed a perfect match for the small Muscular Dystrophy Association chapter where she started as a fundraising coordinator in 2012.
It wasn’t long, however, before her excitement fizzled. Her boss quit for a new job, and Ms. Weissenborn, then 25, was left to navigate a maze of unfamiliar duties with little guidance. She found herself courting corporate sponsors and recruiting grocery and convenience stores to ask patrons for donations at checkout. She organized annual golf tournaments and galas and helped firefighters count the coins and bills from “fill the boot” drives.
Though her duties included raising money for the gala from individual donors, her prospect list was a set of binders filled with notes scribbled by fundraisers who’d come before her. “You hoped you could read the person’s handwriting, but it was pretty fruitless,” she says. Exhausted and fed up, she found a job as an associate director of advancement at George Mason University outside Washington, D.C.
Today, a little more than a year later, Ms. Weissenborn talks about her work with the wonder of someone who has stumbled from the Dark Ages into Google headquarters. George Mason has a donor database! It hires consultants! It pays for professional development! Best of all, it has a bona-fide donor-engagement process.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I was like, ‘Oh, you mean there’s a science behind fundraising? And a method that other people use?’ It’s a little scary that I worked as a fundraiser for three years and I had never heard words like ‘identification,’ ‘qualification,’ ‘soliciting,’ and ‘stewardship.’ "
Amateur Hour
In the nonprofit ecosystem, it’s the natural order of things for fundraisers to move from local charities or small branches of national organizations to large institutions. Typically, they seek more money, stability, or an escape from planning yet another gala.
Ms. Weissenborn’s story, however, captures what appears to be a new variable in the fundraiser’s career calculus as they consider big vs. small. Large nonprofits, which have long enjoyed the advantage of deeper pockets, are also now often seen as the smart ones, the sophisticates that practice and teach the best fundraising. Want to learn how to raise money? Go to a big shop, many development veterans advise. It has the fancy tools. It makes deep investments in professional development. And it has absorbed the lessons of a decades-long movement to professionalize fundraising.
Small shops, by comparison, come off as amateurs, rubes to be left to their galas. “I hate to say this, but I tell young people starting out in fundraising: ‘Do not go to a small organization under any circumstances,’ " says Gail Perry, a fundraising consultant who has worked at Duke and the University of North Carolina. “Small organizations don’t have a lot of know-how or systems or support.”
Ms. Perry’s critique obviously doesn’t apply universally. Plenty of nonprofit leaders and development experts disagree. Yet the blunt words leave you to wonder: Are the big guns really the only ones with something to teach about fundraising?
ADVERTISEMENT
A Place to Build Skills
Every year, Jeremy Weinstein returns to his alma mater, the New School in New York City, to talk careers with the graduate students in nonprofit management, many of them future fundraisers. Since earning his master’s there in 2005, he’s raised more than $70 million, chiefly with national organizations like Jumpstart. As a consultant now, he works frequently with small charities, but those don’t seem to interest students much, he says. “They definitely tend to go into larger organizations. That experience is something very compelling to them. They want to activate what they’ve learned with a large audience.”
Growth: Little vs. Big
Revenue from donations is growing faster at small groups than at large organizations.
Organizations with less than $1 million in revenue: 5.5%
Organizations with more than $1 million in revenue: 1.4%
Who can blame them? They studied everything from the theories of organizational change to the art of branding. After such heady classwork, life in a small development shop may look narrow, confining, even dreary.
Carol Anderson, director of career services for the program, says New School students typically seek real-world experience that builds on their lessons about legacy giving, annual appeals, online fundraising, and major gifts. Few small groups offer that range of on-the-job training. “In a big shop,” she says, “there’s usually more opportunity, more upward mobility, more visibility within the [nonprofit] community, more exposure to major donors.”
The New School sends graduates to small charities, of course. But Ms. Anderson counsels students to make sure they land at an organization where there’s at least one pro who can mentor them. “I don’t want them in a one-man shop, no matter how great the place is.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Young people get such advice more often than you might think. “I tell them to go to a big shop and learn,” says Ms. Perry, the consultant. “Small organizations have a severe lack of understanding about what it takes to be successful.”
Ms. Perry, who works with many small organizations, says boards often don’t see fundraising as an organizationwide effort. They hire a development director, ask that person to do it all, then get frustrated at meager results. If a young fundraiser is a woman working with a board packed with older men, she can be treated like a child, not a professional, Ms. Perry says. “It’s patronizing behavior — ‘I know better than you do, young lady.’ ”
Sandy Smith, an American Red Cross regional chief development officer in Atlanta, has worked in both big and small organizations. She mentors many millennials, and when they’re inspired to work for a small, scrappy charity, she gently tries to dissuade them. “The first thing I say is: ‘You will be better served for your career path and professionally if you start at a larger organization.’ "
Small-budget nonprofits, she explains, often can’t afford the tools a fundraising newcomers need to learn. “I say, ‘Yes, you can go work in a small nonprofit, but first you need to build your skill set so that you can be the best person possible for that nonprofit.’ "
Her advice, in other words: Start big, then go small, a reversal of the conventional career path for fundraisers. “The world of nonprofit fundraising has changed,” she says.
ADVERTISEMENT
A Crusade Begins
One day in 1959, three New York City fundraisers decided over lunch that their field needed a professional association. The three men — from Brandeis University, the National Urban League, and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies — launched what is now called the Association of Fundraising Professionals. It was soon followed by the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (founded in 1967) and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (1974).
Together, the three organizations have led a crusade to professionalize fundraising. Over time, they’ve been joined by an ever-growing number of scholars studying what makes donors tick and how best to reach them; an army of consultants promoting “best practices”; and tech companies that mine giving data for hidden patterns.
Fundraising is evolving from an art to a science, says Patricia Lewis, who teaches at the Arizona State University Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation. She has promoted this change in a distinguished philanthropy career that’s included service as AFP president and as manager of the nonprofit-management studies program at George Mason University.
“Professionalization of the field is coming along beautifully,” Ms. Lewis says. Still, the march of progress is uneven, with small groups often bringing up the rear. It’s a matter, in part, of money: Large organizations simply can spend more for training, consulting, and sophisticated tools. But boards of small charities often don’t believe they need trained development professionals.
Fundraisers typically must choose whether to work at a large or small nonprofit. How they make that decision is changing, with consequences for philanthropy.
“They might think anyone in the organization can just go out and ask for money,” she says. “That doesn’t work. You have to build a program, you have to build relationships.”
Not all small nonprofits are laggards; some are models of fundraising efficiency and professionalism that punch well above their weight. Since 2011, small organizations have outpaced the largest groups in fundraising-revenue growth, according to Blackbaud. In 2015, groups that raise less than $1 million dollars annually saw a 5.5 percent gain; organizations that raise $10 million or more posted only a 1.4 percent increase.
That gap is partly a function of math; small organizations can achieve higher growth rates simply because they start with a smaller revenue base. But the numbers raise the question: If professionalism is not their forte, where do the little guys outperform the big guns?
Taking Risks
A chorus of nonprofit leaders and experts argues that small groups are typically more nimble and entrepreneurial than big organizations. Also, because they may not be as beholden to accepted fundraising wisdom, they frequently are more willing to experiment. “Small shops do that by necessity,” says William Weber, head of a Boston-New York nonprofit consulting firm. “Larger shops could do a bit more of it.”
Jeanne Bell, CEO of the nonprofit consultancy CompassPoint, contends that small nonprofits are better at hiring for diversity, which means they’re better prepared for America’s changing demographics. Large organizations that hire only from comparably sized institutions are overlooking fundraisers who could help them tap the donors of the future. “That will hurt those organizations in the long run,” she says.
ADVERTISEMENT
Even if a small charity isn’t a paragon of professionalism, it may be an ideal incubator for personal qualities critical to good fundraising. Chief among those: tenacity. Unlike at large organizations like universities and hospitals, where private dollars are only part of the revenue puzzle, fundraisers with many small groups raise the dollars that mean life or death for programs or even the entire organization.
“The world is on their shoulders,” says Randa Safady, vice chancellor for external relations in the University of Texas system. The good ones, she adds, are special — entrepreneurial, scrappy, hard-working.
Bill Littlejohn, chief executive of the Sharp HealthCare Foundation in San Diego, says small-shop development officers are often better prepared for leadership roles. They’ve managed relationships with boards as well as a wide variety of fundraising operations. “People in big shops may not have that broader perspective because they are cogs in a big wheel,” he says. “There are plenty of people who work in big shops who are destined to be role players.”
Closer to the Donor
When it comes to the act of fundraising itself, small organizations may find that their size plays to their advantage. “My feeling, without any hard data, is that smaller, high-performing nonprofits tend to be closer to their donor base,” says Steve MacLaughlin, Blackbaud’s director of analytics.
That small-group fundraising has outpaced that of large organizations in the post-recession years speaks to this, he says. “The fundamentals of fundraising, like engagement and stewardship, are working for them. They can’t simply go out and acquire thousands of donors, which means they have to be better with the ones they do get.”
ADVERTISEMENT
These ideas echo in conversations with fundraisers who’ve left small charities for big organizations. They often talk wistfully about their previous donor relationships and the shared sense of mission. “Smaller places are simply more soulful,” says a gift officer at a major private university who’s also worked for a local social-service agency. “I say this with a sense of humor, but we’re a multinational corporation fighting for market share against Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and Yale. We’re fighting for faculty, for students, and for money. It’s not a particularly soulful thing.”
Priscilla Cortez fell in love with fundraising because it touched her soul like her law career couldn’t. She was legal counsel at Southwest Key Programs, an Austin, Texas-based agency working with at-risk families, when she stepped up to help the executive director run a capital campaign. She was the lone development officer, so she did everything — the annual fund, major gifts, the newsletter, marketing materials. And she found it exhilarating to bring in money that changed lives. “Fundraising can be addictive,” she says.
Having found a new career, Ms. Cortez looked for a job that would teach her the craft. “I wanted to learn from the best in my community. And that was the University of Texas.”
Texas has one of the largest and most professional-minded development operations in the country. The system’s 14 institutions field 900 development professionals, including 300 frontline fundraisers. In recent years, the board of regents has invested millions to build an in-house training center for staff.
At Texas, Ms. Cortez cleared her desk of the peripherals that filled her day at Southwest. The fundraiser finally got to focus on being a fundraiser, and she moved quickly through the ranks, from major gifts at the Austin campus to the system’s central development office.
ADVERTISEMENT
She’s now in the upper echelon of one of the top public-university fundraising operations in the country. Yet she worries that Texas, like a lot of other large institutions, may be too big, too professional. The volume of work and donors means proper stewardship and personal connections can get overlooked. “We can be transactional,” she says, and that may hurt in years to come. Younger donors demand more involvement, more engagement, she says, and they are coming of age soon.
Ms. Cortez also now works as a consultant. When helping small charities, she is reminded of the fundraising lessons she took away from Southwest Key. The dynamic with donors is very different with donors than what she feels at the university. Fundraisers and donors build deep relationships. They bond as they work through an organization’s struggles and success, then share the joy of seeing its impact. “It’s much more day to day; it feels like a family.”
“I don’t regret the path I’ve taken,” she says, “but I miss that sometimes.”