Nonprofits that struggle to hire enough fundraisers should look for candidates with the following profile, according to a new survey: people who work in sales, who are no more than 12 years out of college, and who give to charity — often to the organization doing the hiring.
For colleges and universities, such candidates may be found in their own donor databases, suggests the leader of the study.
The Rutgers University Foundation Office of Talent Management undertook the study to explore some hunches recruiters had about where people who jump into fundraising from other fields come from, says Tahsin Alam, associate vice president for talent management and organizational development at the foundation.
To conduct the survey, researchers reached out to more than 300 frontline fundraisers on LinkedIn who were employed in other industries before moving into higher-education development jobs. Of those, 126 completed a survey overseen by Nazifa Zaman, an analyst at the Rutgers foundation.
The study is not rigorously scientific, Alam cautions. But it does offer a rare glimpse at the career paths of nontraditional fundraisers.
“We have a very serious problem with supply,” he says, a situation that he has not seen improve in his 15 years working in recruitment. “Sooner or later, we are going to have to bring people in from outside.”
The overwhelming majority of fundraisers who have come from other fields learned about a career in development through word of mouth: Sixty-two percent said that’s how they first heard about fundraising jobs. That’s a failure on the part of colleges, Alam says
“The majority of the people who responded [to the survey] were working at their alma maters,” he says. And yet only 5 percent of survey participants said they first heard about fundraising positions from the college they attended.
“As an industry, we’re sitting on a gold mine,” Alam says. “Our alumni are interested in working for us, but they’re not hearing from us.”
Among other findings in the report:
- 96 percent of survey participants said they were happy they moved into fundraising.
- 48 percent said they took a pay cut to move into fundraising. But 38 percent made more in their new job, and 14 percent made the same. Alam says the data show that minorities were more likely than whites to report pay raises when switching to fundraising. This is good news, he says, “for those of us trying to make a dent in diversity” when recruiting development staff.
- Networking and relationship building, written and oral communications, and understanding industry knowledge were the three skills that nontraditional fundraisers said transferred most easily from their nondevelopment jobs.
The report concludes that several questions deserve further study, such as how to better inform people about fundraising careers and why people leave the profession.
Says Alam: “I fully appreciate that this survey will create more questions than it answers.”
