After years of frustration with the high cost of hiring fund raisers in a job market marred by a scarcity of qualified people and rapid turnover, the University of Michigan decided that enough was enough.
“We vice presidents would get together at conferences and wring our hands about the lack of talent,” recalls Jerry May, the university’s vice president for development. “I said we can either keep picking people off one another or grow our own.”
Resolving to groom his own cadre of fund raisers, Mr. May hired Chrissi Rawak, the university’s first executive director of development recruitment five years ago. She has become his “headhunter inside,” he says, devoting all her working hours to attracting and training good fund raisers.
In her role — which she prefers to think of as “talent management” — Ms. Rawak has created a highly sought after summer internship that provides undergraduates with fund-raising training and a 12-week job in the development office. The goal: to place interns with the most potential in frontline fund-raising positions at the university after they graduate.
In another effort aimed at helping keep fund raisers in their positions once they arrive, Ms. Rawak started a one-year coaching program for new hires. And she is overseeing a project that has matched eight experienced fund raisers with carefully selected mentors for a six-month period.
‘Holistic’ Approach
By adopting such approaches to finding and keeping fund raisers, the university may be onto something. Research by Eduventures, a Boston education-consulting company, has examined practices to retain fund raisers used by colleges and universities, such as merit pay, job design, and varying types of professional training and development.
“You should have a suite of things, because what appeals to one fund raiser may not appeal to another,” says Jennifer Zaslow, the lead researcher in the study. She advises: “Look at it in a holistic way: having an approach to building careers and being proactive about it.”
Of the efforts begun by Ms. Rawak at the University of Michigan, the summer internship program has attracted the most interest and attention by far. The university was invited to share the program with more than 20 other institutions last year at a conference organized by Academic Impressions, a Denver company that convenes meetings on topics of interest to higher-education leaders.
One reason the internship program is so appealing: It provides a steady stream of young, energetic, and trained entry-level fund raisers who are capable of working with wealthy donors but at a lower salary than development officers with many more years of experience, says Ms. Rawak.
Here’s how it works: On Monday through Thursday, 20 undergraduate interns are paid $10 per hour to work as employees on a fund-raising project like creating a class giving program or doing research on donors needed by a particular school or college. On Fridays, the students attend classes on fund raising, which include lectures as well as other experiences such as attending events where they learn the finer points of socializing with wealthy donors, including tips on etiquette, table manners, wardrobe, and making conversation.
So far, 37 students have completed the program, and the university has hired three of them. The trio of young fund raisers, all in their 20s, are now working to solicit gifts in the school of medicine, the business school, and Michigan’s central development office. Two of them are working to secure large gifts, and the third is working on getting donations from alumni who recently graduated from the university.
While several other graduates of the internship program have been hired by other institutions, Ms. Rawak says that she is not unhappy about losing them.
“We cannot hire all 20,” she says of each year’s interns. “We are trying to create a pipeline so we can share talent, not steal talent. Someone may come back here eventually, or talk to colleagues who may be interested in coming here. We’re doing a great service.”