The Making of a Fundraiser

ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN VAN AELST

When Carleigh McDonald entered college with plans to be a teacher, her parents worried. “They said, ‘You’re never going to pay off your student loans,’ ” she recalls.

During her sophomore year at the University of San Diego, she enrolled in the Semester at Sea program for a voyage. Accompanied by Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop and antiapartheid activist, the students traveled to a dozen countries, volunteering at charities. The trip opened her eyes to the work of nonprofits and the need to sustain it. She returned to the States and told her mom and dad, “I’m going to be a nonprofit fundraiser.”

Even worse than a teacher! her parents fretted.

McDonald, now 30 and director of leadership gifts at California College of the Arts, has a lot in common with her fellow fundraisers at America’s roughly 1.5 million charities. Though she’s been preparing for this profession from a young age — half of fundraisers take their first job in the field by age 27, according to Indiana University researchers — she just stumbled across it. And she knows that many people are, like her parents, puzzled as to what fundraisers actually do. Indeed, only 41 percent of development directors in an influential 2013 study by CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund said their organizations had a strong grasp of fund development.

Fundraising is a mysterious profession, in part because it’s a relatively new one; a heavily attended session at April’s Association of Fundraising Professionals’ international conference debated whether fundraising is a profession at all. (The consensus: It’s a semi-profession.) Despite the emergence over the past decades of fundraising graduate and credentialing programs, a lot of people still just fall into the field and drift through their careers.

“If you’re in teaching, you know your path,” says Rob Henry, vice president for education at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “If you’re in nursing, you know your path. But in fundraising, people don’t know their path.”

Sarah Nathan, associate director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, is researching fundraisers’ career trajectories. “There’s a great variety of ways for people to prepare themselves for that next move,” Nathan says. “That’s part of being a profession in its adolescence. There’s no one credential that’s accepted by everyone.”

Such variety doesn’t make planning a career any easier. The trick is simply to keep planning, says Alice Ferris, principal at the fundraising consulting company GoalBusters.

“One thing that challenges people: They think about it once a year, around a conference or around the new year,” Ferris says. “If you work on it a little bit every day or every week or every month, you’ll move forward.”

What does it take for fundraisers to ascend the career ladder? What does that next rung look like? When is it time to move up — or stop climbing? Here are some answers from fundraisers who are at various stages of their professional journeys.