Facing Into The Fundraising Talent Crisis

Created By: Craig Shelley, CFRE
July 24, 2024

Over the course of my nearly 30-year career, I’ve constantly heard and observed that there is never enough strong fundraising talent to meet the urgent needs of nonprofits. Today, the sector continues to see a persistent and seemingly widening supply and demand challenge. As such, we need to understand the root causes of this talent shortage if we’re going to develop and implement solutions.

Fundraising is hard, and often, circumstances are not set up for success.

The bottom line is this: what we do is difficult. If you don’t believe me, try and explain your job to a 7-year-old. In the simplest terms, we’re asking people to give us money and, in exchange, receive little more than a good feeling. On top of that, consider how we set arbitrary and unrealistic goals and provide little to no training to new fundraisers. It’s shocking how successful we are. While we can’t necessarily make the job easier, we can change the dynamic in several ways:

• Development teams need to set more realistic objectives. Fundraisers must play a bigger role in budgeting. We’ve all worked in organizations where the budget is established between the CFO and the program team, and it isn’t until afterward that the development team is informed of their revenue goals. Too many development teams know in their gut they aren’t going to hit their goals as soon as the fiscal year starts. So how do we reverse this trend? Fundraisers need to actively and realistically forecast revenue preferably before expense budgets are established (note my use of ‘realistic’). Fundraising teams do themselves a disservice when they sandbag and try to lowball their projections. Budgets are an organization’s lifeline and represent strategy through numbers. As such, fundraisers need to treat and participate in the development of budgets with the utmost care and attention.
• Organizations need access to better professional development and education programs to engage future fundraisers earlier. If you ask fundraisers how they got into this work, most will say they ‘fell into it’. You won’t meet many lawyers who’ll say the same. Fundraising is a legitimate profession, but until we have well-established academic programs that feed us a pipeline of new professionals, we’re a stool missing a leg. I can count on one hand the number of undergraduate programs focused on fundraising for nonprofits and on two, the number of post-graduate programs. Furthering the issue, once you’ve entered the field, the cottage industry of professional development opportunities is scattered and inconsistent in quality.

There are a lot of bad leaders leading nonprofits.

When speaking at conferences, I’ll often ask for a show of hands for people who have had crappy bosses. No less than 90% of the hands in the room go up every time. I was very fortunate at the start of my career and through most of my professional experiences to benefit from great bosses, mentors, and colleagues. However, I’ve come to realize I was the exception, not the rule. As I mentioned earlier, given the lack of a true educational path to this career, we’ve become overly dependent on bosses to lead and train fundraisers. We’re failing at that. We need to do better and can start by focusing on a few key areas:

• We need to prioritize leadership development for nonprofit C-suite leaders – separate from overall professional development for fundraisers, which is bespoke to the organization and its philanthropic culture. The opportunity for executives to benefit from formal leadership development programs is abundant, but too few nonprofit leaders take advantage. They are either “too busy”, or the courses and conferences are “too expensive.”  To change this perspective, nonprofit leaders must first and foremost see themselves as organizational leaders and be motivated to leverage the enormous body of training and literature available to improve their performance. Every C-suite leader should be a lifelong learner.
• Nonprofits need boards that understand and take seriously their obligation to hire and fire their CEOs. As a former nonprofit CEO and frequent participant in nonprofit board deliberations, I know firsthand how challenging this part of a board’s responsibilities can be. The dynamic is most often that the CEO is recruiting and, in many ways, leading the board. That can be effective as long as everyone understands and respects their respective roles. But ultimately, CEOs work for boards. Boards must take their obligation to hire, provide feedback, set compensation, and when needed, fire CEOs more seriously. To restore this balance of power, organizations should consider facilitating regular executive sessions of the board without the CEO. This will create necessary separation when it comes to major board functions such as gathering important feedback from stakeholders and staff and conducting performance and compensation reviews.
• We should be hiring more fundraisers as CEOs. The path from program lead, board member, Chief Operating Officer, or even Chief Financial Officer to CEO are all roads more frequently traveled than the road from Chief Development Officer to CEO. Why? Good CDOs work well with boards, understand the nuances of the organization’s finances, are effective staff leaders, understand how the organization is perceived in the market, and are experts at articulating an organization’s value. Don’t those all sound like the attributes you’d want in a nonprofit CEO? We’ve all met and worked for CEOs without on-the-ground development experience who were scared to fundraise or had never navigated the dynamics of working with a board. As fundraisers, we need to help boards see the value of this experience, and at the same time, encourage CDOs to fill the perceived gaps in their experience and skills so that the path to CEO can become a natural and common transition.

Fundraising as a profession is not diverse.

Our professional associations, and I believe our collective hearts, are committed to diversifying our field. However, progress is not happening fast enough. Imagine how much easier it would be to address our talent gap if we doubled or tripled the pool of potential fundraisers by not defaulting to hiring white people. Often, whether consciously or not, we assume fundraisers need to look like the stereotypical image of a donor to be effective. On the contrary, more diverse fundraising teams are also likelier to seek out and attract diverse donors—a win-win situation. In many cases, the solution is within our reach.

• We must develop a pipeline from program staff to development staff. Diversity tends to be less of a challenge in nonprofit organizations when you step outside the development department. I’ve yet to work with or on a program staff that does not represent the communities we serve. My first full-time nonprofit job was starting Cub Scout Packs in the South Bronx, where I worked on a dynamic and incredibly diverse team. On the other side of the office, literally through a closed door, was the fundraising team. While I was toiling around the South Bronx in a Boy Scout uniform, our fundraisers prowled midtown Manhattan in suits and seemed to attend an awful lot of cocktail parties. I made it my mission to befriend and join them, which I did. But very few of my colleagues, and almost none who were people of color, ever walked through that door with me. Program staff have a passion and a deep understanding of the work. There are many natural fundraisers amongst them and even more who could become fundraisers with the right training, support, and encouragement.

Technology can be leveraged to fill talent gaps and increase fundraising bandwidth.

As we continue to grapple with talent shortages, we have an obligation to become more efficient and can lean on technology to do so. AI tools, ranging from those that can help us write better and more quickly to those that can automate actions in our CRM, can make us better and more effective fundraisers. At its extreme, the promise of technologies like the fully autonomous fundraiser being developed by Version2.ai will allow us to reach donors we’ve never had the capacity to interact with before, or who will never respond to a real-life fundraiser. At its most practical, it will make day-to-day tasks less cumbersome and give us back much-needed time to further our work.

The persistent crisis of not having enough fundraising talent is solvable. We’ve thrown up our hands and accepted it as a reality for far too long. It will just take time, a collective agreement to change, and a commitment to accountability in contributing to a field where everyone can thrive.

Orr Group can help you build, attract, and retain strong fundraising talent. Get in touch to learn more about how we can support your nonprofit during times of transition and contribute to your growth.

Craig Shelley, CFRE is a Partner and Chief Growth Officer at Orr Group. Craig advances the missions of nonprofits by bringing a change-management and entrepreneurial approach to strategy, organizational development, fundraising, and board optimization.