Small and large nonprofit fundraising differs not just in degree, but in kind. Development roles must reflect that.
Let’s say you’re the executive director of a small nonprofit. You have a great mission, revenue is up, your programs are growing. The time has come to seek a full-time development person, so you post a job description for development director. You’re willing to pay a fair salary: nothing exorbitant, but you know you’ll get what you pay for. You don’t have the resources to promote this opening to the moon, but you do what you can.
Resumes start to come in. Nothing great. A week later, though, one catches your eye. Two years in the development office at a university. Another two years in a mid-level development role at a hospital. You look up median salaries for these roles and your offer could be competitive. You set up an interview. The candidate impresses you; you’ve never done development full-time, but as executive director you know the basics, and he has clearly been trained well. He talks about the value of working under experienced fundraisers in an established program but explains that he’s looking for a new challenge.
You press him on some specifics—what has his donor relations experience been? what is his plan for a grants program?—and while his experience with both is a bit spare, he acquits himself well. His references all give glowing reports. You schedule lunch with the candidate and a board member you trust just to make sure you’re not missing anything glaring. He’s bullish and encourages the hire. You’ve seen what’s out there, and it’s not great. Hiring someone with relevant experience is hard. It seems like a slam dunk, right?
Then he starts. You’ll admit that your development processes aren’t great, where they exist. After all, you’re running the whole organization! You’ve got a million other things to worry about. You recognize that maybe your donor database shouldn’t be a Google Sheet. And it’s true, you could use a better donate page. Your new charge is eager to demonstrate his expertise and implement what he knows. The hospital used a state-of-the-art donor database; the university had an awesome donate page platform—this is what he knows. You’re hesitant. There are a lot of bells and whistles, and this is a small operation, but you’ve prepared yourself for some growing pains and the necessity of ceding some control, so you defer to his experience.
Two months go by, and still these systems monopolize his attention. You want to give him space to shape a vision for your fundraising efforts—and the systems being implemented do look very nice—but you’re getting a bit apprehensive about what’s not being accomplished. Year end is approaching and it’s not clear that many donor relationships are being built. Grant deadlines are passing. Giving isn’t ticking up. But you’ve already invested a lot—from scarce resources—into this development director. How do you proceed?
The moral of this story—and yes, my hypothetical scenario is drawn from multiple real-life situations—is that small and large nonprofit fundraising differs as much in kind as in degree. It is not that there is no commonality between development roles at small versus larger nonprofits, but rather that the mechanics of executing certain foundational development activities—and the job descriptions of those doing so—look very different if your budget is $1 million rather than $100 million.
What ultimately causes this difference, of course, is the resource discrepancy. Large nonprofits have prospect research teams, grantwriting teams, planned giving teams—not to mention sophisticated research and analytic tools to support them. To hire, say, a full-time prospect researcher and equip her with state-of-the-art research tools for your five hundred donor, $1 million nonprofit makes no sense. But transitioning from a narrowly defined and well-supported role at a large nonprofit to a broader role at a small one is easier said than done.
Yet the bedrock principles of fundraising remain, and as such, the transition is not impossible. Nonprofits large and small write grants, circulate direct mail appeals, and sent out email solicitations. Donors are donors, and it’s critical to build relationships with them. (Though of course some donors do gravitate toward larger organizations and other toward smaller ones—that may merit another piece.)
And it is on these principles that our hypothetical executive director must focus. Does the candidate truly get development (or does he appear capable of getting it), or was he simply good at executing a specific set of tasks? And if you do work for a large nonprofit, ask yourself the same question. If the answer for now is no, do what you can to broaden your understanding, not merely of the best practices of other areas of fundraising, but also of the principles that animate them.
After all, civil society needs practices and principles both!
