Fund Raisers Become Harder to Find and Tougher to Keep

For those who solicit donations for colleges, the best offers are often new jobs

Call them what you will: fund raisers, development officers, or advancement professionals. It doesn’t much matter. If you are one of them and you are good at your job, there are many colleges in the United States — or, increasingly, in Britain — that would love to hire you right now, and keep you forever.

That may be good news for fund-raising professionals looking for their next big career opportunity, but it is creating problems for colleges that are struggling to land professionals who know how to secure important private support. There simply aren’t enough such people to go around, and higher education is feeling the pinch.

Capital campaigns of a billion dollars or more are becoming more prevalent. Taxpayer support for public colleges is diminishing. The competition for philanthropic dollars is at an all-time high. It is little wonder, then, that the dearth of fund-raising talent is one of the top sources of college-administrator anxiety.

“I recently met with 50 chief advancement officers and surveyed them about their major challenges,” says John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “The top of the list — the most significant challenge — is the recruitment and retention of fund-raising staff.”

Colleges are losing their best people, mostly to each other, and to institutions overseas that are poaching talent in the United States to ramp up their own fledgling fund raising. More institutions are being forced to increase salaries, offer incentive compensation and other perquisites, and devise strategies to grow their own talent instead of raiding each other’s offices for new blood.

“There is such competition to attract the people who have had successful campaigns, and there aren’t that many out there,” says Paulette V. Maehara, president and chief executive of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. “And with one campaign after the next — first a billion, then 2 billion — these are highly stressful times for everybody.”

Onward and Upward

The fund-raising profession, whether in higher education or other nonprofit sectors, is relatively young, and is battling its way through some awkward teenage years. While most other administrative positions in higher education have a professional pipeline to draw talent from, development staff members come from varied backgrounds — like corporate sales, or marketing, or the legal profession — and are not necessarily groomed for the job in the way that, for example, provosts are often presidents in training.

“It’s not a career to which most people aspire,” Mr. Lippincott says. “People have to find their way to it. When you ask fund raisers how they got into the job, no two stories are ever the same.”

But after someone starts showing promise as a fund raiser, he or she may not stay in the same place for long. A recent compensation survey by CASE showed that 65.5 percent of development officers have been at their institution for 5 years or less. Another compensation and benefits survey, by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, found that 18 percent of 919 respondents from all sectors of fund raising had been in their job for one year or less.

Ms. Maehara says that fund raisers are satisfied with their profession, but not necessarily with their jobs. In her group’s compensation and benefits survey, participants said that the top reasons for leaving their positions are career advancement and quality of life. People in fund raising usually do not move for a better salary, Ms. Maehara says.

“If somebody is planning to move to another job, most say that there are a number of reasons that prompt them to look,” she says. “Some of those main reasons are inefficient staff, feeling unappreciated, and a lack of career-development opportunities.”

According to her association, those raising money for education make slightly less than the average salary for all fund-raising professionals. At the top, specialists in science or research make an average of $109,300, and at the bottom are people in government jobs who make an average of $61,000. Fund raisers in education earn an average of $78,925.

Finding Opportunity

Experts like Ms. Maehara and Mr. Lippincott agree that although the number of nonprofit groups is exploding, with more than one million organizations registered with the Internal Revenue Service last year, it is not creating additional competition for fund raisers in higher-education. Most often, college fund-raising professionals are leaving their jobs for better positions at other colleges. It’s a self-perpetuating problem, they say.

Sarah West, interim associate vice president for university development at Georgetown University, is a classic example. She has been in the field for 21 years and has held advancement and development positions at Harvey Mudd College, the University of Virginia, and the Universities of California at Los Angeles and at San Diego. She has also worked at two online-learning start-up companies in the private sector.

“I tried to shape my career in broad terms,” she says. “For example, the organizational structure at UCLA was flat, so if I wanted to gain management experience, I had to jump to another institution. At UCLA, it would’ve taken me 15 years to get there.”

Ms. West says that she has consistently added sought-after skills and job titles to her resume as she has moved from job to job. When she started working at UVa, she was fresh out of college with a background in journalism, but her writing skills made her a good grant writer. Because seeking private support was a relatively new concept at a public university, she found “boundless opportunities” to gain experience.

“For someone just coming into it, all you had to do was show eagerness,” Ms. West says. “I owe my career to UVa.”

Like many others who entered the profession in the 1980s, she saw the field expand rapidly not long after. At UCLA she was a major-gifts officer in the school of medicine. At Harvey Mudd, Ms. West oversaw planned giving and organized all development programs under one umbrella. And during her time at Harvey Mudd, she earned her M.B.A.

“Then I jumped to the private sector for a while,” Ms. West says. “Sales skills are transferrable to fund raising, and when I went back to philanthropy I was able to leverage my M.B.A. to get a senior management position.”

Spending Money to Raise It

Ms. West landed at San Diego as associate vice chancellor for university development, where she stayed for three years, helping to get its fund-raising program off the ground. Now Ms. West is optimistic that her interim position at Georgetown, which she accepted after one of her previous bosses recruited her, could turn into a permanent job. She was attracted to the position for personal and professional reasons, she says.

“I needed to move to be closer to an aging parent,” Ms. West explains. “And this allowed me to help plan a new campaign and work on Georgetown’s overall strategic plan. It is a great opportunity because I’m very interested in getting into strategic long-range planning.”

Her mobility isn’t an anomaly. David H. Lambert, president of Lambert & Associates, an executive-recruiting firm that specializes in higher-education fund raisers, says his business has been booming in the last five to seven years. And when his business is going well, salaries are usually going up.

“I can say that in most situations, the person is getting a 20- to 30-percent increase in salary when they are hired by another institution,” he says. “Colleges want to know what it’s going to take to get these people.”

Mr. Lambert says that beyond better salaries, colleges hiring fund raisers often offer one-time signing bonuses — for the most senior people, that can be $25,000; for lower-level positions, it’s around $5,000. Sometimes, if a lot of driving is expected, access to a car is thrown into the deal.

“I am also seeing more and more contracts being used for the senior-level positions,” Mr. Lambert says.

Those contracts can include a variety of incentive plans that mirror practices in the corporate world. More colleges are offering bonuses to people who stay until the end of a campaign, or giving annual bonuses up to a certain percentage of a person’s salary for hitting predetermined objectives, such as making a certain number of calls or new contacts. Generally, such incentives are not based on the number of dollars raised. Some institutions deliberately avoid such incentives, saying they do not like offering special deals to one small pocket of employees.

‘Adventure and Challenge’

Mr. Lambert and other observers of the field say that geography is also playing a big role in the places fund raisers choose to go. When Ms. West tried to recruit staff members to San Diego, she had a hard time, simply because the university could not offer salaries that adequately covered the region’s high cost of living. On the flip side, other colleges far from metropolitan areas have difficulty finding talent because many people do not want to live in remote, rural locations.

And now some of the nation’s best fund-raising talent is being recruited to start development programs at institutions overseas, mostly in Britain.

“It is indeed a global marketplace for fund raisers,” Mr. Lippincott says, adding that senior officers from the Johns Hopkins University, Santa Clara University, the University of New Hampshire, and others have already made the move. “It exacerbates a problem that’s already there.”

Ron Gray left his development position at Washington University in St. Louis after ten years to become the director of development and alumni relations at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England. The officials at the institution were “relentless in their efforts to recruit me once I expressed interest,” he said in an e-mail message.

“Warwick was looking for an individual to build a development and alumni-relations office capable of leading by example,” Mr. Gray said. “After visiting the campus and learning what an extraordinary place Warwick is ... I wanted to become part of it. ... England is a beautiful country, so it just became a matter of working out how to make it happen.”

Many colleges and universities in Britain are experiencing the kind of financial-support shift, from public to private, that their counterparts in the United States started noticing a while ago. While a culture of giving is alive and well there, experts say, the region lacks a culture of asking. American fund-raising professionals can provide that experience.

“Having worked in a North American university as a major-gifts fund raiser for 13 years and training others for more than 4 years helped my candidacy,” Mr. Gray says. “What is different about my job here is that I am immersed in a new culture that adds a dimension of adventure and challenge.”

Art or Science

Keeping people like Mr. Gray, as well as lower-level fund-raising staff members, engaged in their jobs seems to be a major part of encouraging loyalty.

Dan Diedriech, vice president for institutional advancement at Westminster College, in Fulton, Mo., says that higher-education fund raisers stick around when they are given the proper tools to succeed, such as support from top officials and career-development programs. Cultivating and investing in such talent is often what’s missing from college fund-raising organizations.

Mr. Diedriech came into his position in 1999 with a background in broadcast journalism, followed by a stint in college public relations. His staff of 16 has been remarkably stable, with an annual-fund director in place for seven years and other people in key development positions for about six years, he says.

“I think it really helps when you engage a staff as a team and everybody understands that they’re important,” he says. “Our compensation is fair, we have a supportive president and board of trustees, who spur us on to do bigger and better things.”

Mr. Gray and Ms. West agree that finding support at the top will keep talented fund-raising professionals in place, but fear that not enough resources are being put into training programs. Whether asking for money is an innate talent or something that can be taught is up for debate, but most can agree that now that the field is a full-fledged profession, it’s time to start treating it like one.

“I’m actually putting together a business plan for a training program,” Ms. West says. “I feel like I owe a great deal to the people who were my mentors, and I feel like it’s important to prepare the next generation, whether it’s by implementing in-house training or outside programs.”

Many of the biggest institutions are already eyeing their next money makers. Some are offering scholarships to freshmen who work in their development offices for four years, while others are developing new majors focused on philanthropy.

“Some operations are better equipped to train individuals or have more luxury to be patient while a new professional is trained,” Mr. Gray says. But even the most careful efforts to retain people sometimes fail to ward off suitors. “The problem? Once they become successful,” says Mr. Gray, “they will be approached by others with offers of more money.”

And the cycle continues.

RAISING BIG MONEY, BUT NOT MAKING IT The Association of Fundraising Professionals’ 2005 Compensation and Benefits Survey found that fund-raising professionals in education earn slightly less than the average for all people in that field. According to the survey, which did not differentiate between fundraisers in higher education and those in elementary and secondary schools, the average salaries by sector are: Scientific or research $109,300 Federated appeals $101,667 Consulting agency $97,376 Association $90,082 International emergency relief $84,143 Health $83,427 Arts and/or culture $82,298 Average for all sectors $80,685 Public broadcasting $80,200 Educational $78,925 Social service $74,740 Religion $69,537 Civic and/or public affairs $69,256 Environmental $61,613 Government $61,000

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 52, Issue 10, Page A34