Opinion

Time to invest in talent!

Fundraising | Lindsay Boswell | 8 Jun 2010

The sector is failing to grow its own fundraising leaders, says Lindsay Boswell. It’s time for charities to start investing in talent and stop being frightened of promoting people.

In the future, might all directors of fundraising come from outside the sector and not grown through the ranks? The suggestion will be one of the questions argued at this year’s National Convention new event the Big Debate. But is this scenario likely to happen and does it matter if it does?

More and more charities are turning to beyond the sector to find their chief executives and there has been a massive increase in interest in working for a charity from all areas of business, commerce and the corporate world. Charities are now seen as serious CV additions, and quite right too! But the problem with this is that these people do not understand or ‘get’ fundraising and think that it is just a branch or form of marketing and sales and therefore they can go and recruit a high quality fundraising director from outside our sector.

Sadly this course of action is exacerbated by the serious shortage of proven experienced individuals who can make the step up to become one of the big brand fundraising directors. Very few organisations are prepared to spend time and money investing in equipping their senior fundraisers to become the directors of tomorrow. Far too few ‘heads of’ are prepared to admit that they have still lots to learn and to persuade their own organisations to invest in them. We are, as a sector, totally failing to grow our own. Too much of our fundraising culture is short-term in its focus and not prepared to look at the longer-term benefit of investing in staff. The commercial world learnt the error of this a long time ago. Why are we so far behind?

Of course there are always exceptions and these often prove the rule. I know of one organisation that has, over the past eight years, gone through massive and sustained growth – and I mean seriously impressive stuff. It is absolutely no coincidence that the average length of time any of their fundraisers has been in the organisation is five-anda- half-years. This is because they are developed, they are promoted and they are constantly being challenged to learn more and to apply what they learn. Placed against what they have saved in not constantly advertising vacancies I suspect that they are spending only fractionally more in training than they would have done in advertising.

Because organisations are not investing in their own staff development in a planned and concerted manner, these fundraisers are doing their own career planning and jumping from job to job to get the new skills and experience that they feel they need to develop. It’s time that we reintroduced the P- word…Promotion. Let’s identify the stars of tomorrow within our organisations, move them from one area to another to broaden their knowledge, add managerial skills though training and added responsibility and then promote them and support them to succeed.

Talk to the Tony Elischers, the Ken Burnetts, the Russell Thompsons of this world and they will tell you of a time when they were part of a supremely talented team all of whom went on to achieve great success across the sector. We need to recreate this now.

That is why the Institute has asked former NSPCC fundraising director Giles Pegram to assess why there seems to be such a shortage of fundraisers with the skills and experience necessary to take up director-level roles. We hope that his findings and his ideas will serve to encourage more senior fundraisers to aim for the stars. 

Lindsay Boswell is chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising 

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