The Institute of Fundraising has enlisted former NSPCC fundraising chief Giles Pegram to assess whether and why there is such a shortage of fundraisers with the skills and experience necessary to move into director-level roles.

Pegram (pictured) has also been charged with devising some ideas for supporting more senior fundraisers to become directors of fundraising.

Institute chief executive Lindsay Boswell told Civil Society that several major organisations have struggled recently to find someone to fill their director of fundraising post. Friends of the Earth have been without one for more than two years, Leonard Cheshire Disability is on its second interim; RNIB took several months to replace Paul Amadi and the RSPCA’s top fundraising post is currently vacant.

Boswell said recruitment consultants also often found it difficult to find the right people for many fundraising director roles. “They say the same old names keep cropping up – there just isn’t that many people out there.”

He said it seemed that too many charities failed to adequately prepare their senior fundraising managers for the top job, to enable heads of individual giving or heads of fundraising strategy to become full directors of fundraising.

There also seemed to be a propensity among sector chief executives to appoint people from outside the sector to director roles if they appeared to have transferrable skills and experience.  While this was good for “enriching the gene pool of the sector”, Boswell also wanted to see more home-grown talent making it into the top jobs.

“So, we have asked Giles to call on his knowledge and experience and to network with his peers to firstly assess whether we are right and there is an issue, and if so how to help more senior fundraisers acquire the skills necessary to progress to directors of fundraising.”

Boswell said Pegram was selected because of his contacts and his experience, but also because he had worked at the NSPCC with Dame Mary Marsh, then the charity’s CEO and now director of the Clore Social Leadership programme.  He said there may be a role for the Clore programme in developing a solution to the problem, or at least the Institute wanted to ensure it didn’t “cut across” the Clore offering.

Pegram is due to test the hypothesis and report back to the Institute, with recommendations, at the end of June.