The sector's biggest challenge is finding, recruiting and keeping talented fundraisers, says Paul Farthing.

Ask any senior manager in the charity sector about their biggest challenge and invariably, in my experience, they will say it is finding, recruiting and keeping talented senior fundraisers. It could be argued, however, that the challenge to find and keep talent starts right from the beginning of a career in fundraising. The growing number of fundraising organisations (even police forces are fundraising these days!), investment by major charities, and the increase in major appeals and campaigns – notably in the education and cultural sectors – are driving a shortage of experienced and talented individuals.

One response in the past has been to drive up salaries, and the sector has certainly been keeping the recruitment agents busy, with an historical high turnover of staff across the sector as people move between organisations. Sadly, particularly at junior levels, this can be before people have really had an opportunity to go through the full learning curve, trialling initiatives, rolling them out, learning and doing it all over again.

The alternative is for leading charities like the NSPCC to challenge how we find and keep great people. Our opportunity is to get better at developing our people in-house and seek to keep them for longer than the 18 months or so that seems to be becoming the norm.

We also have to get better at investing in our people. Too often, small organisations use the excuse that they cannot afford to invest in staff development, while some larger organisations overlook it, relying on reputation and salaries to attract the best recruits. When money is tight, staff development budgets can suffer, but we still invest in recruiting staff.

By developing, I mean investing time and effort, as well as money. The measure of how we value staff needs to be more than the size of our training budget. The focus too quickly shifts to the formal training programmes offered by external organisations such as the Institute of Fundraising. These have an important part to play as we continue to professionalise the sector, but they are not the be-all and end-all of staff development.

As a guide, 70 per cent of learning and development is achieved through experience – doing the job, secondments and the like; 20 per cent is through feedback and coaching; and 10 per cent is from formal learning such as classroombased training programmes. Investing in your staff requires a culture of development and support, thorough and regular appraisals, the offer of coaching, the scope to take risks, learn from failure and try out new ideas. Some staff turnover is good, helping the charity to bring in new perspectives and enabling staff to learn new skills and take on different challenges. I am merely suggesting that we should put more emphasis on and investment into keeping staff than we put into recruiting people.

The other approach that we as a sector have to get better at is creating a more diverse workforce. Looking around the delegates at a fundraising conference, it can too often look like a young person’s profession. Given the great talents and skills possessed by older people, people coming back into the workforce and people who have operated in other sectors, we have to work harder to bring new people into the sector.

There is no doubt that fundraising is a profession and it takes time to build experience, but the skills we need, such as relationship building, logistics, marketing and project management, are widespread in the workforce. The challenge is how as a sector we can make the transition into fundraising easier. Often we interview candidates from outside fundraising and fail to appoint based on a lack of experience, but this is a trap from which we need to escape. As a sector, we need to come up with ways to design programmes and approaches to help people into fundraising in the way that the teaching profession and others have done.

Fundraising is a people business, and finding and keeping great people is always going to be a challenge. We just have to get more inventive in how we take it on and create more opportunities.

Paul Farthing is director of fundraising at the NSPCC