March 18, 2012 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Recruit mentors. Even before their first day on the job, newly appointed chief fundraisers should line up peers or experts who can provide advice when challenges arise, says Curt Simic, president emeritus of the Indiana University Foundation. “If you do not say, ‘I need some help,’” he warns, “you can be high and dry.”
A top fundraiser for decades, Mr. Simic says he is now serving as a fundraising consultant to chief development officers at three other institutions, but “I am spending more time mentoring than consulting.” In one case, he says, “I am helping a chief development officer where one part of a campaign is at 300 percent of the goal and another is at 3 percent. What do you do about that? If you haven’t been through it, you don’t know.”
Expect political jockeying. At large organizations such as medical centers, performing-arts organizations, and universities, top executives and other internal constituents are often competing for contributions and fundraising assistance, which can ensnare the chief fundraiser in challenging turf battles.
“You have to defend territory or push hard for what development is doing, which might be different from what the general counsel wants to do,” says Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for resource development at Rice University. “You butt heads a lot because you have different value sets and you measure success differently. It is remarkable how much time this jockeying takes. You have to reconcile these different worlds.”
Another political issue: Trustees sometimes badmouth the chief executive who is the top fundraiser’s boss. When that happens, “I try to say something like ‘I understand you find this frustrating,’” rather than getting pulled into attempts to discredit or undermine a colleague, says Patricia Jackson, vice president for advancement at Smith College. “One rule I try to live by is to always speak with good purpose for what is best for Smith.”
Borrow from other disciplines. James Thompson, chief advancement officer at the University of Rochester, says his early training in corporate sales has helped him increase the amount of cash donations to his institution. In sales, he says, “you manage your business so you have as many standing orders as you can, which is similar to pledges filled with multiyear payments.” Mr. Thompson says he’s focused on increasing the number of multiyear pledges and the amount paid on them every year to better meet the university’s needs.
“With all the things people use to measure fundraising productivity, no one deals with this cash-flow issue of pledges,” he says.
Since he arrived at the university six years ago, Mr. Thompson says, the total value of pledges on the university’s books has grown from $8-million to $250-million, and two-thirds of that amount will be paid within nine years.
Teach other leaders about fundraising. Chief fundraisers can head off executives who oppose fundraising goals or have unrealistic expectations about what the development office can do by educating them about how fundraising works, says Mr. Simic.
When he was chief fundraiser at the University of California at Berkeley, he recalls, five angry biology faculty members ambushed him in his office one day. They demanded that he raise $50-million so they could be eligible for $100-million in matching grants from the state, he says. How was he supposed to do that? “I had no clue,” he says.
But Mr. Simic and his colleagues agreed to survey 33 top donors about how important they thought biology was to the university.
“One person said it’s really important, and 32 said it’s not a big deal,” he recalls. That led Mr. Simic to suggest an 18-month communication plan, with the biologists’ help, to educate donors and other constituents about the importance of biology, followed by a larger donor survey. “We got 3,100 responses to the second feasibility study, and over 70 percent said biology was critical,” enabling fundraising for that purpose to begin, says Mr. Simic.
Educate subordinates about the top job. Because training for the chief development officer’s position is hard to find, experts say that lead fundraisers should give staff members who aspire to that job insights into what it requires and exposure to trustees.
At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Susan Paresky, the institution’s chief fundraiser, created a program three years ago called Chief Development Officer University to teach her assistant vice presidents and other senior fundraisers about the top development job. The evening program involved once-monthly meetings for three hours. Each was on a different topic and included presentations by Dana-Farber executives with whom Ms. Paresky interacts regularly such as the chief financial officer and chief legal officer.
“I probably will repeat it again,” Ms. Paresky says. The meetings, she adds, taught her staff “to handle things you don’t learn in the ranks.”
