Why can’t I just hire a fundraiser?
A lot of staff members at organizations don’t want to fundraise, they just want to hire someone to fundraise for them. This is especially true of people who start nonprofits. They want to do the work of the organization. Why not just hire a fundraiser?
The problem is that there aren’t enough professional fundraisers. In America, there are about 160,000 people who raise money for a living. There are about 1.5 million nonprofits. Of these, about 500,000 organizations make $500,000 a year or more, enough to hire someone just for fundraising. So, if you look at just the 33% of the most successful organizations, you can see that about two-thirds of those wouldn’t be able hire someone to fundraise, just based on the number of people who raise money for a living.
What makes it worse is that many of the largest organizations have a lot of staff members, leaving even fewer people to raise money for small nonprofits.
What do nonprofits do? Well, they often hire people with little to no experience in fundraising, because that’s all they can get. They focus on things like grantwriting, because it’s easier to learn how to write grants. They have ineffective gala events, because that’s the only kind of fundraising their board of directors understands. And they fundraise, even if they don’t like it, because that’s the only way they can get paid.
There’s another way to get fundraising help. That’s to hire a consultant, someone who can come in and help you fundraise without being a staff member. To find someone, check out www.afpnet.org. It’s the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and it will tell you if there’s someone nearby who might help you. It will also tell you if there are meetings near you where you might learn about fundraising or talk to people who know the local fundraising situation: it’s definitely worth spending the money to attend.
The first kind of help you need might be a board training. There are plenty of fundraisers who will come in and give you a few hours or a day of their time to train your board in fundraising. This is the the best, most efficient use of your money if you have a board but don’t have much to spend on fundraising.
The next kind of help is to hire a consultant for a project. Perhaps you need grants researched and written: this is something that can be done locally or long-distance through email. It will cost you money, but it will help you learn how to make the case of why people should give you money: it’s good for start-ups that have few dollars but time before they need the money.
If you need money faster, you’re going to have to learn how to do it. Faster fundraising means going to people who can make a gift and asking for money. You can get money within weeks, but you’ll need to learn how to do it; a fundraising coach or consultant can be very effective in teaching this to you, but you still need to do the work.
There are many ways to do fundraising. The smaller your organization, the less likely you can just hire someone to fundraise for you. However, fundraising is fairly simple to learn and you can get quick results from your actions. Once you learn it, you will always know it and can do it repeatedly. If you care about your cause, it’s worth learning how to fundraise yourself.
If you would like help with fundraising, or if you need a training in fundraising for your board of directors, please contact me, Katherine Wertheim, CFRE, at katherine@werth-it.com.