What would the charity sector look like without career fundraisers?
It’s an (admittedly dramatic) question that came to my mind when reading the recent research – What Makes Fundraisers Tick. The finding that 46% of fundraisers indicated that they intended to leave their current employer within two years, with 9% indicating they planned to leave the whole field of fundraising/development in that time, stopped me in my tracks.
What would it look like to your charity if almost half of your fundraisers were to leave in the near future? What disruption would that cause, what impact on your whole team’s morale, what hole would it make in your organisation’s budgets and in your ability to deliver your charity’s work? And what if when you were recruiting to replace them you were going to an ever-decreasing pool of people, meaning vacancies get harder to fill and pushing salaries up?
As a CEO, these are the kind of worries that would keep me up at night. I want our charity sector to thrive and to be able to meet the needs and challenges not just of today, but of tomorrow. And I know that the best way that can happen is by being able to rely on a motivated, committed, and skilled fundraising workforce.
When our fundraisers succeed, we all benefit – more services are run, more public benefit is delivered, financial risks within charities are mitigated, your colleagues’ jobs and cost of living pay increase is more secure. And an almost unmeasurable amount of joy, pleasure, satisfaction, and positivity is felt by the millions of people across the UK who donate to charities because a fundraiser was there to ask them to.
A human need to feel appreciated
Going back to that research, I was struck by looking at the reasons why fundraisers were saying that they may be leaving their job, as well as what motivates them. It resonated with what I knew from being a fundraiser myself, as well as what I am reminded about every day through the conversations and engagement I have with our members of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.
Alongside the core motivation of a deep care for the cause, the very human need of getting a feeling of appreciation and recognition as part of your job was highlighted in the research, alongside fundraisers having the professional respect of boards, colleagues, and CEOs. The lack of professional growth, autonomy, and support were all highlighted as being “draining factors” – the feelings that were leading people to intend to quit. And interestingly, while pay is important and does resonate with the area of professional respect, it comes across as a lower consideration than others.
Time we stopped biting our tongues
We’ve all laughed – at times biting our tongues – when a fundraiser says that someone in their family asks them when they will get a real job, or express surprise that they get paid at all. Or worse when colleagues refer to the fundraising team as the “money grabbers”. We’ve winced when someone from the board says “but can’t you just write to Richard Branson”, or the CEO thinks that they can re-write the appeal letter that is about to be posted to supporters.
Well, it’s time we stopped biting our tongues. Our sector needs its career fundraisers, people that continue to invest in and develop their professional skills over years, because without fundraisers, we don’t have a sector like we do now, and we don’t have millions of people benefitting from the work of charities.
So it’s time to get real about facing up to the issues of wellbeing, burnout, and lack of appropriate support and investment in our fundraising teams. It’s time to make sure that we are nurturing fundraising talent, and giving people the professional respect and recognition that they need in their work to be motivated to stay.
You can have a lifetime of impact with a career in fundraising, and it can and should be the most rewarding job you can do. Across the whole of our sector we need to properly support and invest in fundraising careers so we can continue to meet the needs of our people, causes, and communities.
Katie Docherty is chief executive at the Chartered Institute of Fundraising
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