Prioritize Passion - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Hiring Fundraisers

The choice of who to hire as a fundraiser can be one of the most important decisions that an organization makes.  Choosing the right development staff makes a world of difference in whether or not a ministry is able to build a successful and sustainable development program.  

Show Notes:

Andrew and Rhen return to the podcast to discuss how organizations improve their chances of success when hiring development staff.  As Andrew sums it up, he'll always choose to hire for passion and train for skill.  Andrew also shares several soft skills that he seeks in potential development staff, and he closes by reminding organizations that once they find good development directors, they should be prepared to invest in them for the long-term.

In this episode, Andrew answers the following questions:

• What characteristics should you look for when hiring a new fundraiser?
• If a new fundraiser fails, what likely caused the failure?
• Can introverts be successful fundraisers?
• What salary should you expect to pay a new development director?

If you'd like to access the free sample incentive plan that Rhen mentions in the episode, you can find it HERE.  We hope you'll find it useful!

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

03:46.69 Host
Well, howdy everybody. Welcome back again to the Petrus Development Show. My name is Rhen Hoehn from Petrus Development. Joining me today, he is the president and owner of Petrus, but he also has had another job title recently and that's development director. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. Welcome Andrew Robison.

04:09.54 AROB
Thank you very much, Rhen. How are you doing up there in the North, great white North?

04:15.12 Host
It's excellent. We're taking advantage of the snow for as long as we can keep it around. This is the time of year when I always get to start getting sad that it's going to melt and we're not going to be able to ski and snowshoe anymore.

04:26.73 Host
We have usually got another week or two before it really starts melting, but we'll see. Got to enjoy it while it's here.

04:32.91 AROB
That's exactly right. Yep.

04:34.63 Host
Exactly. So tell me about you working as a development director in recent months.

04:40.33 AROB
Yeah, so back in the fall, I had a local organization. I've known the executive director for a while. We've helped them out kind of with some projects along the way. They were looking for a development director. They had a first development director ever back in, I guess it would have been around 2023, and he did a couple of different jobs. So he got development going, but then he moved on, took another job. They hired somebody else in 2024. That was a disaster. Just did not work out. After about three months, they just determined he was not doing any of the work, and so they had to let him go. And so the executive director was a little...

05:24.70 AROB
...kind of wary, a little gun shy of going out and hiring a fundraiser again, which if you're listening to this, maybe that's your feeling right now at this moment.

05:26.81 Host
Yeah.

05:33.73 AROB
And so he just called me and said, you know, I'd love to pick your brain, get some advice. And so I went and I met with him. And at the end of the day, what we ultimately determined or the solution that we came up with was he hired Petrus for me to basically serve as their acting or interim or fractional development director for about six months to essentially get their development program started.

06:02.19 AROB
And kind of build up the annual fund stuff, start asking for major gifts, train the staff, and then we will hire a development director that can come in, kind of pick up the pieces that I helped to get started and move into a comprehensive functional development role. So it's been really successful. We've moved a lot of things forward, got a lot of things started.

06:30.32 AROB
Done some really great training with the staff and so now the new development director will have a lot to work with moving forward.

06:36.81 Host
Okay. And you said fractional, but we know you've still been around Petrus. We still been doing podcasts.

06:40.64 AROB
Yeah.

06:40.97 Host
You still been around the company. What does that fractional mean? What does that look like?

06:44.55 AROB
Yeah, so I'm with this organization, I'm on site one day a week. I focus mostly on the annual fund and then training the executive director and the rest of the staff. They've got a great team over there, and so I've been training the communications person who's been working on newsletters and appeals.

07:03.59 AROB
But I'm in the office one day a week, at least there's some weeks that I'm there for, you know, I've got a donor meeting on Wednesday. So I go in that day or, you know, we do an all-day strategic planning session another day. So it's limited time, but because I've got, you know, 20 years of experience, I know kind of how to build this with limited time and I'm sort of putting the foundation in place for somebody else to move forward. So what the next person will do is really take the work that I've started, layer on a lot more donor visits and move it forward in a pretty significant way.

07:37.71 Host
Great. So we're going to transition from this and talk a little bit more about hiring that next person.

07:41.72 AROB
Yeah.

07:41.80 Host
But is this a service that you see Petrus offering to other organizations going forward?

07:47.25 AROB
Yeah, absolutely. So we've been in conversations with actually a couple of organizations about doing this kind of fractional staffing role specifically for annual fund managers, for communication managers.

07:59.97 AROB
It's a little bit trickier with that major gift officer role, just because with major gifts, you need time. You need dedicated time onsite being there, which is hard to do in a day a week, or a couple of days a month.

08:16.57 AROB
But on the annual fund side, yeah, we've been, we've had conversations with a lot of organizations about doing that. And I could see this being something that we really develop as a kind of core offering of Petrus.

08:30.14 Host
Love it.

08:30.85 AROB
Yeah.

08:31.17 Host
So let's talk about that hiring process. You know, imagine either you're in this organization's situation where you're kind of almost starting from scratch in some ways, right? They've had a little bit of fundraising in the past, but they need to hire somebody to build up this program.

08:43.86 Host
Or if you're in the situation of a lot of organizations that we work with where maybe the director's been doing some fundraising on the side, building up enough to hire somebody. It's time to hire a development director and you have no idea what you're looking for. What does this person need to be, need to do? What they need to be like? What does the job description look like? So let's start there. What are some of the main characteristics of a development director or and a development staff to look for when you're hiring them?

09:10.22 AROB
Yeah, so there's kind of two ways to think about this. There's one is the hard skills, which are they know how to build a development calendar. They know how to write effective communications. They know how to make the calls. And they know how to sit down with a donor and evaluate the right ask amount, the right strategy.

09:32.75 AROB
They know how to make the solicitation, do the stewardship. Those are kind of the hard skills, both on the annual fund, the major gift, the campaign, the planned giving. They know exactly what to do and they know how to do it well.

09:48.39 AROB
There's also the soft skills. And soft skills are, when I say that, what I'm referring to is they are able to sit down and have a conversation with somebody and they're comfortable in that role. They're able to be a good listener and kind of draw out clues from a conversation about whether somebody's a good prospect or not.

10:11.86 AROB
They know how to tell a story in a way that can be written into a newsletter or an appeal or content for the website and also, you know, relayed one-on-one in a donor meeting or to a group at a big event.

10:28.91 AROB
So the hard skills and the soft skills, you know, put those together and you can get a really good development director. But if somebody is new in this role or they're transitioning or whatever, they don't have years of experience, it's not likely that you find somebody ready to go with both of those together. So what I often find advising directors or hiring people is if you don't have, if you can't find somebody or your organization can't afford somebody that has, you know, five, 10 years of experience and has really developed those hard skills. We can train the hard skills, but...

11:09.21 AROB
...without those soft skills, without the ability to have conversations, kind of be insightful, tell a story, it's going to be really tough to train those into somebody to be a good fit. And so start with the soft skills, and then we can train them up in the hard skills of fundraising.

11:26.77 Host
Right. Nobody goes to college for fundraising, right?

11:29.56 AROB
Unfortunately, that is not the case yet, one day maybe, but yeah, that's not right.

11:32.62 Host
Well, in a while you'll find somebody who studied nonprofit management, occasionally, but most of us went for something totally unrelated and ended up in fundraising kind of by accident.

11:35.67 AROB
Yeah.

11:40.94 AROB
Correct.

11:42.49 Host
Right.

11:43.25 AROB
Yeah.

11:43.35 Host
And that's where, that's why we have things like our BOAT program, Basic Online Advancement Training. It's meant to give that foundation of how all these pieces fit together for the new fundraiser.

11:50.09 AROB
Totally. Yep.

11:54.44 Host
If that's something that sounds like it'd be interesting for your organization and your staff, petrusdevelopment.com/boat.

11:59.45 AROB
Yep.

12:00.55 Host
So one question that comes up that you're kind of touched on there, but I think it's worth discussing. If you had to pick one, either experience or mission alignment, somebody who's really enthusiastic and interested in what your organization does, what it stands for, which of those two would you pick when hiring a fundraiser?

12:17.09 Host
If you could only pick one, experience or mission alignment.

12:20.10 AROB
Yeah, if you could only pick one, I would hire for passion and train for skill. So what I mean by that is kind of recapping of what I said a minute ago, but find somebody that loves the organization, loves the cause, loves the work that you're doing and can tell the story and can communicate with people about the need, about the case with passion.

12:42.61 AROB
And then they can learn the skills of how to do it properly and how to be most effective and efficient. So if you had to choose, I would go with that mission alignment, which also kind of includes those soft skills of being able to tell a story, have a conversation, and then train for the hard skills, which is what we're talking about when we say experience as a fundraiser.

13:06.95 Host
I love that. I'm going to give you another kind of hypothetical question, but I think it kind of draws out some important stuff here. So let's imagine you hire a new fundraiser and then you fast forward two years and find out that they were a failure.

13:20.30 Host
What is most likely to have caused them to fail? Does that make sense?

13:23.92 AROB
Hmm. Yeah, that's a good question. So, it can be a couple of things, right? Sometimes I see new fundraisers or not even new fundraisers. I see fundraisers come into an organization and they struggle and they don't get what I call a small win, right? They don't close the gift, or they get a couple of nos early on, or they send an appeal and it totally flops.

13:48.03 AROB
And so they don't get those wins at the beginning. They lose confidence. They default to kind of areas that they're most comfortable with, which typically are not client facing, not donor facing—in the office, managing the database, cleaning up old records for the 35th time this month. And they just aren't doing what they need to do for fundraising. So sometimes it's just a result of how they start and then how that trajectory, that path goes. What does that sort of indicate or what's the underlying reason for quote "failure" in that way? They're not doing the activity.

14:28.68 AROB
Right? They're not making the calls. They're not seeing individuals. They're not sticking to deadlines and getting communications out on time. They're not mining the database. They're not doing the activity that ultimately leads to success in fundraising. And so whatever the reason is, they're not doing that. Sometimes it's lack of confidence. Sometimes it's, you know, you hire them, you think they're going to—this is my fundraiser, I don't need to do anything. You just disengage as a sort of a supervisor,

14:57.12 AROB
And then, you know, you're not managing them. They're not doing the activity. All of these, there's kind of a million reasons why—personal distractions, whatever it is. At the end of it, though, if they're not doing the activity, they're not going to be successful.

15:12.55 Host
Makes a lot of sense.

15:14.07 AROB
Yeah.

15:14.89 Host
Anything else you want to talk about?

15:14.91 AROB
Is there anything else that you would add to that?

15:17.08 Host
Um...

15:19.90 Host
No, the main one that sticks out of my mind is exactly what you said. It's defaulting to the easy things in the office.

15:27.45 AROB
Yeah, yeah.

15:28.16 Host
A lot of times I see people say, "Oh, I'll write grants and we'll get lots of money from grants" and I don't need to take the time to go and do the uncomfortable thing of meeting people, right? But it's really, it's the people who succeed are the ones who go out and meet people face to face and do it a lot, right?

15:42.24 Host
The more you do that, the more money comes in. It's just, it's a law of large numbers thing. It's how it works.

15:48.87 AROB
Yeah, I mean in a lot of ways, if you're going to be a successful fundraiser, you have to be willing to do the things that are not naturally comfortable to you if you're going to be a good development director, right?

15:58.29 Host
Right.

16:01.33 AROB
When I worked at the university, at the time there were 65 development directors. We did this kind of personality quiz and probably 63 of them cared nothing about the strategy of building the annual fund or the development program, but they loved interacting with people.

16:22.25 AROB
So, they were excellent major gift officers because that's all they needed to do. Make the calls and go see people and ask for gifts. The two of us that were stronger or leaned towards strategy and building out the systems and all of that—

16:43.84 AROB
That's a strong way to build the annual fund, but the comfort level might be less on going out and seeing people and asking for gifts. So you have to put yourself in a position, either you have a job that just completely leans into your strengths and interests, or if you're going to be a development director, which oftentimes is the case for small organizations where you have to do all of it, then you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

17:06.08 Host
Yeah. And as long as we're on that personality quiz topic, I know we did a full episode on this, maybe about a year ago, early 2024 about personality types within fundraising. I myself am a very strong introvert. Whenever I've taken those tests a few times, I fluctuate between 98 and 100 percent introvert, like all the way. Right. And...

17:26.21 Host
There are a lot of people within fundraising that are introverts and you don't necessarily—I think the stereotype is you have to be extroverted to go and talk to people.

17:28.86 AROB
Yeah.

17:33.04 Host
We introverts tend to, you know, we need some recharge time, but we kind of develop a script and test that script with each conversation and find out what works better and better and can be just as successful doing that.

17:44.95 Host
So that's not necessarily something you need to—I think somebody needs to be pretty organized and be able to handle lots of different things happening, especially if you're in a one-man shop. Maybe that's a characteristic to look for personality-wise, but it could be extrovert or introvert.

18:00.36 AROB
Yeah. And, on that note, a lot of times if you are an organization that's hiring somebody, you know, you're going to get recommendations from your board. You're going to get recommendations from other people. And a lot of times the people that are going to be recommended are, "Oh,

18:16.68 AROB
you got to hire so-and-so because they are just the most charming and most charismatic person that you'll ever meet." And they will have zero issue asking for money, right? Which is an important piece of going out and asking for major gifts. But sometimes people that are so charismatic, so charming that they present that way,

18:45.69 AROB
they don't always—I'm not saying this is a rule that crosses over—but they don't always have the organizational skills to do the systems that are necessary to run a comprehensive development program, right?

19:02.81 AROB
So they love being out asking people, they absolutely hate putting in donor notes, managing the database, sitting down, writing a newsletter or an appeal, updating the website.

19:03.57 Host
On it.

19:14.69 AROB
And so all of those other things just never happen, but you've closed a lot of major gifts, which can be good—it's not a bad thing. But as we've talked about on this show multiple times, this is just sort of general philosophy of Petrus.

19:29.87 AROB
You have to have a strong annual fund that fills your pipeline for a strong major gift program. And if you're not doing both of those together, then your program won't succeed long-term. So all that to say that sometimes, somebody is so extroverted and so charming that everybody's like, "You got to hire that person," whoever it is.

19:51.10 AROB
And you say, "Let's do it." And then you end up, "Wait a minute, this person never puts in donor reports. They never show up to staff meetings with me on time," you know, all these things that kind of create problems, but everybody loves them. And so you end up in a situation that's kind of tricky to extricate yourself from.

20:10.18 Host
Yeah, I think there can be a tendency to look for people who are similar to you in hiring, but I think you want to look for people who are complementary to you, right? I worked for an executive director who was very extroverted, loved talking to people.

20:17.47 AROB
Yeah.

20:22.96 Host
Not organized at all. Right. Never on time, et cetera. And so my kind of role—and we were going on donor meetings together—get them to the right place at the right time, make the introductions and he could carry the conversation.

20:33.96 AROB
Yeah, yeah.

20:37.37 Host
No problem. We made a great team, working together in that way, playing off of each other's strengths. And so that's something to look for, I think, when you're hiring somebody for your own team.

20:46.36 AROB
Yep. Yep, that's a good way to put it.

20:51.12 Host
Great. One last thing to talk about here, let's talk a little bit about what salary ranges you should be thinking about if you're hiring somebody. I know this can be a big topic, it's hard to say definitively based on where you live, et cetera, but what are some typical ranges you're looking at for salary for a development staff member?

20:57.59 AROB
Sure.

21:05.58 AROB
Yeah. So again, like you said, there's a million factors, right? Big city versus rural area, school versus parish versus university. The one kind of through line through all of this is experience. How many years have they been doing this and have they been successful in that time, right? So if we kind of put all those other factors aside and just look at experience, we can create a line of somebody who's,

21:33.46 AROB
Brand new or has been doing fundraising for less than three years, right? Zero to three years somewhere in there. Once they hit three years of experience, they're gonna come up to the next tier of salary because they're more...

21:48.71 AROB
...they're more recruitable, I guess, by other organizations. And then once they reach that three to kind of seven-ish range, once they hit about seven years, somebody knows that this is a career, they're gonna be doing this, and they're going to be highly sought after by other organizations. So, if we just get very simple and we look at those three experience ranges, we can come up with pretty good estimates for what a salary range would look like.

22:18.79 AROB
That initial range, you're going to be looking somewhere $40,000 to $48,000 a year base salary, possibly plus an incentive bonus if that's something that you want to incorporate into your pay structure. An incentive bonus is really built on activity. Are they doing the activity? Are they hitting the goals that we lay out every year? And if so, then they can earn a bonus on top of that.

22:43.10 AROB
So 40 to 48 is a range for that sort of tier one. Tier two in our system, three to seven years, would be somewhere around starting at 48, 50,000 up to about 70 to $75,000. That's a pretty good range for that three to seven years experience, again, possibly an incentive on top of that.

23:06.65 AROB
Once they hit about seven years and up, then it's going to be really hard to hire a development director for less than $75,000. After that, it kind of goes up based on the organization, budget, location, goals, all of that. But just think of if I'm going to hire somebody with seven years of experience, where else are they getting offers from? Nobody is going to pay them less than $75,000 to do the job.

23:29.69 AROB
So that's basically 75 and up from there. Those are kind of three pretty easy ranges: 40 to 48, 48 to 75, and then 75 and up.

23:41.36 AROB
You can kind of dial it in a million different ways from there, but that just gives you a pretty good snapshot of what you're looking at from a salary standpoint.

23:51.03 Host
Great.

23:51.05 AROB
Does that jive with your experience?

23:51.19 Host
And you mentioned...

23:54.32 Host
Yeah. And I mean, like you said, it totally depends on where you're looking, what type of organization. You know, when you're looking at job postings, the ones that stand out are some of the good ones you can find well into the six-figure jobs, right?

24:07.69 Host
Usually those are bigger cities, bigger organizations, and you look for 10 plus years of experience, but the sky's the limit.

24:07.99 AROB
Yeah.

24:14.35 Host
If you kind of establish yourself in the profession, if you're looking for a job and looking for pay increases.

24:20.45 AROB
Yeah, and you know for somebody who—right, we're kind of talking primarily to hiring agents, but if you're a development director listening to this episode and you're like, "You know, I've been doing this for two, three years. I think this is good." I mean, you stay in this for 10, 15, 20 years, and there's no reason that you can't be making north of $150,000 annual salary.

24:41.99 AROB
And if you do the work, if you bloom where you're planted, if you are bringing strategy and activity into your work, you can be compensated very well for this work because your production is going to more than make up for that investment in you. So, we're talking primarily to the hiring people, but also if you're a development director thinking about, you know, where do I go with this career? You can be compensated very well if you are successful and you stick with this as a career.

25:19.35 Host
Exactly. And maybe one last thing to add to that is the longer a development staff member is on board with your organization, the more valuable they are in terms of the relationships they've built, right?

25:29.96 AROB
Yeah.

25:30.00 Host
It takes a lot of time to reestablish relationships when you change over the staff. And so it's worth kind of increasing your investment in that person to keep them around as long as you can.

25:42.48 AROB
Totally. 100% agree.

25:44.42 Host
So you mentioned that incentive plan, and we actually have a sample incentive plan that you can go download for free. If you go to petrusdevelopment.com/164, because this is episode 164, petrusdevelopment.com/164, you can download for free a sample incentive plan. One thing to note on there,

26:02.28 Host
We always try to point this out is that within fundraising, it's considered unethical to pay a straight commission for dollars raised, right? There are parallels to sales, but it's something that can lead to lots of problems.

26:08.11 AROB
Right.

26:12.73 Host
And we went into it in past episodes in much more depth. But just note that you don't want a straight commission. You want to create an incentive plan based on activity. And you can see a sample of what that might look like.

26:24.15 Host
If you go to petrusdevelopment.com/164.

26:26.66 AROB
Awesome, yeah.

26:29.58 Host
Great. I think this is helpful. Any kind of last points on the hiring process?

26:35.13 AROB
I think last points are, I'll kind of double down on your last statement. When you find somebody that is good, then expect to invest in them over the long term. And it can put you in a place, if you're the supervisor or the principal or the chaplain or whatever, it can make you a little bit uncomfortable sometimes to think about, "Gosh, I've had this person here for 10 years, now they're asking for a 10% raise or increase or whatever."

27:07.90 AROB
But think about the value that that individual and those relationships bring to your organization and be open to investing more in them over the long term. So yeah, I think that's kind of where I'll close with that. I think we covered a lot of really good stuff in here. Good points. I'll just close with that.

27:32.07 Host
Great. Love it. Well, thank you, Andrew.

27:34.55 AROB
Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for doing this.

27:36.44 Host
Have a great day.