How to Hire a Rock Star Fundraiser

“There are many more important things than money…but they all cost money.”

This wisdom (from Michael Brown, City Year Co-Founder and Former CEO) is wisdom we live by in our work at TGP.

When you lead a nonprofit organization, your reality every single day of the year is a laser sharp focus on having enough money to create change in the world. Therefore, hiring the best fundraisers is one of the most important decisions you can make.

If you’re a nonprofit executive in charge of hiring a Chief Development Officer or a very senior Major Gifts professional, how do you determine – during the interview process – whether or not someone is the right fit for your organization?

The answer is in re-engineering the traditional hiring process for fundraising professionals. Instead of the typical ‘review resumes without context, interview candidates, and empower senior executives to make a relatively knee-jerk decision’ process, we recommend:

1. Reviewing resumes differently
2. Sending a questionnaire in advance of Round One Interviews
3. Asking Round Two candidates to respond to real-world challenges you are facing
4. Recommending at least two finalist candidates

Let’s explore the four components of this new hiring strategy and review some proven practices…

The Resume Review

Before we review resumes for a particular senior fundraising role, we need to understand the competencies required to do the job with excellence. Too often we review resumes arbitrarily and simply look for candidates for what we think are the right titles at the right organizations. We rely too much on our gut instinct during this phase of the process.

We should only review resumes from prospective candidates after first listing out both the “hard” skills, the “soft” skills, and potential behavioral / cultural fit that will be demanded of your hire. Ultimately, five to seven of what you think are the most important of these skills should be used to create a scorecard by which you can measure each candidate throughout the interview process. Here are some of the skills we recommend considering integrating into your hiring process.

Hard Skills: Technical Fit / Knowledge

1. Relationship Management, Internally and Externally
2. Program Creation
3. Sales Material Creation
4. Team Management and Leadership (inspiring vision, individual goals, structure and process, individual and team management / coaching / mentoring)
5. Storytelling
6. Change Management
7. Board and Committee Support / Management
8. Revenue Projections
9. Budget and Expense Management
10. Writing
11. Research & Analytics

Behavioral / Cultural Fit

1. Stress Management
2. Handling Challenging Investors
3. Partnership with Functional Leaders
4. Servant Leadership
5. Trust Building / High Emotional Quotient

Soft Skills: Personal Traits and Cognitive Skills

1. Leadership Skills
2. Passion for the Mission
3. Partnership with the CEO
4. Curiosity
5. Enthusiasm

We clearly expect a lot from our fundraising leaders. Therefore, let’s be sure to design a process that gives us confidence in their full capabilities. Let’s start with a new type of Round One Interview.

A New Type of Round One Interview

We typically have 60 minutes or so to get to know a prospective candidate, test for their competency to do the job, understand if they’re a culture fit, and determine whether we want to fight for our mission with them every day. That’s too much to ask.

Instead, what if we send a questionnaire to candidates in advance of our initial discussion that asks questions aligned with the competencies on your hiring scorecard so that we can have the most productive 60-minute interview ever?

If your candidate doesn’t want to put in this initial work and refuses to take the time to answer these questions, they are clearly not your person. Thoughtful responses from someone can send a genuine message about their interest in and passion for the role, and interviewers will be prepared to probe further into the competencies on their scorecard.

We have found that the right questions in advance of Round One interviews can make all the difference.

Here are a few examples:

1. What is your leadership doctrine?
2. How do you lead teams and set staff up for success?
3. If we called your last supervisor, what would they say about you?
4. What kind of fundraising culture would you like to create?
5. Have you built and scaled programs (i.e., major gifts society, fundraising campaigns, planned giving / endowment etc.) to attract philanthropy and / or earned income?
6. How do you envision creating a professional development program for fundraising staff and others?
7. How have you shaped an organization's strategic direction with other C-level executives previously?

Just think about how much information you can get from a relatively simple questionnaire that will only take your candidates 30 to 45 minutes to fill out. You’ll have a highly productive Round One interview, be empowered to rate candidates quantitatively on your scorecard, and be ready to move a smaller group forward to Round Two.

A Strategic Round Two

Once you’ve limited your candidate pool to a smaller group, we recommend asking prospective hires to respond to real-life strategic challenges your organization is grappling with. For example, if your organization raises a disproportionate amount of money from corporations and foundations, how about asking them to design a major gifts program to attract gifts of $10K+ from individuals and families? If you are particularly concerned about this role’s ability to integrate a national office and many satellite offices into a unified fundraising practice, why not ask them to design a solution for you?

Think about what you can learn by designing a thoughtful exercise for Round Two?

You’ll not only get insight into a candidate’s strategic thinking. You will better understand their presentation skills, their communication skills, their cultural competence, their ability to ask questions and engage others, and so much more.

Most importantly, you will be able to clearly see which candidates you want to recommend to your CEO for their final decision.

Recommending Finalists

Oftentimes, organizations only advance one candidate to be interviewed by the ultimate hiring manager. When that happens, we’re not really giving leaders a chance to hire someone because it’s more of a “fait accompli” —  a decision that’s already been made for them.

By re-engineering your entire interview process, wouldn’t it be great if you could recommend two or three finalists to your leadership?

While we understand that it’s not always possible to have more than one finalist for the role you’re hiring for, we hope more than one rock star emerges from your Round Two interviews. This way, you are genuinely giving ownership of the process to the decision-maker.

Food For Thought

Hiring a rock star fundraising executive is too important to not think through the skills we need to hire for first. As you begin to think about your hiring processes, which components would you change?

We hope you take the time to re-think how to hire extraordinary fundraisers for your organization. By re-engineering how you recruit and interview candidates, you will undoubtedly hire someone who will be able to make a long-term difference for those you serve.

Best wishes!

Jeremy, Lisa, and Pam