Others have little to no direct fundraising experience. Some come to the profession having spent decades in the field as top development executives. Instead, I’ll point out a few peculiarities I’ve noticed along the way and offer some noggin nuggets for those thinking about hiring one or becoming one.įundraising consultants vary as much as the clients they serve. So I’m not here to whip open the kimono and expose the industry’s underbelly, or to offer an extended exposition covering myriad variations on the consulting theme. And I’ve had clients with staffs you can enumerate on one hand hoping to raise about as much as Harvard nets in roughly two hours. At the same time, I’ve had rather sophisticated clients with campaigns upwards of $250 million, which isn’t exactly chump change, even by today’s standards. ![]() I can’t claim to have worked for one of the large firms that serve clients waging billion-dollar campaigns, and while some wags dismiss the difference between those firms and the ones dipping farther down into the barrel as a simple matter of additional zeroes, the truth is that the complexity of those larger organizations makes the comparison more like apples versus zebras instead of your commonplace oranges. ![]() Nowadays, after spending the better part of 30 years consulting and working with consultants on my own campaigns, I understand how they add value… and how they don’t. I figured I could run NASA if I had someone telling me every move to make. ![]() Why, precisely, did we hire him in the first place? We’re spending gobs of money on this dude, and now we’re allocating just as much, if not more, for his personal guru. Soon after we trumpeted his arrival from the highest peak in town, this much-heralded individual executed his first strategic move: hiring a fundraising consultant.Īt the time, I wasn’t completely clued in to what a fundraising consultant did, but it struck me as odd that we’d spent so much time tracking down God’s veritable gift to philanthropy (with the help of a search firm, no less), someone whose job was to improve our operation on every front, and yet in turn, he immediately hired someone to tell him how to do that very job. Early in my fundraising career, a university I worked for conducted a nationwide search (touted as such to add gravitas) to find the most experienced, most charismatic and most accomplished development executive imaginable.
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