The Fund Zone

Austerity, debt crisis, end of days… whatever. I seem to be positively inundated with job prospects of late. It must be said that these are rather particular prospects, all being opportunities of one sort or another around the business of non-profit fundraising.

In the past four days alone, I’ve received about a dozen fundraising job opps via e-mail from a single head-hunter; the previous week saw about the same number. Throw in a few phone calls (‘Might you be available…?’), note that ArtsPro and ArtsJobFinder are a-wash in new FR gigs, and the sensible conclusion is that it’s happy days right now for those practicing the dark art of fundraising. (Disclaimer: I was a full-time practitioner of said dark art for more than a decade, but this blog post is in no way intended as an advertisement for future work therein. Faced with the choice of returning to the biz or diving into a vat of battery acid, I’d get my trunks and goggles on. Still, it’s nice to be asked.)

Most of the gigs I’ve seen are for new positions in small to mid-sized organisations, including many dealing in the arts and culture. This is entirely understandable. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has made much noise about “professionalising” the arts, which means finding money elsewhere. This presumably would make it easier for Government to further reduce the current trickle of public arts funding to a barely discernable moistness.

To loosen up those privately held purse strings, Government has deployed a £100m matching fund. There’s also been some modest tinkering with a few philanthropy-relevant tax rules. And now comes the inevitable rush to weapon-up with professionals, the better for organisations to grab all that soon-to-be-free-flowing private cash. If only it were that easy.

Fundraising is mainly the business of building and maintaining relationships. That takes time. Even in this recession/depression the Tyrannosaurs of the UK arts scene will wield their fearsome fundraising machines to good effect. This isn’t because their cultural ‘product’ is inherently better than yours: rather, they’ve painstakingly built strong donor networks and long ago integrated into their daily workings (and budgets) the legions of professional fundraisers needed to turn devotion into dosh. Unfortunately, less experienced organisations often view hiring a full-time fundraiser as akin to recruiting a fiscal alchemist: if you hire them, the money will simply materialise.

There are other ways forward. Fundraising isn’t rocket science; a good consultant can bring meaningful fundraising nous to existing staff. If traditional funding sources are tapped out or locked up—an increasing likelihood—DIY solutions like crowdsourcing may offer a better path to success. And of course, there are cross-organisation partnerships: pooling resources to hire project-based fundraising help could prove cheaper and more effective than going solo.

Sadly, in the current rush to hire full-time fundraisers, there’s a real possibility that dozens of organisations will burn precious resources for little gain. There’s also a broader irony. The time to build a fundraising operation isn’t when things are tough but rather when an organisation is strong. Donors can smell desperation, which is no more appealing in fundraising than it is on a blind date.