How to kickstart a career in fundraising
Last week, Aperio hosted a group of current and aspiring fundraisers for a roundtable to discuss: How do you advance a career in fundraising?
Many of our attendees were professionals who are interested in transitioning to fundraising. They have many motivations—a desire for more impact, an affinity for a cause, or simply readiness for the next challenge. Most were asking, in one way or another: “What is the purpose of my career?”
As someone who transitioned into fundraising mid-career, I identified with the questions they asked.
Most of us crave a ‘north star’ professionally. If a north star is our unwavering purpose, then the urgency to find it (and follow it) seems quite logical. Identifying one’s north star promises the realization of the quote often attributed to Confucius: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
I was seeking my north star when I found fundraising. After a career practicing law, it still surprises me sometimes that I have landed in the world of development. But after asking myself a series of questions centered around what I found excitement and joy in doing, I launched a job search that resulted in my transition from law and teaching to professional fundraising for education-related nonprofits. I learned many things about myself during this process, and my journey may help those similarly considering how to successfully make the leap into fundraising.
I took a big leap and three steps to identify and follow my north star:
Determine what excites me professionally
Rigorously assess my skills
Network with people in the field to kickstart my career in fundraising
Here’s what you can learn from my story . . .
Self-realization: determining what excites you professionally
One of the things that initially drew me to the practice of law was my love of a good argument. Not the combative aspect of being in an adversarial situation, but crafting a theory around a fact pattern, finding supporting laws, and making an argument for my position based on why my client should prevail.
It never occurred to me that I could generate this excitement in a profession other than law. But now that I am in fundraising, it is so clear that the work of a good fundraiser is similar to that of a good lawyer. A fundraiser, whether one is a grant writer or a major gifts officer, plays a very similar role for a nonprofit that a lawyer does for her client where we make the case to prospective donors about why our nonprofit fits into the donor’s philanthropic priorities.
Figuring out the right questions to ask and then holding yourself accountable to answering those questions was and remains critical. It’s an inventory in which we should all engage on a regular basis throughout our careers.
When you are thinking about a career in fundraising, ask and answer the following questions:
What qualities do you like about the work you are currently doing?
What things are you curious about?
What motivates you?
What are you passionate about?
It’s this last question in particular that led me to fundraising. My last legal job was as a juvenile defense attorney. I was passionate about helping children have better life options but being a defense lawyer was depressing. I wanted to support children before they reached a courtroom and with my linear thinking, I thought that the natural path to reaching children before they got to delinquency court was to be a classroom teacher. For me, education had been the key to many doors, and I wanted to share the opportunities I had with children who looked like me.
In my mind, because I had taught at the law school level, I thought surely that I could teach children. How wrong I was! And after over two years in the classroom, I was ready to figure out what was next.
Answering the questions above found me looking at a job at Teach For America as a director of development where I would be supporting great educational options for children. And that didn’t involve me directly teaching children. My greatest hurdle though was figuring out how my legal background translated to fundraising.
Rigorous skills assessment
Though skills assessment is seemingly the most straightforward aspect of my experience in becoming a fundraiser, it was a challenge to be disciplined in analyzing both my technical skills and my soft skills to determine both what I could do and what I wanted to do.
Reading numerous job descriptions for development roles that extended beyond the position that I eventually accepted at Teach For America ultimately helped me understand development and really zero in on my skills.
Every job description that I read had a list of preferred and required characteristics. I made a running list of those qualities and then asked myself the following:
What are the hard skills required by the role?
What skills do you have?
What skills can you learn?
What skills require experience in the field to obtain?
What skills do you have from your current experience that parallel the fundraising skills required by the role?
What are the soft skills that you have or are curious about developing?
What are your communication strong points? Are you a good writer (grants), do you enjoy storytelling, do you build relationships well?
Do you enjoy researching information?
Do you enjoy strategy work?
Do you enjoy interacting with people external to your office role?
What type of culture do you thrive in?
Are you able to collaborate with team members?
How do you organize yourself?
How do you problem solve?
How would you navigate in an entrepreneurial environment?
Do you enjoy setting and meeting deadlines?
Even after answering this series of questions, I still felt that one piece was missing before I could really say that I wanted to transition to fundraising–and that was talking to an actual fundraiser.
Networking can be a key tool in kickstarting a fundraising career
You often hear that there’s nothing like experiencing something for yourself to show you whether it’s a path you want to pursue. However, I am admittedly risk-averse. After all, I pursued a pretty traditional career path by going to law school and also in my first deviation from the legal path to try teaching. Personally, I needed something a little less risky than jumping into the deep end of a new career. That bridge for me was networking.
Professional networking is often extolled for its many benefits—raising your visibility, remaining connected to people in your field, learning about new opportunities. Networking can also play a critical role in helping to kickstart a new career.
Through networking, you can talk to people who are working in the field you aspire to join and ask for advice—and as a fundraiser, you learn quickly that people love to be asked for advice! It’s probably the greatest leverage point for getting an initial meeting with someone that you may also want to cultivate as a donor one day.
Keys to networking as a lever for kickstarting a fundraising career:
Review your professional contacts to determine who works in the field
Ask for informational interviews with professional fundraisers if you don’t personally know anyone who has that role
Be clear and specific about why you want the meeting: “Hi XXX, I would love to connect to chat about your work in development. I am thinking about a career transition and would love to get your advice on a couple of next steps that I’m considering. Here are a couple of times that I’m available to connect. I look forward to hearing from you!”
Ask lots of questions once you get on someone’s calendar—and prepare your questions in advance. Suggested questions:
What do you view as the career opportunities emerging in the field?
What skills do you feel are most important to the work?
What challenges have you discovered in the work that you didn’t anticipate?
How did you enter the development field?
What volunteer experiences would you consider valuable for someone pursuing a new career as a professional fundraiser (particularly if the person has no direct fundraising education, certification, or experience)?
What professional fundraising networks are you part of?
Who do you look to for professional development? Are there courses that you’ve taken, blogs that you read, newsletters that you subscribe to that you would recommend?
Ask for referrals: “Who else should I be talking to?”
If reading this story is inspiring you, I’ll leave you with the final advice: Go for it. Following your unwavering purpose in a professional context can lead to daily inspiration, stress reduction, and joy derived from feeling like you are doing purposeful work. For those reasons alone it is a worthy exercise to ask the question:
What is professionally exciting to you?
And if helping a cause that’s close to your heart attain sustainability and enough resources to engage in its mission and achieve its vision, then kickstarting a career in fundraising may be the path to pursuing your north star. You can solidify that path by determining how well your skills align with various fundraising roles and networking with folks in the field to test the practicality of designing a path to becoming a fundraiser.
If you're on this journey and want to network and exchange ideas, I know how important connection is—let's connect.
Toryah Cameron
Toryah is a strategic fundraiser combining legal and development experience to help nonprofit organizations thrive. Before joining Aperio, Toryah served as Director of Development for the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools and Teach For America — South Louisiana.
