Fundraisers – Second Class Citizens?

Many fundraisers consider themselves – or are considered by their colleagues – to be second-class citizens within the charities where they work.

I have never understood this attitude.

A charity’s operations and its fundraising are inextricably linked. Without fundraising, there can be no service delivery; and without a service there is no need for fundraising.

Many charity Trustees – and some senior executive staff – are keen to analyse their fundraising team’s effectiveness on the basis of how much the fundraisers bring in when compared with their remuneration.

But strangely enough, no one else is assessed on this basis. Trustees are not judged on the number of potential donors they introduce to the fundraising team, nor the degree to which they involve themselves in the overall fundraising effort.

Likewise, senior executive staff rarely have their projects or the charity’s core activities scrutinised to see if the funds these activities have absorbed have been used to best effect; still less that their salaries would be subject to change depending on the activities’ financial outcomes!

We hear much these days about the importance of teamwork – and rightly so. Trustees, operational staff and fundraisers are a troika which together can and should deliver for a charity’s beneficiaries. Each of the 3 has a key role to play, without which the other 2 cannot maximise their effectiveness. At the end of the day, these 3 groups exist for the charity’s beneficiaries – a fact which should be constantly in everyone’s minds.