Tag Archives: Staffing

Why You Can’t Hire Staff

Are you not able to hire staff because you can’t…

Find the right candidate? 

Searching for the ideal employee is like selling a house — you don’t need hundreds of people to come through, you just need the right person to walk in and get interested.

Are you attracting the right people? Do you really know (and does everyone agree) what you are looking for? Are you paralyzed by a previous hire that didn’t work out? 

In this competitive market, months can go by without a hire. Which means you are spending more time and resources than you expected. 

Solutions include changing your process, getting better buy-in from those involved, or hiring an Executive Search firm to clarify process and help determine who would be successful in your organization.

Afford to take on a full-time employee? 

Would you consider a part-time employee, an interim staff member, or a consultant? Temporary staffing can help increase funding so you can afford to staff up permanently. 

Get your favorite candidates to accept the job offer? 

If this happens, think about if it is based on:

  • The reputation of your nonprofit’s workplace environment.

    Given a choice, employees are not going to choose the job where everyone is overworked, there are micro-managers, and no one stays for more than a year. In other words, the high rate of nonprofit turnover is not only happening because there is more money at another organization. It’s also because employees want to like showing up at work every day while still having a life.
  • Your compensation package.

    With the trend/requirements to list salary ranges, saying that you can’t afford the current rate will eliminate many people whom you might like. You can list something like one recent Netflix posting for $90,000-$900,000. Or you can consider other ways to compensate employees, like bonus vacation time or paid education stipends.
  • Your nonprofit’s cause doesn’t make enough of a difference.

    Sure, your cause matters to a job candidate, but not as much as you may think. An employee can help increase cancer research, enhance education, or improve youth programming at many different organizations (not just yours). And that is true of most markets. Especially if you include jobs that are 100% remote.

Join us next month when we tackle Part 2 of this topic, with a focus on preventing employee burnout. In the meantime, if you have ideas for what I should include, please email me and let me know!

Set New Fundraising Goals for the Year? Make Sure You Have the Resources to Succeed

Resources for fundraising goalsIt’s a few weeks into the new year and, hopefully, you have set your new fundraising goals for the year.  And, if you intend to achieve those goals, we also hope that you have a fundraising plan with a stewardship calendar) in place. There is a reason for the adage, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

How did you set your fundraising goal?

Let’s talk about the reality of your situation.  Choose the letter that best describes your nonprofit’s fundraising goals for the year:

  1. I/we kept our fundraising goal the same as last year.
  2. I/we took the current budget and increased our fundraising goal by XX%.
  3. I/we looked at the budget shortfall and added that to the amount we raised last year to create our fundraising goal.
  4. I/we looked at what we raised last year, estimated we would have the same donor retention and new acquisition rates, and created our fundraising goal based on similar results.
  5. I/we looked at what we raised last year, estimated that we could implement a stewardship calendar that could help retain previous gifts while increasing our donor retention by 10% this year. We added an estimated amount based on those proportions to our fundraising goal.
  6. I/we looked at what we raised last year, estimated we could implement a stewardship calendar that could help increase our donor retention by 10% this year, determined we could hold three first-time donor events and three introduction emails to increase our first-time donor retention by 20%, and examine our lapsed donors above $1,000 for the past five years by looking at donors who could be reactivated. Then we established estimated increases for each category and added that to our fundraising goal.

The truth is, it is hard to get from A to F. It requires resources – human and financial. You cannot take the time to analyze your giving patterns, if you do not have someone to collect the data and analyze it. Even if you outsource the analysis – Mersky Jaffe & Associates can help you with this – you still need the resources to turn the findings into funding.

You will need resources for all aspects of your plan. Creating an overall stewardship calendar? You may want to send out additional snail mail letters. Creating a planned giving program? You might need collateral. Wondering how to deepen the engagement with first time donors? You might want to have coffee with the strongest prospects.  That all takes time and money.

Need it spelled out? Assuming you can increase the amount of money you raise this yea, without changing what you are doing, is a sure way to disappoint yourself, the executive director and board.

So, instead of considering what will not get done as a consequence of your new areas of focus, think about what resources you will need.  And ask for them. Could additional administrative help alleviate some stress? Do you need a new development professional? Is there a way to shift current under-utilized staff time to focus more on fundraising?

I know that budgets are tight and adding staff may not be high on your list of priorities. But you can’t raise more money without a plan on how to get there. Of course, it depends on how much you are hoping to raise. Trying to increase your numbers by $100,000 or more?  It may be time to increase your human resources. And know that the hire will more than pay for itself within a few years—even ten times over.

To quote another adage, “It takes money to raise money.” At least, that’s the adage as I remember it. 

Would Additional Fundraising Staff Support Help Raise More Money This Year?

Lately, I have heard about multiple nonprofit organizations who don’t have enough fundraising staff support. This can play out in a lot of ways:

  • inconsistent response times
  • lack of donor stewardship
  • fewer offerings
  • using volunteers to cover needs
  • late mailings
  • angered constituents
  • skipped events
  • and/or lost opportunities

Surprisingly, the reason for the lack of staffing is not always money.  It can stem from something as simple as not knowing what staff you need to handle the workflow of the agency in its current configuration (this is often the case after a reorganization). Other times nonprofits don’t have enough fundraising staff support when someone leaves and replacing him/her feels like plugging a leaky bucket that keeps springing new holes.  No one had any idea what the person actually did every day, anyway.

Of course, lack of staffing almost always results in less money raised.  Every late mailing or stewardship meeting that didn’t happen will reduce support now and into the future.

If you have read this far, you are probably don’t have enough fundraising staff support and wondering what to do about it. Here are a few options:

  1. Engage Mersky, Jaffe & Associates to conduct an Organizational and Development Assessment. This service can help you define your strengths and needs as well as save you money over time by fully utilizing your staff and their skills.  This is also very helpful when presenting your need to increase staff to the board.
  2. Perform the following exercise:
    1. ask each person in the administrative office to write down what they could achieve if they could magically add 20 additional hours per week.
    2. ask each person in the administrative office to write down 3-5 items they wish someone else could take on so that they could achieve more in the “core” areas of their job.
    3. Ask the supervisor to list all areas that are under-performing due to staffing constraints
    4. Consider the costs of one new part-time person and one full-time person. Generalize – don’t waste too much time on this part of the exercise.
    5. Compare what you could achieve with these additional costs – what is it worth to you?

Raising more money this year will require additional support from staff.  If you are not willing to chart a new path to success, don’t complain when results do not.

Read the overview from this series by clicking here

Read Chapter 1: Solicitation, Acknowledgement, and Stewardship Systems

Read Chapter 2: A Stronger Fundraising and Development Committee