Tell me about your fundraising job

[marylou]

In the recent careers thread, there were a few of you who mentioned getting into fundraising and enjoying it. This is an option with my background, but I'm not necessarily sure I understand the job completely.

Can you tell me about your day to day? And where does one go to find a job like this?

[LoveTrains]

I work at an independent school, although I started my career in higher ed.

On a regular day, I spent time emailing and calling volunteers who make many solicitations for me. I work mainly with parents, so I often have parent volunteers stopping by my office as well. I write text for letters/mailed & emailed solicitations and pick out pictures for communications. I manage the senior class gift campaign and the student calling program, so I work with students. I write the scripts and am constantly updating volunteer materials.

I also personally solicit prospects/donors in the $1000 - $50,000 range. I look through the database and do research on prospects that I think might have financial capacity to make a gift, and then I try to get a meeting with them to talk about the school. Once I have met with them, I often email or call them throughout the year to give them updates on what is going on with the school and solicit them once a year for a gift.

I work with reunion committees and our alumni board. I cultivate faculty/staff and try to be as involved in the life of the school as I can. I will go to games and concerts in the evenings/weekends to integrate myself into the school.

I also run reports in the database and do a lot of data analysis. I want to track how my work is doing and compare it to other, local/similar schools. I read professional list-servs and try to stay on top of the major trends in the field.

I have a lot of meetings.

I also work with volunteers on planning our yearly fundraising gala. We do a silent auction and a live auction and we have sponsors. My school doesn't have a golf tournament, but these are often common fundraising events.

I started out right out of college as an assistant to a large fundraising group at a major university. The school is so big that they have about 200 people employed in fundraising.

If you want to get into the field, do you want to do education, health/human services, healthcare, etc? It seems that the education people generally stick with education. The thing we always look for in career changers are people that are heavily involved as volunteers with their own alma mater.

[sunny]

check out www.afpnet.org/ your local chapter may have some good training or educational presentations where you can learn more and start to network

[kaylie]

I started off doing it at a community non profit in NYC and LOVED it. I did individual giving and special events. Special events were a lot of fun, but you make more money in individual giving so that's where I stayed. From there I went to be a major gifts officer at another NYC non profit which was interesting but also stressful and hard. You have to be willing to make a lot of calls and send a lot of emails to get meetings.

My current job is really similar to LoveTrains. I'm also at an independent school but I'm focused on a particular age group. I get to be really creative which is kind of fun. I will say that I liked doing it in NYC more. This job would be perfect if I had kids because of the flexibility and the fact that it's low stress, but I miss the intensity of my old job.

The basic types of fundraising jobs:
Major/Principal/Capital Gifts - working with a portfolio of donors (150-250 usually) to solicit large gifts. sometimes restricted (for a specific purpose) and sometimes for general use.
Annual Giving - using mail/phonathons/e-campaigns to solicit smaller gifts from a larger group
Grant Writing - writing proposals to foundations and corporations to secure large gifts, usually for a specific purpose
Special Events - planning large fundraising events that can include golf tournaments, casino nights, galas, runs, etc
Planned Giving - securing gifts through estates, trusts, life income plans, ect (a lot of lawyers end up in this field)
Development Services - the people behind the scenes who manage data, produce lists, research prospects

To find the jobs, go to indeed.com and search fundraising. You can check idealist.org and local hospitals/schools to see if they have any open positions.

[LoveTrains]

Just to add to what Kaylie said, at many places you can do annual giving and just be focusing on soliciting gifts of $1000+ from individual donors.

[marylou]

Sorry, I had to post and run earlier, but this is all great information. Thanks everybody!