Effective Fundraising

3The Players

DEVELOPMENT IS LIKE a minuet. There are a lot of specific processes you need to go through. How you staff and execute them, however, is highly idiosyncratic. It depends on your size, the nature of your giving base, and your culture, among other things. There are a number of people who play critical policy roles in shaping development. These include the chairman of the board, head of the governance committee, head of the board's development committee, head of the board's capital campaign committee (only at capital campaign time), the organization's CEO, and the development head. Each of these individuals has a key responsibility in ensuring the success of the organization's development activities regardless of whether one is dealing with a neighborhood nursery school on one end of a size spectrum or a top-50 teaching hospital on the other end of the size spectrum. Each person's role will be discussed in detail in the following sections.

The Development Director

This individual is central to the success of the development effort. An effective development director requires extraordinary interpersonal skills to manage relationships with multiple constituencies, both inside and outside the organization. The director must also be able to handle large amounts of operational details and complexity in an almost flawless way. Such people are hard to find. It is one of the reasons why compensation for these jobs and their turnover rates are so high. Burnout is a constant ...