Andrew Gray wrote:
On 17/04/2008, Jon scream@datascreamer.com wrote:
I don't understand, did you mean, 8 hours a day * 5 days = 40 HRS/workweek.
I think his point was that they're all full-time eight-hour-a-day jobs, so assuming you don't sleep or take breaks you could technically fit three of them into one 24-hour period ;-)
Returning to your original question, though, remember that in the past there just wasn't the manpower to handle fundraising. If one person got caught up in something there was no-one to take up the slack, potential large donors slipped away, etc. There was no-one who did fundraising and only fundraising, no dedicated full-time employee who could focus on it.
[Consider, for example, the situation with major charitable-foundation grants - they tend to bring lots of money, but they also tend to require a lot of paperwork in the submission process - so if you can't have someone work solidly on it for a period, you're not even in the running.]
You can see how this sort of thing tends to spiral downwards when you need the donations to pay for the employees!
By the looks of it, the plan is to have a couple of full-time fundraisers - one dealing with grants and big donors & one dealing with "ongoing" fundraising from readers and small-scale benefactors - and a third person who'll handle the back-end administration for the whole.
It has the overt assumption that we're expecting fundraising to kick up by a good degree - and if we can hire people to work on it specifically, I don't think that's an unreasonable projection at all. We have a very high-profile name, we have a very well-liked mission, and there's a lot of donors out there. If the Foundation has the ability to put resources into properly fundraising, it'll pay off tenfold, and going about it half-heartedly - by trying to employ just one person to take on the whole task - is likely to prove a false economy in the long run.
Agree here, and this is expected as the foundation grows. There would need to be a separation of duties, these duties, are so different, and would be demanding.
Jon