[Foundation-l] Three fundraising job openings

[Andrew Gray]

On 17/04/2008, Jon <scream at 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.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk