Over the past month, we have been discussing the many trends re-shaping the philanthropic landscape. One of the primary drivers we have talked about is increasing pressure on philanthropy as a strategic financial resource—where other revenue sources often face growth limitations, fundraising is a go-to solution to fill potentially any and every financial gap.

That makes our work increasingly mission-critical. The advancement shop is no longer off to one side, as it often was decades ago. It is integral to managing the organization’s most difficult and complex challenges.

That means advancement professionals aren’t just team leaders and departmental leaders, today they are organizational leaders. That is a very different kind of leadership challenge compared to decades past.

I believe the leadership challenge can be broken down into five key dimensions.

Challenge One: Vision

Vision is the most determinative and expansive leadership challenge for advancement professionals today. Management consultants often use the kitschy phrase “seeing around corners” to describe the kind of visionary talent that helps corporate leaders stay ahead of the competition. Advancement leaders face a bigger challenge: seeing around many corners, not just their own, but everyone else’s, too—making “vision” an Everything Everywhere All At Once kind of challenge.

Think of it as kaleidoscopic, in which advancement leaders must hold in their sights at all times a vast array of variables:

  • the organization’s mission and goals
  • the complex financial picture of how fundraising connects to mission success
  • the changing donor landscape
  • the organization’s place in an increasingly competitive nonprofit landscape
  • how to leverage limited resources for greater impact
  • boosting retention in a profession where turnover in the fundraising shop is a strategic and financial liability for the entire organization
  • recruiting for the most relevant and strategically important skills in a tight talent market
  • creating a workplace that is both culturally attractive and financially successful

When one talks about seeing the “big picture,” that is a very big picture indeed. And while each piece of the “vision” challenge can be considered a specific skill set on its own, I put them all under this one umbrella because they can’t be effectively managed individually.

A key talent that will determine success is an advancement leader’s ability to envision how all the moving parts can be fit together into an integrated, successful whole.

Challenge Two: Entrepreneurial Mindset

Sometimes, the word “adaptability” is used to describe how people shift priorities and approaches according to changing circumstances. For our profession, that word doesn’t go far enough. Instead, advancement professionals should be thinking in “entrepreneurial” terms.

In the last roundtable discussion, for example, panelists talked about how it’s ever-more difficult to match donor intent with institutional need. Donors have increasingly specific intentions about what they want to fund, regardless of what the institution may be raising money for.

With an entrepreneurial mindset, fundraisers might take this as an opportunity to find out whether other donors feel the same way and whether there’s an untapped pool of funds available to support a new strategic program; an entrepreneur might also go back to square one and assess whether an entirely different outreach program should be built in order to find donors who do want to fund that existing need.

In addition to problem-solving, advancement leaders need to bring a mentality of building and creating – i.e., an entrepreneurial mindset.

Given its strategic importance, senior executives responsible for fundraising need to complete the feedback loop with C-suite partners, envisioning and communicating how advancement can help grow the organization and enhance its impact, rather than just figuring out how to deliver the necessary checks and stopping there.

There are 5 main qualities that define advancement’s leadership challenge today and moving forward.

Challenge Three: Connectedness

As discussed above, advancement leaders need to see the interconnectedness of fundraising with every other part of the organization. Yet, it’s not enough to see it, connections have to be forged through strong, nurturing, personal relationships.

Too often in the past, there has been a moat between programs and fundraising. That is no longer a workable model. The advancement shop has to build bridges to every part of the organization. And it’s important to note that we’re not talking about perfunctory connections that might result in a few donor lunches, or featuring frontline service providers once a year at the annual fundraising gala. We are talking about tight, personal bonds at all levels of the organization, in which we share in their successes and challenges, where we proactively create solutions and strategies, where we act as their advocates and they become evangelists for philanthropy.

That kind of connection and personal relationship building can only happen if the person leading advancement sets the tone from the top—modeling the right behaviors and showing the philanthropy team how it’s done.

Challenge Four: Trust

None of advancement’s other goals can be met without trust. Abiding, unshakable, personal trust—which is very hard to build and extremely easy to break. Who hasn’t seen news headlines about some donor demanding a return of a huge donation because they felt misled, or that the organization didn’t live up to its promises? Many of us have had the experience of working overtime to repair relationships with colleagues on the program side who were disappointed by, or felt under-supported by philanthropy.

Trustworthiness is our currency with key audiences. Given that we are stewards of large pools of their money, those audiences have high expectations for transparency, honesty, and integrity. They can spot the opposite a mile away. We need to teach our teams that even in a high-pressure fundraising environment, making the smallest compromises can destroy hard-won trust—e.g., creating inflated expectations, delivering conflicting messages (saying different things to different people), not correcting miscommunications in a timely way, not owning up to mistakes and taking responsibility, etc.

We operate in a high-stakes, trust-based world, in which advancement leaders need to cultivate an outsized sense of personal integrity around building and maintaining trust, with everyone we’re connected to in the philanthropic mission.

Challenge Five: Endurance

Decades ago, when philanthropy was a nice augmentation of the annual budget, or a good way to support a one-off need, there was less pressure on the team. If philanthropy missed its target, there was likely some wiggle room in stretching the fundraising window, or maybe scaling back the need.

Today, if philanthropy misses its target, that can create a mission-fail for the entire organization, or key parts of it. There’s a new level of mental and even physical stamina required now in advancement leadership, because of the higher levels of responsibility and the associated pressure. Successful leaders will be those who can meet its demands without breaking.

Burn-out is real; we see it in our executive search work. The level of responsibility shouldered by advancement leaders is only growing, the stakes are rising, and it can all take a toll, professionally and personally.

In conclusion, back in the good old days when “philanthropy” was barely distinguishable from “fundraising,” the challenges were mostly tactical, and leadership could be defined by a narrow, practical skillset. That’s no longer the case. The job is now different, and thus requires different skills and talents.

Philanthropy has become an inter-connected, essential, strategic resource, and while that raises new challenges it also presents exciting new opportunities. CDOs have a seat at the leadership table and a chance to make a much greater impact than ever before. If you are an entrepreneur, you get a lot of room to build and create. You also have the opportunity to engage many more people across the nonprofit enterprise, and forge many more trusted relationships. And finally, if you’re built for a marathon, winning at the “long game” is tough, but thrilling.

Taken all together, it can feel a bit overwhelming, but these challenges show just how exciting and essential advancement leadership has become. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

Contributing author:

Clare McCully, Senior Consultant, Aspen Leadership Group

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NEXT UP on November 5th: A Q&A panel discussion on leadership challenges—how senior advancement professionals are adapting to philanthropy’s increasingly strategic role, and the personal and career challenges it brings.

 

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Aspen Leadership Group (ALG) supports exceptional careers in the nonprofit sector and in philanthropy, recruiting and supporting CEOs, executive directors, chief advancement officers, COOs, CFOs, General Counsels, and other C-suite leaders and helping them recruit and develop diverse, inclusive, and high-performing teams. Our search services and leader-to-leader consulting focus on building teams that strengthen revenue and drive increased
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