Tony Poderis on when to appoint a first fundraising director

Howard Lake | 26 July 2006 | News

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• Management

US fundraising consultant and writer Tony Poderis has added a new article to his Raise-funds.com website addressing the issue of when should an organisation appoint its first fundraising director.

Tony, a long-time contributor to the UK Fundraising Forum, writes regularly on practical issues affecting charities, boards and fundraisers. His style is positive, based on his considerable fundraising experience, but also blunt. In his latest article he argues: “if a non-profit organisation is beginning to ask whether it needs a professional development director, it probably should have hired one months, even years ago.”

He adds that “the biggest mistake non-profits make in hiring their first development director is waiting until the board, executive director, and other key personnel have arrived at a consensus that one is needed NOW.” Consequently, “an organisation that waits until it is necessary to hire a development director has waited too long.”

Tony offers a useful checklist to use with the organisation’s fundraising plan to help it establish when a fundraising manager will become an essential requirement. But he points out that there are no universal indicators of when this will be: it all depends on the individual organisation.

“When Should a Non-Profit Organization
Hire its First Development Director?” is just one of dozens of considered, practical discussions of some of the key issues in fundraising that Tony shares at no charge in his Fundraising Forum Library.

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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.