The qualities of a great fundraiser – survey results revealed
Howard Lake | 24 November 2011 | Blogs
Back in the summer we announced our “What Makes A Great Fundraiser” survey. It was seven years ago that we first wrote an article for Fundraising magazine about the qualities required to be a great fundraiser. We canvassed opinions from the great and the good and we published our findings.
But times have changed – a lot. The recession has arrived, the world of online and digital brings new opportunities and new challenges almost daily, the FRSB is here and expectations of donors have increased hugely.
So, do the qualities identified in 2004 still hold true for 2011? Or is something different required to survive and prosper today?
In an effort to find out we created an online survey for fundraisers to tell us what they thought and more than 500 people did.
And now it is time to reveal the results – a bit of fun, with a serious side.
Qualities of a great fundraiser in 2004
First, a reminder. In 2004 we witnessed the expansion of the EU, people still smoked in pubs, Greece was in the news for happier reasons having won the European Football Championships, and 812 million people had internet access. And of course there was the terrible Boxing Day Tsunami. Back then, the top five qualities needed by a fundraiser were identified as honesty, a sense of humour, endurance, inspiration and top of the pile was passion.
Qualities of a great fundraiser in 2011
Fast-forward seven years and we now have 2.1 billion people with internet access, more than 5 billion mobile phones in circulation and an all pervading global economic gloom. There is a famine in East Africa.
More specifically, fundraising is under pressure like never before. One senior fundraiser said to me recently: “when times are good my charity thinks anyone can fundraise, when they’re not so good, they think anyone but me can fundraise”. In our survey 56% of responders said they did not feel appreciated for their efforts by their organisation while only 15% felt ‘enormously appreciated’.
We asked nine simple questions, which included ranking twenty pre-defined qualities as well as suggesting some of your own and we had responses from the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada and Scandinavia.
We were also interested in which qualities people felt were least useful or needed and this threw up our first surprise of the survey. Just behind Ruthlessness (which just 2 per cent thought important) as the least valued quality came Connection to the Cause. Only 11 per cent of fundraisers considered this to be important or essential. The reasons why? Well we don’t know for sure, but it may have something to do with the increasing ‘professionalisation’ of the sector and the seemingly ever shorter length of time a fundraiser actually spends (on average) at any one charity. Seven years ago this was one of the qualities that came up a lot, but for today’s fundraiser it seems a far less significant requirement.
Other qualities that did not score highly (anchored in mid-table obscurity a la Sunderland if you want a footballing analogy) were Sense of Humour (a lofty fourth in 2004), Flexibility, Diplomacy, and more curiously Imagination and Creativity, which we had expected to see significantly higher up the list.
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In reverse order, the top five
But enough of the also-rans. Let us move on to our top five as chosen by our responders. In fifth was a quality defined as “Firmness of purpose; resoluteness. Resolved not to change”. Of course, this is better known as Determination – a quality 40 per cent of people rated highly and only just beaten for fourth spot by Commitment, which gained 42 per cent.
In third was a companion quality to Determination, that of Perseverance, which 46 per cent of people identified as important. Just pipped into second place with 49 per cent was the Ability to Motivate Others, which in our office had been a couple of people’s outsiders tip for the top spot…including mine.
However, firmly in first place with 51 per cent of people considering this to be the single most important quality a great fundraiser must have was…(pretend drum roll)…Integrity (“The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”).
Surprising? No, not really. After all, given the causes we represent, the good we enable to happen through the funds we raise, and (most importantly) the trust placed in us by donors, it would seem a natural for top spot.
And perhaps it is worth remembering this quote from Alan Simpson, which seems particularly relevant given its top of the pile placing, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”
And what do donors think?
But we didn’t stop there. Our twist in the tale was to take the same list to a small, but select group of established charity donors (to causes large and small, in the UK and overseas, local and national), and asked them what qualities they considered it most important for a fundraiser to possess.
Would they say the same?
Well, yes and no. They too considered Ruthlessness the least important and relevant, and they too selected Determination, and Commitment in their top five. Best of all, they agreed that Integrity was the single most important quality a great fundraiser must have.
So far so good. Fundraisers and donors speaking as one. All is rosy.
Except for this one thing. Close behind Integrity came Connection to the Cause – a hugely different result to that which our fundraisers gave us.
You can decide for yourself how significant this is, but for our part we’ll finish with a quote from one of the donors, who said, “Connection to the Cause and Integrity go hand in hand don’t they. I can’t really see how you can have one without the other. If I thought someone was just fundraising for a job, and not because they had passion for their cause then obviously it would call into question their integrity…”
Food for thought we think.
Thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll do it again in 2018!
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.