The 100th fundraiser

How do you decide how many fundraisers you need at your nonprofit?  Do you need 5 or 6 or 15?  What about 100?

We know how much a fundraiser costs – say $100,000 including overhead and management time and whatever rounding we need to do to keep the math simple.

Knowing that, it seems like you have two options:

1. Keep hiring people until the next person you hire can only raise $99,999
2. Keep your fundraising team at some “reasonable” proportion to everything else you do

Either approach has its merits.  But more interesting to me is that I’ve never heard anyone approach this question in this way.

Instead, we tend to work backwards and say: “here’s how much we need to raise this year, let’s throw our team at this problem… ” and then if you come up short you tinker with the team or the approach in one way or another.

Two quick conclusions:

1. If you are a fundraiser (nonprofit Board Member, Exec Director, CEO) why exactly do you not hire that next person?  Do you not actually believe you can bring in an additional person who can raise more than they cost?    Because to raise $200,000, that person would have to raise $1,000 a day, and I’m pretty convinced that you can hire someone to do that.
2. Want job security in the nonprofit sector?  What if you could walk up to a Board Member or an Executive Director and say, “I’ve got some big ideas and I’d like to come work with you to make them happen.  I can raise $1 million in the first year to for what I plan to do.”  You’ve just written your own ticket, and it has nothing to do with anything that’s on your resume.