Getting the right person for your fundraising team

Your fundraising team is only as good as the people in it, so making sure that you recruit the right people is really important. This is often the trickiest area for me when helping the charities I support as so much can often depend upon getting the right person in the post.

In my experience, making sure that a candidate has the right attitude and approach is often way more important than any specific skills, experience or qualifications they may hold. I often see job advertisements requiring years of experience in precisely the same field or a need to hold specific qualifications. I can’t help thinking that this limits the field and stops some potentially great candidates from applying in the first place. Skills can be taught and experience can be gained but a person’s attitude and approach to their work is infinitely more difficult to instil.

A can-do attitude, a willingness to learn and a passion for the cause can give you the ingredients for an amazing member of staff. You can always offer training, mentoring and support to ensure that they have everything they need to carry out the role. Of course, this might not be enough for particularly high-level roles or technical roles but in general, it has worked for me.

Some of the best people that I have recruited have never worked in fundraising before, returned to work after more than a decade long career break or joined from an entirely different field in fundraising. This isn’t to say that experience and qualifications are worthless, they aren’t, but it would be great if they were treated as desirables, whilst the attitudes, attributes and values of a candidate became essential.  

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