Management

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This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Introduction

The following section covers considerations specific to our field.

In passing, though: there’s a strong case for prioritising learning good line management skills, even more for us than in other management roles. Trusts staff maybe experience more challenges than some roles and it is easier for them to leave. 

As individuals, we tend to have good people skills to build on. However, quite a lot of us are by habit a bit “head down”, introverted, productivity orientated. A lot of us don’t have much experience of good managerial support, because our own managers didn’t understand what we did. So, it can be a bit of a challenge for us to really appreciate the trusts team managerial role or to give staff the support they need.

Ways to move towards management

• If a research volunteer would benefit your work, it would give you some relevant experience. 
• Ditto mentoring other trust fundraisers. In some regions, the Chartered Institute of Fundraising runs mentoring schemes you can join. Once I got very experienced at mentoring, I also advertised independently for mentees on the different discussion groups.

Staff retention

I’d suggest you make staff retention a key part of your strategy. Recruitment agencies will tell you that people typically stay in a trusts post for under two years. There’s a shortage of people, the staff who work for you are good at applying for things and yet our team targets often assume the posts are continuously filled.

Let’s suppose it takes 3 months to fill a post, 4 months for them to get up to speed and they build at an even rate. This is roughly how much of the maximum amount you’d raise over the years, depending on the average length that someone is in post:

No doubt you could reduce the drop by focusing on the most important work. At the same time, it’s only in the easier roles that people will be properly up to speed in 4 months. 

Frankly, there IS only so much you can do to get people to stay, but you can help:

• The general research suggests people most commonly leave because of their managers. If you prioritise being a good manager, it could help. 
• I’ve seen people leave because of the stresses of the role. You can help with quite a few of these.
• I’ve also seen people leave because they wanted to progress onwards. You may not always be able to help them increase their salaries, but you CAN delegate and support people to develop.
• I’ve also seen people leave because they’re bored. Again, you can do something about that.

In most charities, these issues are picked up mainly in six monthly or yearly appraisals. However, if someone will be in post for just 18 months, they may decide between appraisals to go. It could be wiser to also consider the matter at 1:1s.

Making the job emotionally easier for your reports

It’s not always an emotionally easy job. There are opportunities to spot people’s emotional resilience in recruitment and it’s worth including in the person specification. However, you’ll be aware that it’s hard enough to get good candidates. So, why make the job harder than it need be?

I’d personally say you’d be a better manager if you care about everyone who reports to you. Otherwise, they may adapt to the stresses in ways you don’t want: leaving; losing motivation; being less productive; taking less responsibility; becoming process- rather than results-driven.

People won’t feel comfortable with high expectations if they feel unsafe. I’ve tried to predict and be proactive in raising the kind of stresses my reports face, highlighting that experiencing stresses can be natural but there are things that can help. This has often (though not always) created a sense that it’s worth them disclosing problems.

Likewise, people tend to open up when they think it’s safe and useful to do so (though they may not, even then). You have to work to create that sense.

A lot of issues (such as internal politics) are covered elsewhere in this site. However, the following are emotional issues you may well need to address specifically:

Trust fundraisers have to handle a lot of uncertainties and they have more responsibility than power. If you approach your report’s job honestly in that way, communicating with them and judging them accordingly, you can reduce a lot of that stress.

Some consequences, for me, are:

• You need to anticipate and head off any sense of threat people feel if they could miss their target. My own approach is: to say that the benchmark is enough stuff going out, of a good enough quality, based on good enough research and engagement. I say that income targets are an indicator of good work, but there’s too much luck in the process to rely on them. I look for opportunities to praise people’s (genuinely) good work when they’ve been rejected, as well as trying to be delighted by their successes.
• Don’t give arbitrary targets, based only on the need of the organisation not what’s realistic,  if you can avoid them.
• Being a good sounding board for them, being encouraging, affirmative, trusting and helpful where possible. 

Be careful how you treat failure. To quote Amy Edmunson of Harvard University, ‘When I ask executives to consider this spectrum of reasons for failure and then to estimate how many of the failures in their organizations are truly blameworthy, their answers are usually in single digits—perhaps 2% to 5%. But when I ask how many are treated as blameworthy, they say (after a pause or a laugh) 70% to 90%.’ She has a great talk on how to ensure people learn from failure, based on being open that it’s happened.

Trust fundraisers need to feel they can fail and learn from failure. It’s part of the job, like any other. However, managers can respond to the pressure of targets by saying “This is all fine, it will all work” and it puts pressure on people to conceal mistakes and/or start looking to leave when the situation when they can’t handle their responsibilities. If they’re no good at their job and can’t or won’t improve, they’ve got to go. Your service users absolutely need you to make that decision. However, otherwise, it’s a phase they need to go through. You should welcome with them their introduction to the real world, while expecting them to learn to go beyond where they are.

It’s also a fairly isolated role. The person working for you probably spends a lot of time not talking to anyone. The people they’re working with are normally not the people around them. Their contacts in Services often have great people skills, but it’s not always an easy relationship, due to competing priorities and the fact you’re trying to get things from them. It’s easy to feel quite detached.

Things that I think have helped are:

• Making time/opportunities to chat with your report(s) a bit more than you would if you were just “walking the floor”. Once people realize they are self-reliant, they’re less likely to feel alone. However, it’s a hard job initially and then at times later on. At those points it could be worth making a bit more time. The work can seem relentless and some people want to get their head down, but if people are happy to talk in comfortable ways within the team, research shows it builds loyalty and improves retention – useful in a sector where such opportunities aren’t common,
• Encouraging them to socialise within the team, but also with Services if the chances arise. 
• A degree of recognition by senior staff. Being a bit cut off doesn’t mean they should feel that no one cares. 

Once you’re past the learning curve, the role can get tedious, especially for people in entry level roles (who are probably used to lots of learning, but whose jobs can be more repetitive). It’s more an issue in full time than part time roles. If they think there’s nothing in it for them to highlight the issue, your report may hide it from you – why admit a “weakness”?

Things that have helped are:

• Delegating more difficult responsibilities to them (which could mean being prepared to take up bits of their work, at some stage)
• An ongoing culture of learning, with opportunities to implement that learning (see below)
• Visits to projects, including speaking to service users, rather than just Services managers. (There’s a bit of connection between feeling strongly about the cause and not feeling bored.)

Hayley Gullen summarises some arguments against giving a ridiculous target and discusses in length that it would be unfeminist to do so. The blog post is 1 March 2018: https://scepticalfundraiser.com/page/2/

You can feel you’re at the bottom of the tree when you’re in early trust FR jobs. You have to work with managers and senior managers who seem to know just a tonne more than you do, who have better people skills, etc. I think there’s more of a place for bigging up your staff: noting the things they do well, spending time on appraisals, amplifying their messages, attributing their ideas to them with others, making sure people are aware of their successes. 

This should have the usual benefits you’d expect in any job: if they feel trusted, they’re more likely to be open; if you’ve shown loyalty to them, the chances are they will reciprocate; a 2004 study published in Harvard Business Review found that for the highest performing teams, the average ratio of positive comments to negative ones was 5.6:1.

A culture of development

The case for a culture of development is:

• If more junior staff aren’t able to take on more responsibilities, the senior staff may have to shoulder too high a proportion of the team target
• People who are learning (in a way that feels safe for them) are more likely to enjoy the work and see a future in the team

A famous management quote, attributed to Henry Ford amongst others, is ‘“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, is not training them, and having them stay”. My own experience is that development is something we agree with in principle but gets pushed out by:

(a) The demands of the job. Reports don’t think they have time.

(b) Not really thinking deeply about what it means. If the staff member’s development plan is tacked on the end of the annual performance appraisal process, when everyone’s tired and the plan is basically to continue business as usual, their development plan may be a bit ineffective.

Ideas to help are:

• Slightly reducing KPIs, explicitly to accommodate development. If the alternative is someone getting bored / doing inferior work longer-term, development seems a better option
• Delegating harder responsibilities. That needs them to free up time. How can you make that even possible?
  • Raise the money differently. If the team has more skills, does a more cost-effective approach open up?
  • Would using more volunteers enable you to delegate to them?
  • You yourself may need to deliver bits of the job of the person you manage. The chances are they won’t stay forever, so if you won’t touch any of their work in the short term, you’re going to end up doing their job while their post is vacant! You’re just extending the stay of a talented staff member (rather than having to recruit, with the consequent drop in income).
  • Follow a slightly riskier strategy. Actually, you’re BALANCING risks – the alternative is that your report may get bored and leave, with the associated drop in team performance! If you do that explicitly – that you want to explore the future potential for the team of doing more of X, with learning if it doesn’t work out, and you’ll manage the risk as follows – you might carry your manager with you. 
• Occasional training during the year. It should be clear from this website that there are a LOT of things that are partly the responsibility of your team. Have they been trained in them? If they time the training to fit with upcoming projects and have to feed back the key ideas they’ve learnt, they’ll digest the material better
• Two fundraising trainers who have genuinely different, challenging ideas who will undoubtedly develop your team’s thinking (whether you agree with all their ideas) are:
  • Bill Bruty https://www.fundraisingtraining.co.uk/
  • Rob Woods https://www.brightspotfundraising.co.uk/ 
• Listening to and discussing podcasts in team meetings (looking for agreed changes, so it’s relevant)
• I have two dozen different PowerPoints for training, if you want to deliver something specific to your team.

Feedback on proposals

Feedback on proposals is important and helpful. However, it does create another time pressure and when you feel you’re struggling a bit, it’s easy for feedback to feel like another slight criticism. If this is an issue, things I think can help are:

• Getting them to talk through how they approached the application (most likely, you’ll see strengths and concerns they had, which you’d have missed)
• Mentioning when the application was already good enough to go out, as was – and that almost anyone can improve any application, the following are just some ideas… 
• Highlighting good points – appreciating what they’re doing, pointing out strengths to build on
• Looking for genuine learning points
• Otherwise, only changing what really needs changing
• Research has found that people feel better about their work after negative feedback given in an emotionally positive way than they do after positive feedback given in an emotionally negative way. So, working hard at being warm, positive, friendly and encouraging is  Targets

Targets

If people can set their own targets and KPIs, it’s more motivating, they have more ownership – and once you’ve got past the “How can we know?” stage, they tend to set more stretching targets. However, it’s worth doing your own analysis, mainly so they don’t set themselves up to fail.

With KPIs, it’s easy to “game the system” in trust fundraising. So, even if you don’t look at everything going out, it’s possibly worth seeing a selection and feeding back on it. You have final responsibility for quality.

Briefly moving away from very trust-specific information: It’s also worth remembering that the major guru of Management by Objectives, Peter Drucker, didn’t define objectives purely in terms of income, or productivity. He thought you could set objectives in the areas like: market standing; innovation; and attitude.

I personally think there’s a bit too much emphasis on targets at the end of the year and not enough on the mid-year point. If you look at other disciplines – sales, for example – targets are often looked at quarterly. My own tendency, and some other trust fundraisers I’ve seen, drift a little during the summer, get very serious later in the year and at some point get a little freaked about the targets. That’s because they’re treated too much like an end of year exam, rather than more continuous assessment. You can’t realistically work towards quarterly targets, but you can a bit with six monthly ones. Hence, the suggested change in focus.

Changing styles of management for different roles

With a post working with smaller trusts, management by KPIs and quality, then supporting them to trouble shoot and develop where there are issues, will get you quite a long way, in that productivity, efficiency and quality are important components.

However, at the other end of the scale, with the biggest applications for the newest work in the most flexible organisations, the post-holder is really working in a “Three I” role (information, ideas and intelligence) in a “task culture” (to use terminology from management guru Charles Handy). In that context, management in terms of providing support and development but being flexible about objectives, is key. Also, how to support someone to do a more task-centred job in a department and organisation which might be more about very clear divisions of roles.

Points to consider in check-ins

Although the year’s target is, in a sense, the rationale for the post, challenging but achievable shorter-term goals are much more motivating (Martin, Goldstein and Cialdini, The Big Small, 2015).

As stated in the “work with Services” section, people tend to under-estimate the likelihood that someone they approach for assistance will help (Flynn, F.J. & Lake, V.K.B. (2008). If you need help, just ask: underestimating compliance with direct requests for help. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(1), 128-143. The researchers believed that the reason is that people tend to focus on the cost of the task but under-estimate the “social costs” (embarrassment, awkwardness, etc) of saying “no”). Yes, you do need to be the one person in the charity who really “gets” the problems your reports have, but it’s worth probing a little and trying to build a bit more culture of support from Services and Finance.

Division of responsibilities

In small teams, there’s potential for jealousy/resentment. For that reason: 

• I’ve tried to look for clear divisions between responsibilities (whilst emphasising that it’s the team target that really matters) with obvious “ownership” based on clearly justifiable reasons. For example: you can divide trusts by total income, for example. If you need to split trusts of a similar size, you can divide them alphabetically.
• I’ve also tried to encourage generosity and support within the team, for example more senior staff member advising/mentoring more junior ones (which in turn gives senior staff something management-related for their CV). If everyone’s doing a bit more than you’d think they need to, the chances are there won’t be as much tension as if they’re looking at whether everyone is pulling their weight at the bare minimum.
• Do the maths when you divide up work, as Bodnar and Lane argue in Ready, Shoot, Aim. The Pareto principle (sometimes called the 80:20 rule) is important. The chances are that there’s someone with the best skills, probably you. When you delegate that the work, there are two sides to that:
  1. Is the person who’s going to really deliver getting the work?
  2. Are they being encumbered by other tasks that stop them delivering?

A moral/purpose-driven approach to management

One of the really weird things I’ve found about fundraising is that people never talk about the fact we’re trying to do good in the world. There’s often a pretty direct connection you can make between a trust fundraiser’s job and more people in need being better off. However, I’ve only once been praised in that way.

There’s a lot of management theory these days about being purpose driven (e.g., the work of Simon Sinek). Doing your job to make the world a better place is potentially motivating, makes the work fulfilling and can give you more clarity. However, in our sector we talk a LOT more about targets than about people.

At the same time, we live in a slightly guilt-driven society and people need to avoid burnout and be able make mistakes without worrying they’ve screwed up the lives of vulnerable people forever! Otherwise, they won’t grow and nor will they grow your charity. So, I think there’s a time to say, “Well done, homeless people are SO much better off for having you here” and a time to be saying: “If you don’t forget all that, you’ll go mad. It’s just a job.”

Preparing people for their career

In most trusts roles, the people you manage will have to fend for themselves: using what works for them, feeling confident, resilient and self-reliant, problem solving, being independently driven. While they’re with you, they’ll also be easier to manage, leaving you the time to try and develop them.

Things I have found personally to help are:

• Setting clear strategic goals, with standards they can work to as independently as possible
• Taking more of a coaching approach, rather than telling them what to do
• Where possible, expecting people to be accountable, rather than controlled
• Focusing management on: 
  • Spotting things they don’t know yet
  • Asking good questions that they could answer
  • Be actively looking for their strengths as well as the things they do right and praise them for those. Praising them more than you yourself have been praised as a report. I suspect the reason many managers don’t offer a stream of enthusiasm and encouragement is that they aren’t actively looking for things reports are doing well. However, if you get them to deal with more of their own problems, they’ll not only develop solutions that work for them. They’ll leave you free to catch them doing well.
• Encouraging them to argue back. I say I’m more interested in us doing the right thing than that I’m seen to be right, myself
• Where possible, being clear with people that unless I say otherwise, my points are just advice, it’s up to them to choose the way that works best for them. (How do you still retain authority? If you are decisive, knowledgeable, assertive when you need to be, and clear that the buck stops with you, so you need to reserve the right of final say, it’s been fine.)
• (When it’s right for them) nudging them to be more independent of you. 
• Trying to get them to celebrate their successes – consistent good work, big grants, meeting targets. This is a well-established practice in football (where people are highly goal-orientated). It encourages enthusiasm and goal focus without people then wanting to leave in case they fail. Things that seem to have worked:
  • (Non-alcoholic) sparkling wine or cake at team meetings, by way of a celebration
  • Sending congratulations cards
  • Promoting their success around the charity
  • Suggesting the person goes out and has a celebratory meal with friends. (I’m clear with them it’s not just something they deserve – it helps make them target-driven)
  • I’ve been at charities where we’ve all gone out to celebrate a big grant
  • Sometimes fundraising teams as a whole do this with regard to the team as whole. However, it’s more impactful if you get down to the level of the individual’s achievements, too
• Leaving some expectations until you get to know people and then pushing back a little when they should be capable of more
• Visibly trusting them to find their own way. That means: being open minded about the best way to get results – and both communicating and showing trust in them to a way that works for them. As with any job, there are different approaches that work (as well as ones that don’t) and if you try and corral someone who’s capable of doing the job their way into your way, they may not be capable of delivering

You’ll need to balance this against the times when things need to be done as a team – e.g., what you share, or where services may reasonably expect a common approach from your team. However, you’ll usually get more from your reports and set them up better for the future if you let them be the best they personally can be. 

Using consultants

Occasionally you’ll want to use freelancers / consultants to help with the work. The following are some considerations:

• You may be able to get a consultant who’ll work with you for, say, 20 days at £250 a day as of 2022. You can go lower (I’ve had people starting out as consultant tender to me for work in 2022 for £150 a day) and you may end up considering experienced freelancers who’ll charge you more. You can advertise on the Facebook, LinkedIn and CIoF io/Yahoo trusts groups and expect some responses. However, it’s hit and miss. Harris Hill and possibly other recruitment agencies will charge an introduction fee if you can’t recruit directly. 
• If you’re asking someone to fit in a few days, their rate can go up.
• You’d pay a lot more to use a firm of consultants – which perhaps gives you a few more guarantees around delivery. In 2022, I’ve seen day rates of £400-£600+ with VAT (VAT’s not something you’d normally pay with an individual freelance) for short pieces of work.
• Consultants are of variable standards. Many seem to understand the work well, but I’ve seen people drifting along as a consultant who weren’t capable of holding down a staff job. A former manager who was very involved with the Institute of Fundraising London Region said that there seemed to be ethical issues with some. So, you need to look at their work and get references. If you use consultants from the Association of Fundraising Consultants you’ll get a more reliable standard, but pay a lot more than if you contract a freelancer. I’ve wondered whether it would work to look down the staff lists of associates at AFC-affiliated firms and approach them directly. You’d probably weed out some poor consultants, but you’d maybe still want to be paying a decent level to ensure they didn’t prioritise their other work.
• Consultants charge a lot more than staff (?£350 a day?). That’s not normally because they’re evil, greedy people, but because (a) there’s got to be something in it to accept less secure situations and (b) you’ll have quiet periods and get let down by some of your clients, who’ll suddenly shift the dates they want you in, and you have to price in unpaid days.
• Consultants will get up to speed quicker than staff, because that’s part of their skillset. However, they aren’t superhuman. So they’ll thrive better doing cold applications in one area than writing reports across several, just because there’s less to learn.
• One of the biggest challenges as a freelance is fitting the work together. Your work can get squeezed out as they try and satisfy their different customers. So, it’s easier to get someone to block out a few months and sit in the corner of your office than to get them to do piecemeal work to a deadline. I’ve also struggled a bit with a consultant who was doing limited amounts of ongoing work part time – which is a concern, because you likely don;t have the budget to get someone in full time for a period.
• One of the challenges of a trust fundraiser’s job is trying to identify the number of days a piece of work will take. You might struggle to do that yourself, but whereas for you it averages out more over a year, it’s more of an issue with small contracts and a consultant who doesn’t know anyone or anything at the charity. That means that you need to manage things carefully, so they don’t burn down the contract without you knowing how far they’ve got. You risk running low on days and they haven’t delivered. This is worsened by the fact that consultants can be pretty independent. Setting milestones during the contract delivery and regular check-ins can help keep you in control. 
• However, if they’re blocking out a month, that can raise tax issues, which you’ll need to discuss with your Finance team.