What drives fundraisers? Making a difference? Yes! Feeling useful in society? Yes! Being a good citizen? Perhaps! There are many reasons why people become involved with charities and fundraising. The most common answer I’ve found is that people want to make a difference.
There are other pluses for working in the nonprofit sector. Work usually has great variety, often you shoulder responsibility earlier in your career than you would in the corporate sector. You have a chance to mix with the most interesting people, including corporate people.
So if such work is important, why isn’t there a focus – somewhere – on qualifications for working in charitable organisations? and for fundraising?
I think it’s coming – a bit like marketing qualifications came upon the scene some while back. Now of course if you are in marketing you expect to have a degree, if not a masters or doctorate. Fundraising isn’t marketing, it’s fundraising so it needs courses dedicated to providing the varied skills necessary for the role.
Are there universities out there prepared to look at undergraduate courses that will provide for some of the 600,000 people working in the sector?
Filed under: charities, education, fundraising, nonprofit, training | Tagged: degree, fundraisers, marketing, nonprofit, professional development, qualifications, universtity
Sue-Anne makes a good point and the mark of most professions is that their exists a discipline devoted to the study of the evidence base for the particular profession. It is difficult in today’s tertiary education scene to create the space amongst competing professions, but QUT has since 1990 provided university courses for the fundraising profession. Many professional associations devote significant resources to cultivating university administrations and researchers in order to preserve their course positions and influence students to consider entering into such courses which provide the future members of their profession. This appears to be intensifying of late with the looming crisis of baby boomer retirements and general shortage of labour.
In the case of QUT, we can only thank FIA for the support it has shown us in assisting with establishing courses, promoting them with potential students, recommending guest lecturers and advocacy to our university administration.
I think that education for fundraisers is essential. While at the recent FIA conf. in Perth I had a conversation with some one that was new to the industry and this “name less person” thought that anyone could become a fundraiser and that it was so easy qualifications were not necessary!
If this is the general opinion out there then are we all just car salesmen and women!
I believe that there needs to be qualifications for our industry to become more professional and for the public to have faith that we can and will do the job asked of us in a professional manner.
I can tell that this is not the first time at all that you write about this topic. Why have you decided to write about it again?