When I Discovered I Am a Legit Fundraiser

Usually when I tell people I “work in philanthropy” the conversation gravitates toward my experiences working on the giving side, for organizations like The Pew Charitable Trusts, Russell Sage Foundation, Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation and Philanthropy New York, along with my consulting work for organizations like The New York Community Trust, J.M. Kaplan Fund and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. But even considering my countless experiences grantwriting and raising funds for the nonprofits I’ve worked for over the years, I never considered myself a “fundraiser” until recently.

Successful fundraising has been a constant in my 30 years in philanthropy. After getting my feet wet at the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation, I spent my graduate school years working for the Center for Social Policy and Community Development, where I was responsible for developing several successful proposals for federal grants and wrote many reports to existing funders updating them on our evaluation projects. When I went to TCC Group, in addition to my project management work, the senior leaders of the firm consistently brought in my writing and strategic planning skills for developing proposals for new work with corporate and private foundations.

After my tenure at The Pew Charitable Trusts, I spent almost a decade in grant-funded organizations, the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation and Public Agenda, which did not have fundraising staff and relied on me to lead many successful proposal development efforts, as well as to continuously nurture funder relationships.  

I started to really see my strength as a fundraiser when Philanthropy New York started its first ever capital campaign in 2011 and I helped our president think more broadly about our capital needs beyond physical space to endowing operational needs. I then developed a wide range of funder outreach materials and electronic communications that resulted in raising twice the amount the organization originally considered as its target. Even as I started serving on the Stonewall Community Foundation board and worked in a very hands-on capacity on fundraising committees at a time when it did not have any dedicated fundraising staff, I still didn’t consider myself a “fundraiser.”

That started to change when I became one of the founding board members of Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. In 2016, it was just an idea, but when we got our 501(c)(3) and launched in November 2018 we were thrilled that we raised $11K from friends and colleagues. After a year and a half of steady development, growth and a little bit of self-generated media attention, we started 2020 with a modest goal of raising $100K. But with the pandemic’s attention on restaurant workers, our well-timed positioning and 80-hour weeks of work on fundraising (while still consulting to my paying clients), RWCF raised $8 million in 2020 from an enviably diverse range of funding sources. We built an incredibly healthy organization with a CRM system that tracked all donors and could support our growing donor prospecting operations. Unlike many of the legacy-foundation reliant organizations I had worked for previously, RWCF attracted a much broader mix of small donors, family foundations, corporate dollars, and a few sizable institutional funders. As Fundraising Chair for RWCF – which now has a steady $2 million annual budget and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year – I began to feel like I actually could describe myself as a thoroughly knowledgeable and successful fundraiser. 

But I still didn’t position myself professionally as a fundraiser until recently. I was still consulting to mostly to foundations. For example, I was the lead consultant New York Community Trust’s New York State Census Equity Fund, for which one of my many roles was to develop proposals to bring in new supporters of the collaborative fund. We started out aiming to raise $2 million and we ultimately raised a little over $4 million, and a big part of that was the challenging effort to convince funders to support redistricting efforts in the later stages of the initiative.

Around this time I was also working as the Editorial Director for Inside Philanthropy’s State of American Philanthropy series of in-depth white papers aimed at fundraisers. I spent 2.5 years immersed in research on the funding environment for nearly 40 different programmatic topics, from “Giving for Early Childhood Education” to “Giving for Climate Change.”

It wasn’t until I was recruited by folks at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help advise their health equity grantees on fundraising from institutional sources that I was convinced how much I really knew about the daily ins-and-outs of the fundraiser’s job. I was brought in especially to advise on how to organize effective funder briefings, a specialty of mine. But as they tapped into my wide range of experiences in fundraising, I was asked by the project leaders to present on such topics as prospecting, fundraising system development, funder relationship management and many other topics. I also started working one-on-one with RWJF health equity grantees on a variety of new fundraising strategies.

It was when the fundraising consultants leading the RWJF initiative and fundraising staff of these health equity grantees validated my knowledge and experience in day-to-day fundraising procedures that I finally said: I am a fundraiser.

Now, I am doing more fundraising work and loving it. I am excited about helping more organizations with the essential work of connecting to potential supporters to resource their missions. Now, when I say “I work in philanthropy,” I always add, “concentrating on communications, fundraising and giving strategies.”