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In a lousy economy the last job in the world one might want to have is to be Director of Development for a nonprofit organization.

There are only two routes to go for a development officer, and both of them are playing against a stacked deck. Beating the last red cent out of board members in tough times only works until all the last of the red cents are coughed up and the victims are pronounced dead. The other method is to attract new support from citizens and corporations. For this, one needs to put on armor and helmet,  cement the smile, and visit Federal, State, County and local city agencies and  foundations in hopes of convincing them that your cause is just, certainly more just than as portrayed by the last organization’s representative who was just leaving as you walked in the door. In tough times, which these definitely are, the tendency for development officers is to be awash in a blaze of ‘no’.

Raising funds for a nonprofit these days is akin to a heavyweight fight. One enters the ring knowing that the bets have all been placed on your losing. Only the most intrepid and stalwart can stand in the ring long enough to weather fifteen rounds of pummeling. After the bruising and beseeching, the bell rings and the answer is usually still a resounding ‘no’.

This kind of approach is a bare half step up from door-to-door solicitation, the difference being that while the salesman is selling a Hoover, the development director is selling one or another kind of compassion. Whether the cause benefits the arts, a social service, a medical program, the environment, or literacy the underprivileged, compassion is thrown into a trunk when the corporate ink bleeds red.

You might be thinking I left off the obvious solution, that of writing grants. If the development director is charged with writing grants (usually grant writers are hired from outside on a commission-only basis), his or her job depends on serving up the product (crass, I know) in a way that would make hucksters on Madison Avenue blush. The grant success rate for the aggregate of nonprofits is less than 5% these days, where it used to be slightly over 10. Folks have other more important ways to hoard or spend their cash, it seems.

The turnover rate for development officers, which normally hovers around 60% every two years, has skyrocketed to 80% per year. They are fired or they quit. An unsuccessful or fraught DoD waits a few months licking the wounds before donning the armor again to approach another nonprofit.

The most common dilemma facing DoD’s these days is the possible threat of showing up mistakenly to interview for a job from which they were fired a few years ago.

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