Old Fundraiser, Any New Tricks?
Would you rather hire a 20 something fundraiser or 50 something to give you fundraising advice?
I’d wager damn near every reader instinctively leans to the older guided by the worldview that more days on this Earth likely provides more accumulated knowledge.
Now maybe your reaction was, well it depends. And I’d hazard a guess the contingency was tied to more assumptions – e.g., if I want to attract younger donors, I should get counsel from a younger fundraiser or if I want to use the Tik-Gram or Tok-Face app I should consult a younger fundraiser.
I’d argue the question is irrelevant, it’s like asking if I’d rather hire a short or tall fundraiser.
I want expertise and there are two types, which I’ll dub diagnostic and procedural because I’ve got a medical proof point.
Imagine you’ve been admitted to the hospital and you’re meeting the physician. Would you rather they be in their 50s with a good amount of gray hair, or in their 30s, just a few years out of residency?
To objectively answer researchers analyzed 737,000 non-elective hospitalizations across 19,000 different hospitalists. They grouped the doctors by four different age cohorts. Older doctors obviously had more years of experience post residency; doctors under 40 had 4.9 post-residency experience vs. 29 years for doctors over 60.
But did age and experience matter to outcomes? Yes, but the man bit the dog.
The researchers compared 30-day mortality rates and found that as doctors got older, their patients had higher mortality rates; under-40 doctors was 10.8% and 12.1% in the over-60 group.
The reason? The younger doctors were more up to date on the latest research and medical advances and the older docs were more stuck in their outdated, diagnostic ruts seeing the same question and offering the same answer.
But, when the researchers controlled for this, the age effect went away. If you want answers on the two most fundamental questions in fundraising, why do people give and is it the same answer for everybody, then your best served finding someone who’s expert at understanding human behavior and stays on top of the latest research and thinking.
If your “experts” answer to those questions is the same today as it was 1, 5, 10…20 years ago, your donor mortality rates will go up. This is diagnostic expertise.
Where does accumulated experience come in handy? Procedural expertise. The same researchers found that doctor age had a positive effect on outcomes in the operating room. Why? If you’ve done 6,731 heart bypass procedures you’ve likely seen the full array of issues that can flummox a more junior surgeon.
Want strategy and different thinking? Find an expert who hasn’t given the same answer to the same questions for the last X years, decades… Want to know the best way to integrate your CRM with plugin Y? Hire an expert whose done it several dozen times.
Kevin
5 responses to “Old Fundraiser, Any New Tricks?”
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Ageism exists in most every search these days. There are resume courses on how to ‘hide’ your age for any search. Otherwise you don’t even get in the door for an interview.
Try being the oldest staffer on a team. It isn’t fun and often what you know is ignored anyway.
It certainly does and am the oldest person in my company, both of them… But to be fair, age bias cuts both ways and like most of life, the flaws of bundling people into simple, what you see on the outside buckets is wildly limiting as the differences within those groups (e.g., generational groupings) dwarf the between group differences. People are individuals first, groups second.
Interesting thoughts about age. You’re right that age doesn’t matter when it comes to strategy and new ideas. However, understanding the difference between strategy and tactics does. Unfortunately, too many people — both young and old — don’t understand the difference.
That is certainly true in my experience Mark, all tactic, no strategy and that failing is pretty evenly distributed to most humans.
When the hiring folks skew to younger ages, (which is often the case in the non profit industry) that experience factor (of age) seems to take a back seat in selection. It’s no weighed as much because often it costs more. Younger folks work for less, which gives them an advantage in this climate. Plus many young folks who are doing the hiring sincerely don’t want to work with someone old enough to be their parent. I’ve heard some actually say that.