Would you rather take fundraising advice from a 28 yr old or 58?

The older fundraiser probably gets the instinctive nod as 30 years in fundraising must have produced more knowledge than 8 yrs.

But then come the qualifications like hiring the younger fundraiser to attract younger donors or operate whatever social platform appeared during breakfast.

I’d argue using age as proxy for expertise is roughly akin to using height as a proxy for intelligence and two studies in the medical field reinforce this.

In the first, researchers examined 736,537 hospital admissions across 18,854 hospitalists and found that adjusted 30-day mortality rose with physician age: 10.8% for doctors under 40 and 12.1% for doctors 60 and older.

But if you control for the volume of patients treated, the age and mortality relationship disappears. It wasn’t age, it was exposure to patients that created a forcing mechanism of maintaining clinical knowledge and skill.   In short, staying active and by extension, on top of things, matters more than accumulating birthdays.

A second study examined 892,187 patients undergoing one of 20 major emergency operations, performed by 45,826 surgeons. Here the pattern reversed. Adjusted mortality declined as surgeons got older.  The years of experience pushed these docs further out on the long learning curve as they accumulated technical skill and judgment that’s difficult to acquire any other way.

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein reached much the same conclusion in their work on expert intuition. Genuine expertise develops when the environment contains patterns that can actually be learned and the practitioner receives enough reliable feedback to learn them. Confidence is no substitute. Someone can feel like an expert after years of receiving feedback that was delayed, incomplete or simply wrong.

Fundraising provides a factory for producing exactly that kind of false confidence. A fundraiser sends an appeal and money arrives. The appeal receives credit. Nobody knows how much of the money would have arrived anyway, how much was pulled forward from the next appeal, how much shifted from another channel or how many donors were irritated into silence six months later.

Do that for twenty years and you may have twenty years of expertise. You may also have one year of mistaken attribution repeated twenty times.

Procedural work often provides much cleaner feedback. If someone has integrated the same CRM with the same platform thirty times, they have probably encountered most of the ways it can catch fire and so those repetitions have value.

Strategic claims deserve a different standard. Someone claiming to know why people give, whether another appeal creates incremental revenue or why a message worked needs causal evidence, a defensible theory of human behavior and a habit of updating both.

The best question for a prospective adviser may be: What did you believe five years ago that evidence forced you to abandon?

If the answer is nothing, you may be looking at tenure wearing an expertise hat.

• Hire for the learning record, not the birth year.
• For execution, count relevant repetitions.
• For strategy, examine the quality of the evidence and the person’s willingness to be corrected by it.

Fundraising’s casualties rarely appear in a 30-day mortality table. They arrive later as shrinking lists, weaker response and experts prescribing another appeal for the condition their previous appeals helped create.

Kevin