The Profession of Asking

A vice chancellor asked me a simple question last year. He had read about endowments and wanted to begin. “Whom should I hire?" he asked. I didn't have a clear answer for him. I couldn't point to a course. No register of trained people existed—no salary benchmark to work from. I told him the truth. He would have to find someone capable and teach them himself.

That conversation is the subject of this piece, the third in a series. The first argued that the money has arrived. The second argued that we lack the machinery to hold it. Neither asked a harder question. Who will operate the machinery?

The arithmetic of absence

India has around 1,289 universities and more than 48,000 colleges. Suppose each needed just one trained fundraiser. That would be close to fifty thousand people. We do not have five hundred. I have spent twenty-eight years in this work. I could probably name most of the serious practitioners in the country. That should alarm us more than any funding gap.

This is not a shortage of talent. It is the absence of a pathway in. A capable graduate today cannot choose this career because it does not visibly exist. No degree names it. There is no ladder to climb. No salary they can quote to a parent.

What a profession actually looks like. Elsewhere, this work has all the trappings of a profession. Consider Indiana University. Its Centre on Philanthropy opened in 1987. It created the world’s first degrees in philanthropic studies: a bachelor’s, a master’s and a doctorate. In 2012, it became the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. It remains the only school devoted solely to philanthropy. Inside it sits The Fund Raising School, founded in 1974. Last May, it awarded its first professional doctorates in philanthropic leadership.

Then consider the credential. CFRE stands for Certified Fund Raising Executive. An independent body administers it. That body is accredited under the same regime as nursing and financial planning. A candidate needs about five years of paid practice. She must document what she raised. She must complete continuing education. She must sign an ethics agreement. Then she sits for a written examination.

Then consider the associations. The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) was founded in 1960. It has more than 24,000 members and over 240 chapters worldwide. Every member signs an enforceable code of ethical standards. AFP also helped create the Donor Bill of Rights. For education, there is CASE. More than 3,600 institutions belong to it.

Now consider India. We have no school of philanthropy. We don't have a degree in this subject. We have no Indian certification. We have no national body with an enforceable code. A young Indian drawn to this work must look abroad. Most of them, quite reasonably, choose to do something else instead.

None of that furniture is glamorous. All of it is plumbing. Its effect is simple. A young person can see the job, train for it, and grow within it. They can move between institutions without leaving the field. They can be judged against a standard. Thirty years later, they are still doing the same work, and doing it very well.

A profession is not a job title. It is a path a twenty-five-year-old can envision to the far end.

What we do instead. In most Indian institutions, fundraising is an additional charge. It goes to a professor already with a teaching load. It goes to a registrar with a full desk. Sometimes it goes to a willing alum who volunteers. The person changes every two or three years. Nobody objects, because nobody thinks of it as a post.

Consider what this does to a donor. She gives once and is warmly thanked. Two years later, someone new writes to her. They do not know she gave. They do not know why she gave. They ask again, from the beginning, as a stranger. She is polite. She does not give again.

The best-measured sector in the world retains only about 19 per cent of first-time donors. It does so with full-time staff and long memories. We are attempting the same task with a rotating cast and no records. The wonder is not that our retention is poor. The wonder is that anyone gives twice at all.

The work is harder here, not easier. We should be honest about what we are asking of these people. An Indian fundraiser often starts with no donor database. She has no gift history to review. She must learn foreign contribution compliance. She must understand what CSR can and cannot fund. She has few local precedents to point a sceptical donor to.

And she must do something no Western counterpart does. She must explain her job before she can do it. She must persuade her director that this is a discipline. She must persuade a donor that she is not begging. She must persuade her colleagues that she is not merely arranging reunions. That is a great deal of persuasion before a single ask.

What the job actually involves. Most people picture a fundraiser writing letters. That is only a small part of it. The real work is in the portfolio. A good officer manages perhaps 150 relationships. Each one is at a particular stage. Some people are still being identified. Some are being cultivated slowly. A few are ready to be asked. Others are being thanked and reported to.

The officer deliberately moves people between those stages. It happens over years, not weeks. Abroad, this is called moves management. The phrase is ugly. The discipline behind it is sound. Almost nothing about it is improvised.

A single week of this work looks unremarkable. Four conversations. Two research notes. Six calls of thanks. One visit to a city. Nothing seems to have happened. The compounding is invisible until year three.

Where to find your first hire. Institutions usually look in the wrong place. They look to marketing, public relations, or sales. Those skills are adjacent but not the same. Marketing speaks to crowds. Fundraising speaks to one person at a time. Sales closes this quarter. Fundraising closes in five years.

The better hunting grounds are quieter. First, look at your own alum relations desk. Look at teachers who are loved and remember names. Look at journalists, who ask hard questions politely for a living. Look at the development sector. Those people have learned to raise money without any glamour.

Then look for three qualities above all. Patience, because nothing here returns quickly. Memory, because donors notice when you remember them. And a genuine liking for people, which you cannot train in anyone.

One hire is not a programme. But one hire can command one. The cheapest capacity available to any Indian institution is its own alums. A class ambassador writing to forty batchmates will outperform any circular. A reunion chair who calls personally will raise more than a brochure. These volunteers cost nothing. They only need a professional to organise them. Most institutions miss that multiplier.

The three-year clock. We should be honest about the economics. A new fundraising office rarely pays for itself in the first year, and it may not in the second either.

Year one is about data. Who are our alums? Where do they live now? What did they study? Who has given to us before, and for what? Most institutions cannot answer these questions today. Answering them takes a year of quiet work.

Year three is when money begins to arrive at scale. It keeps arriving because a base finally exists. Mature programmes abroad raise several rupees for every rupee they spend. New ones do not, and cannot.

An institution that judges its fundraiser on first-year totals will close the office just before it starts working.

I have seen that happen more than once. The experiment is declared a failure at exactly the wrong moment, after which the institution concludes that fundraising does not work in India.

The leader is the chief fundraiser. One more point, and it's a bit uncomfortable. In every institution that raises money well, the head raises it. The president. The vice chancellor. The director. They don't delegate the biggest asks. They make them personally.

A major donor is not giving to an office. She is giving to an institution. She wants to look its leader in the eye first. A fundraiser can arrange that meeting carefully. No substitute can replace it.

This is where our model most often breaks down. Fundraising is treated as a downward-delegated function. As a result, the largest gifts don't arrive, and the fundraiser gets blamed.

Her real job is to make the leader effective. Research the prospect thoroughly, write the brief, arrange the room, and follow up without fail. If the leader won't enter that room, an appointment won't resolve it.

Five things that would build the profession: Make it a post, not a duty. One named person, one job description, and a three-year mandate. Fundraising rewards continuity above almost everything else. Two years is not long enough to secure a second gift.

Pay for the role, not the grade. A person who earns twenty crore should not be paid on a clerical scale. This makes many institutions uncomfortable, and I understand why. But we already accept that a good surgeon costs more than a good clerk. The logic remains the same.

Train through apprenticeship, not workshops. A two-day workshop teaches vocabulary. It cannot teach judgement. Judgement comes from sitting in twenty real conversations with somebody who has had two thousand. Every experienced fundraiser in this country should carry one apprentice. I would make that a condition of our standing.

Build a curriculum and get it recognised. A one-year diploma in institutional advancement would permanently change the supply side. It needs modules on donor psychology, compliance, data, stewardship and endowment governance. None of that is exotic. It needs documentation and accreditation.

And build the professional body properly. Standards, an ethical code, a public register, and published salary bands. I spent thirteen years building an association for fundraisers in India. It taught me something I did not expect. People joined for the network. They stayed for the identity. Once this work becomes an identity, the other problems start to solve themselves.

Build the platform; don't just hire from it. Here is my real argument. Our premier institutions are all hunting for fundraisers now. They will compete for the same few hundred people. Salaries will rise sharply. No new people will enter the field. That is not a market. That is a bidding war over a shortage.

The alternative is to make more people. And the institutions best placed to do that are the ones that need them most. An IIT or an IIM already has everything required. A campus. A faculty apparatus. A brand that carries weight. An alum base to practise on. And a direct interest in the graduates.

Indiana did not wait for the profession to exist. It created the field, then taught it. That required a planning grant and a few convinced people. It was not expensive. It was simply early.

So this is my ask. Alongside the endowment, build a school. Begin with a one-year diploma in institutional advancement. Add an Indian certification backed by a rigorous examination. Add an association with a public register and an enforceable code. Then open it to fundraisers from any institution, not only your own.

India will need tens of thousands of these people this century. We cannot recruit our way there. We will have to educate our way there.

This is overdue. Our best institutions have spent a decade learning to raise funds. The next decade should be spent teaching others how.

Why this is the bottleneck: Everything in my first two articles depends on people. A spending rule needs someone who understands why it matters. We need a stewardship calendar with an owner who will still be there next year. A legacy conversation needs someone trained to raise it without awkwardness. A matched funding scheme would need thousands of institutions, each with someone capable of applying.

Money is arriving on its own. A circular can amend the rules. People take a decade. This is the slowest item on the list, so it should be started first.

The last word: That vice chancellor did eventually appoint someone. She was a young lecturer interested in alum work. She has raised a modest amount and learned a great deal. She is now the most experienced fundraiser the university has ever had. That is a good story. It is also an indictment. One person, three years old, represents her whole profession at that institution. India has never had a giving problem. I have written this twice, and I stand by it. We are not short on generosity. We are short on people who ask.

Third in a series. Sources: All India Survey on Higher Education, latest release, for institutional counts; Fundraising Effectiveness Project reports, 2025, for donor retention; Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy history and programme pages; CFRE International eligibility criteria; Association of Fundraising Professionals fact sheet and Code of Ethical Standards; Council for Advancement and Support of Education membership data.