Personality Tests Tell Different Story

They Can Sell but Can They Do Fundraising?

by Paul M. Connolly, Ph.D.

Who is likely to succeed as a nonprofit fundraiser? The question came up when I met David Edell, an associate who had spent 13 years in fundraising and 16 years as a nonprofit search consultant with DRG Inc. in New York City. David had seen firsthand the difficulty nonprofits have in recruiting talented fundraisers. Fundraising seems on the surface like a job that should parallel commercial sales jobs. But in David’s extensive experience, skilled commercial salespeople don’t always make the transition successfully.

I chose the job personality tests published by Hogan Assessment Systems as the testing vehicles for our investigation. The Hogan instruments have sound theoretical premises, rigorous mathematical foundations, and don’t discriminate on age, race, or gender.

We approached the question much the same as we would have for any employer who wanted to validate the use of a pre-employment test. The difference was that we were validating a set of characteristics for a common job title within a business sector. We recruited twelve Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), all vice presidents of development, from major nonprofit organizations to create the study.

Our SMEs quickly informed us we needed to define two fundraising jobs in our investigation: Fundraising Generalist and Major Gifts Professionals. Different personality characteristics and competencies, they felt, may be required to succeed in each of these jobs.

Fundraiser Generalists are responsible for working with volunteers and professionals to conduct special events to raise support from individual supporters and constituent groups. 

Major Gift Professionals handle all aspects of marketing, management and administration of activities associated with major donor development.

We used the Hogan Job Environment Tool (JET) to evaluate the factors that would make a difference in successful performance of these two jobs. The JET has been shown in extensive research by the Hogan organizaiton to provide the link between job requirements and the individuals who best fit with a job.

Personality Characteristics

Current thinking in personality assessment says that most personality characteristics can be described in terms of five dimensions, referred to in the testing industry as “the Big Five" personality factors:

• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Emotional Stability
• Openness

These are measured on the Hogan instruments in seven scales. (Contact Performance Programs for the scales.) Results showed that the most important personality characteristics for both Fundraiser Generalist and Major Gifts Professional candidates are high social interaction, social sensitivity, goal achievement, stress tolerance, and vision.  The personality profiles for both jobs are similar, although scale scores on Adjustment, Ambition, Sociability, and Creative Problem Solving are slightly lower for Fundraiser Generalists than for Major Gifts Professionals. Major Gift professionals in our study score somewhat higher on Adjustment, Ambition, and Sociability.

For comparison purposes, we looked at a sample of salespeople in three commercial organizations. The corresponding scales for commercial salespeople are quite different. Successful commercial sales people have high ambition, self-confidence, and sociability. They have average to high scores for creative problem solving. They have average to low scores for conformity and conscientiousness. They are likely to be highly flexible in their approach to problem-solving.

Core Competencies

A competency is knowledge, skill, or ability necessary to accomplish a job requirement. We asked the SMEs to rate 62 competencies for both job titles and learned that the top 15 competencies desirable in a Fundraising Generalist differed from those needed by Major Gift Professionals. Table 1 shows the top five competencies for the two fundraising specialties.

Table 1

Fundraising Generalist	Major Gifts Professional
1. Interpersonal Skills	1. Customer Service
2. Trustworthiness	2. Achievement Orientation
3. Integrity	3. Trustworthiness
4. Written Communication	4. Interpersonal Skills
5. Customer Service	5. Oral Communication

In summary, we learned that a personality test can be useful in filling these two fundraising positions. Testing would help a nonprofit organization identify the degree to which individuals possess the characteristics and competencies needed to succeed in these two job titles.

Note:

David Edell and Paul Connolly produced the specialized NPEdge reports based on this study. To learn more about David Edell, visit his web site: www.drgnyc.com. To learn more about Performance Programs, visit www.performanceprograms.com.