A remote funding developer. They work from home, they take up less support costs and they don’t involve supervisory time - what’s not to love? I worked as a remote funding researcher recently, and while I’m not willing to flat out say it doesn’t work (comments welcome from people doing just fine at this job) I am willing to tell you what to watch out for.

First - it’s important to know that I’m based in Europe right now (the other editor, Sean, is based in Canada). When I got the chance to work remotely for a Canadian company and a European non-profit, I leaped at it - after all, I’m clearly into social change via the internet, and I’m trained as a funding developer. I still cringe when I think of both experiences - for the first time ever I brought no money into a non-profit. What went wrong? Well, here’s what I learned.

It’s not spontaneous:

Executive directors, don’t hire a remote worker unless you yourself have wicked time management skills. You actually have to work harder to supervise internet staff because spontaneous interactions (check-ins around the coffee pot, interrupting in a meeting) aren’t possible. Online meetings - especially ones where you cannot see the rest of the group - need to be facilitated carefully, and you need to orchestrate times where participants can respond to each other with feedback. You’ll be surprised by how much policy you’ll need to set up just to get through a shared task, so leave time for it and be prepared to set lots of limits.

There is such a thing as too remote:

Only hire remote workers from your city, and invite them into the office on a regular basis. My employers couldn’t fly me in or give me a place to stay when I did manage to make it into the country - they did let me use the board room to work in while I was there, but you might not be lucky enough to have a space. Time zones contributed to both sides feeling out of touch, and short 6 month contracts upped the pressure without helping development. Might be obvious to you, but we sure learned the hard way that good funding development takes time to develop - you need to know the local area, be involved with local donors, learn what the non-profit cares about at its heart and see it in action. You can find grants on the web, sure, but this is not good funding development on its own, and it’s not going to help your non-profit.

You’re only as good as your geeky know-how:

You also have to be friendly with communication and file sharing aids like Skype, Pando, Basecamp and Gmail online applications like shared docs and calendars at the very least. If you have trouble checking your email (or you have too many emails to handle efficiently) then you should not hire a remote worker.

Invest in your hardware too - there is nothing more frustrating than Skype meetings that are sabotaged by someone not having headphones to plug in, or a buggy laptop. Also, being able to see your co-workers via camera can help build trust in a way that talking over headphones can’t, so get everybody one and save yourself from one less misunderstanding.

Ok, that’s all the bad news:

Remote workers take heart: I’ve been volunteering for Canadian non-profit Head & Hands since I got to Europe, and I’ve made them quite a packet even though I’m volunteering online for them too. So how come volunteer fundraising works so well on the web when paid employment didn’t? How can you make this work for you?

It helps that I’ve worked and volunteered for this non profit for years, and I started the program that I currently fund-raise for. I know the staff well, and I had a million spontaneous coffee-pot check-ins before I left for Europe. So, I don’t really need a camera, or Skype check-ins: we catch up solely on email, and I bet I’ve taken maybe two hours of their time, max, over the last year. Secondly, H&H is wired. Their staff is all over Facebook, they’ve experimented with online petitions and they have a regular online fund raiser. This online presence leads to good connection with their remote volunteers - I get an email from someone at H&H on a weekly basis, even if it’s a mass email announcing a fundraiser, or giving program updates. Finally, they have a well developed culture of fundraising where the staff and board work as a team to fundraise, led by two funding developers (who work in-office) - and this supports their volunteers working remotely.

Smart uses of remote funding development? That would be:

- encouraging ex-workers to volunteer for your organization online

- hiring a second funding developer to work from home in your city

- allowing your funding developer to work from home on certain days of the week if space is tight

- getting board members and volunteers who spend time inside the organization to raise funds online.

I’d love to hear from other people who have done this because remote funding development is still in the experimental stage for a lot of non-profits. What’s your experience and how can the rest of us make it work better? I mean, beyond remembering our Skype headphones?

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