From Making a Profit
to Making a Difference:
How to Launch Your
New Career in Nonprofits

Chapter 1:

Assimilating Into the Nonprofit Culture

Part 1 of 2 Parts

During my early days as an executive recruiter for nonprofit organizations and institutions, I rarely came upon business executives interested in working for nonprofit organizations. All they wanted was to make a profit, not a difference. The nonprofit world was something of an anomaly to them, resting somewhere between the two major sectors of the working world: private enterprise (corporate) and public service (government). To business professionals, nonprofits really were an alien “Third Sector,” a separate world that had a hard time interacting with the other two.

Consequently, business professionals seldom thought of nonprofit organizations as a field with employment opportunities for them. Back in the early 1970s, there were far fewer nonprofit organizations than today. “Charitable” causes like conserving natural resources were not yet sufficiently etched into the public consciousness for business professionals to leave their lucrative private sector careers and actually work toward making a difference. The business and nonprofit sectors represented two distinctly different career paths without many opportunities to cross over.

But the career world has changed a lot during the past ten years. More business professionals than ever are seeking jobs in the nonprofit sector, and more charitable organizations are hiring them. Over 1.3 million nonprofits in the United States, with more than 8 million employees and 80 million volunteers now comprise the “Third Sector” of the U.S. economy. Over 30,000 new charities are formed each year. In addition to their paid employees, nonprofits reap the fruits of free labor: 56 percent of the U.S. adult population donates an average of 4.3 hours per person of volunteer service every week. Add in these volunteers, and nonprofits constitute America’s largest employers. The nonprofit, or charitable sector, has always been a “growth industry,” but only recently has its expansion begun to create extensive career opportunities for business professionals.

The New Nonprofit Environment

As those aging Baby Boomers redefine the concept of multiple careers, an increasing number of them — as well as recent college graduates — are fleeing the profit–driven world to apply their skills in the nonprofit community to help make a real difference in our nation’s welfare. With the sad spectacle of consolidation and mega–mergers that produce massive layoffs, today’s workers lack the job security the private sector offered the Depression Era generation. Not only are “Boomers” open to moving on to two or three different career tracks during their work life, many actively plan that strategy. While advances in technology have created many of these new career opportunities, Boomers are including nonprofit opportunities in their multiple career scenarios as well. Even if only a small percentage of the 75 million Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 make the transition from business to nonprofit work, their sheer numbers alone would have a significant impact on the workplace.

Today’s migration to nonprofits also results from the values and environment in which Boomers grew up that compliment the values of the nonprofit culture. People raised in the era of Dr. Spock and who came of age during the Kennedy years, the struggle for basic civil rights, the Vietnam War, and Watergate were largely idealistic, progressive advocates for social change. Wanting to create a better society, they were imbued with a sense of independence. They were better educated than their parents and grandparents, and were committed to their beliefs. This value system is fundamental to the career and lifestyle choices Boomers have made. And it is a value system that is shared throughout the nonprofit sector. This commonality makes the transition of the business professional to the nonprofit sector much more likely than a generation ago. But it is only one reason for the new nonprofit environment.

The 1990s represent one of the longest, most active thriving economic climates in U.S. history. This prosperity also has had an enormous trickle–down effect on the financial good fortune of charitable organizations. As nonprofits have been able to expand their programs they have also had to increase their paid staff. As many charitable groups have become a big business themselves, their leaders have begun to realize that they need employees with skills common to the business world. As nonprofits have grown, their leaders have started hiring accountants, financial managers, media–savvy public relations experts, solid business managers, information managers, marketers, information technology wizards, planners, and other traditionally private sector professionals.

Solid business skills have become more valuable to nonprofits as they diversify their activities in a more aggressive manner. Charities have became more business–like, much to the pleasure of the philanthropic community as well as the corporations that often have berated nonprofits for their apparently lax controls over their operations. This new direction has translated into new job opportunities where business skills are highly valued.

For example, in the early 1980s, leaders of the health care industry realized that restructuring the traditional hospital operation into a multi–corporate system was essential to keeping the industry one step ahead of government regulations that would cut into the health care industry’s healthy profit margins. They discovered the value of marketing as they realized that consumerism and managed care competition in health care eventually would require them to adopt a whole new strategy. By the mid–1980s health care systems were hiring corporate marketing executives with consumer product backgrounds and the entire health care industry began competing on an entirely new level.

Current social problems have helped fuel this movement to bring business professionals into the nonprofit sector. The growth of the environmental movement over the past few decades has made worldwide conservation not only politically acceptable, but also a multi–national priority supported by both the public and private sectors. Issues of poverty, affordable housing, unemployment, gang violence, drug abuse, hunger, homelessness, and healthcare are continuing problems the media chronicles on a daily basis. The growing ability of nonprofits to attract attention to their causes and to pull in business professionals as volunteers and contributors has also given business professionals a closer look at the possibilities for employment with nonprofits.

Despite all of this movement, leaving a career in business for a job with a nonprofit organization is still quite a challenging leap. The fact that more business professionals than ever are seeking jobs in the charitable industry in no way implies that the nonprofit job market is ready for, or can immediately absorb all of them. This book should give you an edge over other business professionals who also wish to enter the nonprofit universe.

Today we are on the forefront of a slow moving wave of change in the nonprofit industry where the identification and selection of business professionals to fill jobs traditionally held by nonprofit career professionals is slowly becoming common, and business professionals are beginning to move smoothly between jobs in the private and non–profit sectors. Until we reach the point where business people are fully accepted in the nonprofit world, you will need to use the unique job–search strategies and tactics suggested in this book to successfully make the transition to working for nonprofit organizations.

Transition as Cultural Assimilation

The first step is recognizing that the switch from the profit–oriented world of business to nonprofits is a major change in “corporate” cultures. To get some idea of the sort of cultural transition you will face when moving to a nonprofit, recall the film “Dances With Wolves.” The movie depicted the story of a young Civil War officer who chooses to single–handedly man an isolated outpost in Oglala Sioux territory. He slowly befriends the Sioux tribe and eventually becomes “one of them” through a fascinating process of cultural assimilation. While the nonprofit industry as a whole has grown tremendously over the years, it still is regarded by many as unknown territory, a different culture, the mysterious and misunderstood “Third Sector” of the economy. In many ways the transition from a business career to a non–profit career is like a process of cultural assimilation. It requires an acceptance of different values, different norms and structures, and even a different language.

Thinking of your transition to the non–profit work place as a process similar to cultural assimilation provides a helpful framework as you begin to think about your interest in working for a nonprofit organization. Assimilating from one culture to another consists of certain elements that parallel the process of transition from the private sector to the nonprofit sector. Learning about a new culture requires you to study its norms, language, values, organizing principles, and customs. It is difficult to live in a new culture unless you first study it and understand how it works. This takes time. There is much to learn and we can absorb only so much at one time.

It takes time to make the transition from business to nonprofit employment for the same reasons. This is not like changing jobs within your career path, where the accumulation of skills and experience you have are simply applied at a higher level or in a position of wider managerial scope. To be realistic, you must be willing to accept that the transition process may take a long time for you to achieve. This is not to say that you cannot do it in a relatively short period of time. Some business professionals have found jobs with nonprofits in a matter of months, usually with favorable extenuating circumstances and a lot of luck. They are the exceptions. More typically you will find that the more effort you put into preparing yourself, learning and experiencing the non–profit sector, and applying the techniques presented in this book, the more likely it is that your transition will be more rapid and more rewarding.

Cultures are “people,” not “things.” Understanding how people of a different culture think, what they believe, why they do things a certain way, what they value, where they are at risk, how they interact with each other and with outsiders — one assimilates these things only by interacting with the people of that culture, by being among them. The same is true in the nonprofit world. And the nonprofit world offers a method of interaction that is unique: volunteerism. Having an opportunity to work with the staff of a charitable organization is an experience afforded many business professionals as volunteers, either as members of the board of directors or in a more hands on, direct service capacity, whether it be stuffing envelopes, running a marathon, writing a brochure, or managing other volunteers. Chapter 4 examines how to strategically use volunteerism to ease your transition to the nonprofit sector and find job opportunities. This kind of affiliation also provides opportunities for networking, an important part of any job search, and a job–search technique covered in depth in Chapter 5.

Having studied and learned about a new culture and having lived among the “natives” to see what they are all about, the assimilation process is not complete and successful unless you learn the specific skills required to survive in that new cultural environment. The tools you have used in your old world may not work in the new culture. Availability of resources may be quite different and the manner in which people work together, in part due to the nature of resources at their disposal, may require that you develop new skills. The financial and human resources customarily available in the business world are rarely available to nonprofits. Stewardship of resources becomes an important management strategy as well as a measure of accountability for executive leadership. This final adjustment in the development of survival skills is often the most difficult for business professionals to make.

Click here to continue with Chapter 1, Part 2.