Creating fundraising professionals: the development of the certified fund raising executive credential

Abstract

Credentialing has become an established albeit voluntary—and often debated— part of the fundraising profession. Despite this, scholarly attention to the phenomenon of credentialing for fundraising professionals has been woefully lacking. While the literature has discussed what the benefits of credentialing are to fundraisers and the general public, it has failed to research how particular credentials came to be and why they were created at a particular place and time. This study analyzes the origins of the first fundraising credential, the Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE) credential, which was first awarded in 1981. While touching briefly on the phenomenon of mass philanthropy that paved the way for the birth of fundraising as a profession in the early twentieth century, the study concentrates on the way in which early practitioner associations such as the American Association of Fundraising Counsel and the National Association of Fund Raising Executives worked to establish fundraising as a legitimate profession. They fended off external threats from government regulation and capitalized on opportunities to give shape to the profession through the development of criteria for determining professional standing, codes and standards of practice and, eventually, the self-regulatory mechanism of voluntary credentialing. The principal results and conclusions of this study are: 1) while the fundraising profession has been witness to major events impacting American philanthropy in the twentieth century, including the reification of philanthropy as an economic “third sector” through the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, the fundraising profession as a whole has been largely disengaged from these events except when they have directly threatened the economic welfare of the profession; and 2) the creation of the CFRE credential was largely spurred by increased calls for self-regulation of fundraising in the late 1970s.