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Want to discover how an unexpected job offer can change the trajectory of your career? Join us as we sit down with Jessi Marsh, the Senior Director of Creative Strategy at Dickerson Baker, who went from dreaming of a career in advertising to leading impactful nonprofit initiatives. Jessi’s journey takes us through her early days in volunteer coordination and case management, a life-altering move to Seattle, and her eventual return to Pittsburgh, where she now combines her advertising skills with nonprofit missions. Her story not only highlights the rewarding unpredictability of nonprofit work but also offers a unique perspective on integrating diverse skill sets to drive mission-driven success.
In this episode, we break down the critical elements of nonprofit leadership, particularly in fundraising. Transitioning from a major gift officer to a leadership role requires big-picture thinking, problem-solving prowess, and a deep understanding of interconnected responsibilities. Jessi shares invaluable insights on how leveraging consultants can empower young leaders and bridge knowledge gaps, transforming weaknesses into strengths. Learn how embracing expert advice can help you confidently steer your nonprofit organization forward, ensuring both sustainability and growth.
Jessi Marsh, M.S., leads Creative Strategy for DickersonBakker - a fundraising consulting firm and agency. She is an experienced nonprofit professional with a 20+ year career in leading and growing nonprofit organizations both as an internal staff member and an external consultant. She has overseen Advancement departments large and small, supported urban and rural, local and international nonprofits including those focusing on out-of-school programming, poverty alleviation, health, human services, higher education, domestic violence and food insecurity.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
If you're looking to maximize your fundraising efforts, DonorBox's online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals with ease. Discover the world of simplified, seamless fundraising at DonorBox.org. DonorBox, helping you help others. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast, I'm your host Meghan Speer, and joining me today is Jesse Marsh, who's the Senior Director of Creative Strategy at Dickerson Baker. We're very excited to have Jesse on the podcast, a fellow Pittsburgh girl, so I'm really excited to dig in. Jesse, welcome to the show. I'm Meghan, it's great to be here. So excited. So give your audience just a little bit of overview. You are with Dickerson Baker, tell us a little bit about your role there, but also you've got quite the non-profit journey throughout your career, and that kind of lays the groundwork for what we're talking about today, so give us a little bit of insight into who you are. Sure. So currently, Senior Director of Creative Strategy at Dickerson Baker, which is a fundraising firm and agency that serves lots of different local, national, international, non-profits in various aspects of fundraising. I always say that we're a team of experts across the fundraising spectrum. If you need something that's under the fundraising umbrella, someone at Dickerson Baker can help. We're known for our capital campaigns. We also do a lot of major gift consulting, and on the agency side, we handle direct mail, digital campaigns for clients as well. Excellent. But this is not your first foray into non-profit work. I'd love to tell you how I got here. Yeah, absolutely, please. Sure. So when I was in college, I was an advertising major in Journalism School, at the Scripps School of Communications at Ohio University, and had every intention of going and working for an ad agency in New York when I graduated. I was the president of the Ad Club, or Advertising Association of America. I wrote for The Paper. I was really invested in my major. I was actually a TA for a freshman class, and was just really ready to dive into advertising, and really the only choice that I was thinking hard about was whether I wanted to be a copy writer or an account manager, because I like both of those aspects of advertising work. And so I was interviewing. I had interviews with MTV and Comedy Central. Their promotions department was looking at a few agencies and lining up interviews with them as well. And I got a call from the executive director of a homeless shelter that I volunteered at while I was in college. And I thought he was just wanted to congratulate me, and thank me for volunteering, but he actually wanted to offer me a job, and it wasn't interested at all. So we're having this conversation, and he says, I really think that you should consider using a year of your life to, as he put it, serve the poor. And so I smiled and nodded and thought the whole time, absolutely not, there's no way I would ever do that. Like, that's really nice and great for some people. But I have a plan, I've had this plan since I was about 16, and I was ready to go. And so I went home that night, and I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't sleep until next night. And there was something about this idea that was just gnawing at me, and I couldn't let it go, and I ended up calling him back and saying, well, I thought about it, and I think I have to do this. So my parents weren't too happy. I think I made about $9 an hour at that job, no kidding. And it was the first time I didn't come home for Thanksgiving, because I had to work because I was the low person on the list, and it was my turn to stay in Ohio for Thanksgiving while my family was eating turkey and Pittsburgh. So there were aspects to this that were really unexpected, unusual. It was honestly a hard sell to my family. I was an adult and made the decision, and there I was in the nonprofit world. So it started as a volunteer coordinator. And then the executive director just thought I had some promise in learning more the social work side of things. And while I didn't end up doing that long term, I really appreciated the training that I got in this experience. He himself had an MSW, Masters of Social Work, and just really taught me that side of it. And I became a case manager and shelter supervisor with the clients in the homeless shelter. So then I moved to Seattle, Washington with 12 of my friends, which I always talk about. Now it's like you schedule lunch with somebody, and you reschedule it three times. And you have all of these, you have to deal with the chaos of our lives. And back then, somehow we moved 12, 13 people across the country. And I think only maybe two of us had cell phones. So when you're determined, but you can do just not anything, so we moved out there. And I worked in nonprofit. I worked for a Catholic community services organization and another nonprofit that coordinated volunteers to serve elderly folks in their homes with things that they needed help with. And so I ended up moving back to Pittsburgh and was primarily looking for those type of program positions within nonprofits where it was either on the volunteer coordination side or providing direct service to the clients that were served by organizations. But I ended up getting a job in a chamber of commerce where I was the membership director. Not involved a lot more of like the advertising side of what I did. I was really out there not raising money, but trying to get businesses to join the chamber. So that kind of leading a movement of gathering people, which I think sometimes is how we can look at fundraising. And then ended up getting jobs in nonprofits that were closer and closer to fundraising jobs, worked for the Arthritis Foundation as a community development specialist. And then ended up leading youth programs for human service nonprofit. And what I realized was we were pretty well funded through a mental health grant. But what was really needed was unrestricted funding to do things for the kids in the after school program. And so in the most grassroots, I have no idea what I'm doing kind of way possible. I just started writing letters. I found a list where they had built a kaboom playground. And in order to do that, you had to get so many individual donors and I found the list of individual donors that had been from a few years back. But I thought, I'm just going to write these people letters and see if they'll give us money. I mean, it was like I was inventing fundraising on the spot. Everybody else in the organization had the primary job of fundraising because the organization was run almost entirely on government grants. And so I started this kind of private individual giving effort. And to my surprise, people started sending checks. And we just started this little annual fund effort from just a little spreadsheet with a few names on it. So at that point, I had done that for a while. I decided to go back to school, I went to Carlo to get a degree in professional leadership. And one of the areas you could specialize in was nonprofit management. And so there was a little bit of fundraising education on that. And at this point, I had to start doing the fundraising. I was more so leading a program as the director, but I was raising some of my own money. And I found myself in a room with my cohort of other primarily nonprofit leaders, but also some teachers and nurses. And we were just talking more and more about fundraising. And one of my classmates ended up offering me a job as a major gift officer. And so I started working at Light of Life Rescue Mission as a major gift officer pretty quickly became the assistant director of development and then the director of development not long after that. And boy, I really didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing as a major gift officer. All I knew was that I was supposed to write a thank you note when someone sent a check in. So I did a lot of sales. I wrote a lot of thank you notes. At one point, when people asked me what I did for a living, I would say I'm a professional thank you note writer just to be a little silly, like started an interesting conversation. And so that's really how I landed in fundraising. So if you want to talk any more of that stuff before we lie ahead. Yeah, no, I think that's great because there are no kindergartners who say I want to be a fundraiser when they're like when you're filling out the what I want to be when I grow up poster. Right? There are. I would love to. I would love to be done. They can start me writing right now, but that's generally not it's not on the list right of things that people tend to think about as a vocation or as a job when they're growing up. And so it's always interesting to me to see how people fell into that particular piece. And I think it's a great groundwork for where we're headed in this conversation because I'd seen a post from you on LinkedIn talking about what it means to level up in your career. Right? And so I appreciate you kind of laying the groundwork for how you did that. But let's start with this idea of like, I didn't know what I was doing. I was a major gift officer and I wrote a lot of thank you notes, but that's it. So I would venture to say that in our audience, we do have a lot of folks who are maybe new to a fundraising career or fundraising has been added on to what they have been tasked to do who are probably in that same boat. So when you found yourself in that boat, what did that look like for you in terms of figuring out what the job actually entailed, what worked, what didn't, how did you take those next steps into your career to figure that out from major gift officer to assistant to director? So in a way, thinking about leveling up and I have some thoughts about how I look at staff that I hire and think about, is this person a leader? Are they going to be someone who can take on more help to improve systems, help to expand the work, achieve better results? And so when I'm hiring and when I'm working with staff and thinking about what's the future for them, are they someone that we really want to invest in as a leader? One of the things that I'm looking for is this person's ability to see the bigger picture. And I actually think we're hitting on something interesting here because I think that's how you end up in fundraising is that you start looking at the bigger picture in non-profits and you go, oh, it'd be so nice in our program if we could do this thing. What does that mean? What do we need in order to do this? Well, the answer is usually more revenue. And so now I'm thinking about how we need revenue and I'm thinking about the people who are responsible for doing the revenue. And I think, well, I could go ask them for help and maybe they're too busy. Well, can I do something myself? How do I make this happen? And so it's almost like you get to this place where you realize the necessity of fundraising and you realize that either you need to work with the people who are fundraising or you need to endure yourself to them so that they can do it for you or they can teach you how to help do it. And so I always talk about that ability to not just see what's in your lane. So if I'm like a coordinator level employee and I have this scope of responsibility, but I think about what are those lanes next to me? What are the adjacent lanes? And fundraising is usually an adjacent lane to anybody in non-profit. And so it's just occurring to me now as we're talking about this, that maybe this is how people end up in fundraising is they have that leadership quality that I like to think of as bigger picture thinking. And it leads them into these related spheres or related lanes and you start to dabble in that. And maybe that looks like they're showing up at the annual walk or they buy a ticket to the gala and now any fundraiser in a non-profit knows you have these friendlies, right? Like you have people who are from programs, but they really understand and appreciate what the fundraisers are trying to do for the organization. You have other people who they hear like the heels clicking on the linoleum coming down the hallway and they say, here come the suits, right? But there are also program folks in non-profits who deeply understand the need for fundraising, the value of fundraising. And I think those people end up being more open to what's going on the fundraising side of the house and often that is how they end up scooching over to that side. I think that's a really good point because we do tend to see the chasm between program and fundraising or program and administration. I like your point that it really is a leadership quality to be able to see the bigger picture, to be able to step outside of yourself and say, okay, here's the problem, how do we fix it? And who do I need to bring into the mix to get that ball rolling? Instead of just, here's a problem, I'm going to stay in my lane and complain about it. Right. Would you not helpful to anybody? Totally. When you start taking some ownership and not even, it's not necessarily that you cause this problem, but you're identifying a problem. And so there are people that identify the problem and put their hand up and say, hey, somebody fixed this. But even before that, there are people that just completely ignore the problem because they're afraid it's going to cause more work for them to do, right? So then you have the people that see the problem, they know they should do something about it, but it's more of a passing the buck, like, hey, can somebody deal with this. And then you have people that go, okay, I see the problem, well, I wonder what the cause of the problem is, and investigating the root of the problem, maybe we find it and we might say, oh, I can fix this right now, or I could fix this if I had this and this. So I'm going to go ask this person, can I get this thing to fix the problem? And can I bring this other person with me because they know stuff about this problem? That is the kind of thinking we need to have as fundraisers. I think that you don't get too many fundraisers who are not leaders because I think this is all the same stuff, like we're big picture thinking, ownership, solving complex problems. These are all things that happen daily and fundraising, being able to hold a lot of information about one thing in your head at one time and understanding that when you do one thing in the system, it might impact a whole bunch of other things that also need to be updated along with the initial change that you made. There's a lot of need for complex thinking, and so I think the field of fundraising is really flush with leaders. Elevate your fundraising strategy effortlessly with DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your operations, amplifies donations, and delivers a user-friendly experience for your supporters. And captivating donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, seamlessly monitor donations, and automate receipt generation. Joining is a breeze with no setup or monthly fees. From customizable donation forms and four times faster, ultra-swift checkout to seamless in-person giving with DonorBox Live kiosk, DonorBox makes giving simple and fast for your donors. Visit donorbox.org and unlock your full fundraising potential today. If there's folks listening who are finding themselves in that boat, maybe they are, could be a major gift officer, could be a development coordinator, or they're just kind of working on that admin side, and they are ready to take that step. They're ready for the next thing in their career journey. Let's talk to those folks. What advice would you have for them in terms of leveling up? How did you continue to learn and grow? Because unfortunately, not all organizations are stacked with folks who have that experience, right? Especially some newer nonprofits or smaller nonprofits who may not have the depth of knowledge in the bench to be able to grow and learn that way. So what did you do or what are some recommendations that you would have for those folks? Yeah, so there's a lot of great resources out there that you can tune into. I think podcasts like this one are some really specific fundraising podcasts out there. There are a lot of really smart content creators specifically on LinkedIn. So even just searching posts on fundraising and development, that sort of thing, you'll find creators who are posting all the time about this stuff. When you are in this and creating content about it, which I do from time to time, you're just always thinking like you encounter something interesting and that's maybe an interesting challenge, or you solve a problem that gleaned really great results for a client and you want to share about it. I think sometimes people think of LinkedIn as just like where you go to try to look for a job or just make sure the resume is out there in case anyone wants to read your resume. But it's really about networking and it's really about learning. To me, it's a really good learning platform. Just being abreast of what the current conversation is, what are people talking about and fundraising right now and making sure that you're current on those issues. Like it should be important to any fundraiser right now to understand what are fundraisers doing with AI. How are they using it? How are they applying it? If you have no idea, then it's time to start engaging in that conversation because that is something that everyone's talking about. If you don't realize that there are major implications for probably just about every field certainly fundraising included when it comes to AI, then it's just very important to understand those types of things. LinkedIn is a great place. Articles and publications like philanthropy today, nonprofit publications typically have a fundraising section or at least some content dedicated to that. I think if you're in a position where I found myself in a leadership position really green, really young and I thought, how can I be the person that's responsible for doing this? It can really be overwhelming and one of the best. I had a moment early in one of my first leadership roles where I walked in and I looked around and I was like, I need an adult here adult. I can't be the person right now. Yes. Easy to find yourself in that role. Very quick. And you go. I need an adult. Oh, it's me. I'm the adult. I need an adult. So it is a strange thing and I've been in my career for 24 years at this point and sometimes I have to remind myself of that because sometimes you just, you might be in your 40s but sometimes you still feel like a kid that's walking in on the first day of school. So you can get over that as time moves forward. But another resource I think is consultants. So I've been a consultant in a number of different settings but if you're in a position as a leader, particularly a young leader, if you're sitting there listening to this podcast going, oh my gosh, that's exactly how I feel like I'm relatively young but here I am in this leadership position and yes, we'll think I know more than I do. First of all, everyone feels that way. I don't care how long they've been doing this. There are moments where I feel like, yes, I know exactly what I'm doing. I've got this covered and those moments do become more frequent as you get older. But everybody, I don't care how old they are, have moments where they go, I don't know. And you just have to draw upon what you do know and drive whatever the project is forward. But one way that is always helpful, I think, is just having people in your circle that really are experts in this and sometimes one of the ways that you can access this kind of knowledge and wisdom and experience is by working with consultants. I remember being in grad school and they talked so much about consultants and I remember thinking at that point I was leading a program. I had a team that I was responsible for and my thought at the time was, I have so many ideas of things I would like to do. I don't even have time to implement the ideas that I have. I don't necessarily see the value in just opening the can of worms is like a whole bunch more ideas when I don't have the time or the resources to carry out the ideas I have. So that was what I thought at this time, you know, whenever this was 15 years ago or something. And now I think, well, you don't just hire a consultant and bring them in and say, well, what do you think? There's usually a targeted goal, like you've already identified a problem, but now you're bringing in experts to help you figure out what is the most efficient, effective way to solve this problem or grow this program or whatever you're trying to do. And so it's much more targeted. And so I started enlisting consultants to help with everything from direct mail to public relations. And the secret is I did not know very much at all about these things until I had these consultants come in, work with me, teach me over years in some cases. And now some of the areas that I consider myself to be about as close as you could be to an expert in something, it's areas that I started learning from consultants. So they were advising me and I'm paying attention and not just, you know, they hand you the strategy and you go carry it out. Like I'm paying attention to how the strategies being created and what they're honing in on and what research and data they're using in order to solve this problem or make this expansion. So I've worked with a lot of consultants over the years. That's how I ultimately ended up becoming a consultant because one of them hired me and I've worked with small boutique kind of shops. I've done my own independent consulting. I've worked for a very large operation out of New York and omni-com agency. And now I'm working for, you know, a mid-size, but powerhouse of an agency of expert consultants. And some of my colleagues are some of the smartest people that the field of fundraising has. And so it really is incredible to work with them. And as I see the different consultants that we deploy for a variety of challenges that our clients face, I'm just in awe at the level of expertise we have. That's awesome. So I think you hit on something though that I, it almost feels to me at least. And what I have seen in other folks, right, is when we consider bringing in a consultant, that doesn't mean that you are any less. Right. Right. And I think that tends, yeah. I'm more now because of the consultant. Exactly. Because of those consultants. I think there tends to be this like, I can't, I don't want to admit that I don't know. I don't want to show any weakness that I might have an area in which I'm delinquent. Yeah. If I could take one thing away from this podcast is like, get over that. If you can't get it over, if you can't get over your own ego. Yes. To solve a complex problem, you should not be a leadership. Like that's nothing that we just have to get rid of. And I understand it. I understand that fear. I think the way to get over the fear of not knowing is to just admit when you don't know, but demonstrate that you can still solve a problem. And sometimes that entails enlisting someone who is smarter than you in that particular area. I am not ever going to be an expert in everything that I touch, partly because I like to touch a variety of areas and anything that I'm working in. I'm not someone that can just be really focused on a very small scope of work. I'm a bigger thinker, a broader thinker. And so because of that, I can't be an expert at everything, but I can be very skilled and acquire more skills every time I bring someone along with me that knows more than I do. If you have to be the smartest person in the room, please don't be in nonprofit fundraising because there's too much work to do to spend any time or energy on feeding your own ego at Silly. Reach. Oh, yes. I love that. That's so good. Because I think too, it also, it doesn't mean that your team can't handle it, right? I feel like the other piece of that is there's almost a badge of honor when we're so busy that we can't even breathe and we're burnt out and we look at that as this like amazing accomplishment. It doesn't have to be that way, friends. Like, there are so many solutions. So I really, oh, I appreciate that call out of just having the humility to say, I don't know, but I know someone who does and let's bring them into the discussion. I think a good example of that we see pretty often is, I've noticed that most fundraisers are not also particularly experienced with public relations. So this is an area that I will beat this drum forever. Maybe I can come back and just talk about about this podcast. Because I really believe that engaging in PR is one of the best things that you can do to support a fundraising strategy. And so that is something that I bring to the table when we meet with clients. And I often, not every time, but often know that they need PR support alongside everything that is happening to create their current fundraising strategy. And most of the time, people in fundraising departments and development departments are not also able to be the PR manager. And so that is an area that a fundraiser can look at and say, I don't need to have deep bend strength on my team for this. I need a consultant to help us figure out what we can do with the current structure we have. That's one of my favorite things to do is to come in and do an assessment and say, well, I know you can't hire a full time PR manager. But what do we have? We could have 25% of Suzy's time. And she was a marketing major in college and she's a pretty good writer. Great. Suzy and I are going to come back with a whole plan for you for how you can support this fundraising strategy by dealing with this adjacent field of PR that you should not ignore and that can actually be incredibly helpful to you. So that's an example where it's not a bad thing that nobody on your team knows about this. And hire a consultant to come in, write this strategy for you, tell you how to do it and help you level up the fundraising department because now you know a little bit about PR. Now you know how to respond if something happens. You know how to send out a media alert or a press release or engage with the media in order to support your fundraising efforts that you're probably spending a nice chunk of money on. So that's an example. I think of how you can bring a consultant in, glean wisdom and knowledge from them, change your program a little bit. So this is incorporated into it, but you're not hiring another full-time person. You're not dramatically increasing the costs that you're incurring. So that's just an example where you can bring a consultant in, just level up your department by learning from them a little bit. I love it. So in this particular instance, as we kind of wrap up here, if somebody wanted to learn more about Dickerson Baker specifically about some of the consulting that you all do or wanted to connect with you, what's the best way for folks to find and connect with you? Yeah. Unlinked in. I'm Jessica Marsh and you can connect with me there, message me there, happy to engage about any of this stuff and you can also learn more about Dickerson Baker at Dickerson Baker dot com and Baker has two gays. There we go. Perfect. Jesse, thank you so much. I appreciate all of the wisdom that you have to share today and it's probably a great idea to have you back on the podcast specifically to talk about PR for nonprofits here coming up. So we'll get that on the agenda. Thank you so much. Again, my guest has been Jesse Marsh, who's the Senior Director of Creative Strategy at Dickerson Baker. Jesse, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Megan. My pleasure. We'll see you next time on the nonprofit hub podcast. Bye. ‑‑. (dramatic music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
