Economic constraints have been the biggest hindrance towards interscholastic and non-profit organizations due to their nature of their services. The services of both the non-profit and interscholastic are to contribute or help the society and with their limited ways of gaining revenue, they are reliant on donations from the community, individuals, and profit making companies.
Benefits
Interscholastic settings deal with schools and mostly pertains promoting sports between different schools. Sports is the best way to engage the youths and prevent them from engaging in crime while also enabling them to nurture their talents. The economic constraints and the increased costs of sporting events have led to schools shutting down the sporting department, but due to their importance, different coaches and sports staff engage in developing strategies to have external funding for the interscholastic success thus referred to as philanthropy fundraising (In Alphin, In Lavine, In Stark, & In Hocker, 2016). Non-profit settings also participate in activities that help improve the society and hence they engage in fundraising to generate the resources needed to perform their set programs. The biggest benefit of fundraising is gaining the connection with the community, individual donors, and companies to enable the realization of the set objectives. The fundraisings may be the best source of resources whether monetary, gifts, trophies, costumes, food, and connections with different support groups among other needed support but it is important to know the fundraising principles that can be used to ensure the success of the fundraising.
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Fundraising Principles to Consider
Many fundraising principles have helped interscholastic and non-profit settings to organize successful fundraising. The paper considers three major principles that without keeping them in mind, the fundraising is doomed to fail. Before discussing the three principles, it is important to understand the characteristics of the target donors to ensure that the fundraising principles used in the formulation of the fundraising plan are effective. It is clear that donors are willing to offer their disposable amounts to charity, but their willingness to donate is similar to that of consumer behavior.
According to consumer theory, a customer is only willing to purchase a good if they consider the product or service is worth the price set. Although interscholastic and non-profit products and services are not similar to that of the profit-making sector, the donor is only willing to donate if the proposed project is worthy the stipulated amounts. The nature of the donor behavior creates the first fundraising principle; the non-profit or philanthropic should ensure that they provide the donors with a valuable product. The principle is based on the fact that a donor will donate more if they are convinced that their donations will result in beneficial changes to the community (Sargeant, & Jay, 2014). For instance, if two projects are requiring equal donations from an individual whereby one is based on planting trees and the other involves volunteer works to clean the town, the donor will view the impacts of the two short and long-term effects.
In a world where global warming is a major concern, the donor may see planting of trees to be more valuable to the community thus make the donation. Although cleaning of the town is important, the fact that the local government has set a department to clean the town and most of the workers in the organization are volunteers; the donor may see the set amounts as an extortion thus may not donate. The other fundraising principle is based on the relationship with the current donors that the non-profit setting can use to gain more donors. The status quo argument is that the high class in most cases if not always interacts with the rich thus the non-profit setting should ensure they gain the trust of the donors and use them as channels to meet or access friends, colleagues, or family members who may be willing to donate to their projects (Sargeant, & Jay, 2014).
Trust is gained by the organization having a skilled workforce and meeting previous objectives within the budgeted resources. The association between the donor and the organization becomes stronger thus in the event of fundraising the organization can request the donor to introduce the organization to his peers. There have been cases where the relationships have been very fortunate that the donors have included different organizations in their wills. The last principle is the ability and mode to ask for the money during fundraising. The policy entails different strategies of organizing the fundraising events. Past studies on fundraising claims that use of multiple strategies to reach to the potential donors should be utilized due to shortcomings related to each method (Sargeant, & Jay, 2014). The organizations should also be willing to ask for money directly from donors and perpetuate two-way communication. The ability to ask for money and the connection with the community have illustrated to be beneficial in helping the fundraising generate more money.
Conclusion
The paper clearly illustrates that fundraisings are beneficial to the non-profit and interscholastic settings, but they can be costly if the above fundraising principles are not considered in the planning of the fundraising. The above principles are just, but a few of the major principles but they form the background of the fundraising.
References
In Alphin, H. C., In Lavine, J., In Stark, S., & In Hocker, A. (2016). Facilitating higher education growth through fundraising and philanthropy .
Sargeant, A., & Jay, E. (2014). Fundraising Management (1st ed.). Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
