The art of fundraising
The art of fundraising
Chapter 4 focuses on the ‘art’ or the non-technical aspects of fundraising, exploring how the social and personal skills of fundraisers enable them to succeed. Drawing on interviews with 50 successful fundraisers, this chapter highlights the metaphors that fundraisers use to describe their work, the importance of skills such as reading body language, and exercising good judgments about how, and how fast, to progress relationships with donors. The importance of seemingly trivial decisions, such as the precise wording of an email or whether or not to send a birthday card, illustrates the difficulty of codifying this knowledge. It is argued that the art of fundraising involves responding creatively to the fact that each unique donor has different intentions, attitudes and aspirations in the context of each giving scenarios. As the language of gift giving is, by convention, oblique, it is also argued that the art of fundraising involves an ability to hear the ‘unsaid’ in order to understand donors’ desires and respond accordingly.
Keywords: Fundraisers, fundraising, charity, art of fundraising, relationship fundraising, body language, middlemen
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