Successful Fundraising Research Articles

Book Review of The Generosity Network: New Transformational Tools for Successful Fund-Raising

Book Review of The Generosity Network: New Transformational Tools for Successful Fund-Raising

Middle managers and major gifts: fundraising for academic librarians

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to share successful strategies to enable mid‐level management academic librarians and archivists to raise major gifts from individual donors.Design/methodology/approachThe paper demonstrates the growing need for fundraising in university libraries and shows how participating in fundraising activities is an increasing expectation of librarians. Case studies are provided of successful fundraising by librarians and archivists, including their work with donors and collaboration with development professionals. The paper concludes with suggestions for maintaining donor relations.FindingsFundraising is increasing rapidly as an expected activity of librarians but is a slowly growing part of their education. More literature is also needed on the topic. Successful fundraising is dependent on clear definition of fundraising goals, effective communicational and other interpersonal skills, continuing donor follow up and regular collaboration with development staff.Originality/valueLibrarians and archivists can apply to their own fundraising needs the experiences narrated in the case studies of two successful major fundraising efforts, utilizing a team‐based approach to raising major gifts from individual donors.

Capturing Community Change: Active Living by Design's Progress Reporting System

The Active Living by Design (ALbD) National Program Office (NPO) developed an evaluation system to track progress of 25 community partnerships, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Between June 2004 and October 2008, partnerships documented their actions and accomplishments through ALbD's online Progress Reporting System (PRS) database. All entries were verified and analyzed by the NPO. Results from the PRS suggest that the ALbD partnerships were successful fundraisers, leveraging $256 million from grants, policy decisions, in-kind and direct sources. The partnerships also documented newspaper coverage, TV, and radio air time and they developed physical activity programs such as exercise clubs and “walking school buses.” Partnerships were adept at influencing decision makers to create or rewrite policies and improve built environments. Selected policy examples included, but were not limited to, approvals for capital improvements, street design standards, and development ordinances. Partnerships also contributed to the completion and approval of influential planning products, such as comprehensive land use, neighborhood, and roadway corridor plans. The most common built-environment changes were street improvements for safer pedestrian and bicycle travel, including new crosswalks, bicycle facilities, and sidewalks. The ALbD community partnerships' accomplishments and challenges contribute to knowledge and best practices in the active living field. Five years after their grant began, RWJF's initial investment showed substantial and measurable results.

Common Medical Problems in the Tropics

[Extract] Health professionals and students working in developing countries need access to a definitive low cost reference textbook that deals with common medical conditions encountered, including important tropical diseases. This Third Edition of Common Medical Problems in the Tropics has become one such reference work, which reflects the broad expertise, passion, personal investment and successful fundraising of its author, Dr Chris Schull, as recounted in the Foreword by Emeritus Professor David C. Morley from the University of London. The book contains Important notes about drugs and drug doses, a Foreword, a Preface to the First Edition, a Preface to the Second Edition, a Preface to the Third Edition, an Acknowledgements, 37 chapters, An Appendix, a section detailing Useful Publications, an Index, as well as numerous figures, photos, maps, tables and boxes. There is no glossary, although the second Chapter is devoted to providing definitions of terms and abbreviations. There is no list of tables and figures or references.

The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure

Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Drawing on a dataset of over 48,500 projects with combined funding over $237M, this paper offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures. It suggests that personal networks and underlying project quality are associated with the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that geography is related to both the type of projects proposed and successful fundraising. Finally, I find that the vast majority of founders seem to fulfill their obligations to funders, but that over 75% deliver products later than expected, with the degree of delay predicted by the level and amount of funding a project receives. These results offer insight into the emerging phenomenon of crowdfunding, and also shed light more generally on the ways that the actions of founders may affect their ability to receive entrepreneurial financing.

Institutional investments in private equity funds: social ties and the reduction of information asymmetry

The reduction of information asymmetry between institutional investors and private equity (PE) firms is one of the key challenges for the successful fundraising of PE funds in an increasingly competitive market. Social ties provide a potential mechanism to reduce information asymmetry. Therefore, this paper investigates the role of social ties for institutional investments in PE funds. Based on our fieldwork and a data set of 136 institutional investors and PE firms in Germany, we show that both direct and indirect social ties influence the investment decisions of institutional investors for PE firms. This influence is not restricted to functions of information transfer but also includes mechanisms of trust building. Interestingly, direct and indirect ties reveal different effects. Direct ties transfer information and increase goodwill trust. Indirect ties also transfer information but show no effect on trust building. Our results suggest that social ties can reduce information asymmetry between institutional investors and PE firms and thereby help to establish a financing relationship.

CEO compensation in venture-backed firms

We hypothesize that because fast-growing young companies must raise money in private capital markets that contain significant financing frictions, the CEOs of such firms will be compensated for successful fundraising. Using a sample of 1585 private venture-backed U.S. firms, we find that the cash pay of entrepreneur-CEOs is increasing in both the quantity and quality of financing secured and is more sensitive to successful fundraising the more challenging and difficult is the fundraising task. Successful fundraising also increases the gap between the pay of CEOs and other executives. Finally, we show that while VC financing dilutes the CEO's fractional equity ownership, it increases the dollar value of that ownership.

Leading Where it Counts: An Investigation of the Leadership Styles and Behaviors that Define College and University Presidents as Successful Fundraisers

This paper provides presidents and academic leadership with a body of literature that will strengthen the leaders’ understanding of the unique behaviors and characteristics that are paramount to successful fund raising in the academic arena. A better understanding of transformational, transactional, and transformative leadership theory, and the attributes that are associated with them, can not only help leaders shape and mold their approach to fund raising but also enable them to infuse a greater sense of meaning into their respective institutions while increasing the amount of financial support they garner.

CEO Cash Compensation in Private Venture-Backed U.S. Companies

We study the cash compensation paid to CEOs of private venture-backed U.S. companies. Using a large dataset on CEO base salaries and bonuses collected by VentureOne between 2002 and 2006, we test whether compensation contracts for CEOs in private venture - backed firms are optimally designed so to minimize agency costs, or instead reflect managerial self - dealing. Our findings support the optimal contract view in that CEO compensation is reliably higher for companies with better operating performance. Moreover, consistent with the proposition that compensation contracts in venture-backed firms should also reward the CEO for successful fundraising, we find that compensation is higher for CEOs who raised more VC financing, particularly in their last funding round. We further observe that CEOs who have the greatest opportunity to engage in self - dealing - founders and chairmen of the board — do not have higher base salaries or cash bonuses. Overall, our results shed new light on the mechanisms VCs use to solve agency problems and implement value-enhancing governance in their portfolio companies.

Patronage and Representation at the Huviska Vihāra a Kusāna-Period Monastery in Mathurā

Art and inscriptions from the Jamālpur site in the southern section of Mathurā city help characterize an early Buddhist monastic community and its relationship with lay patrons of non-royal backgrounds. Although named after Huviska, a powerful ruler of the Kusāna dynasty in the mid–second century CE, the monastery at this site was supported by monks, local administrators and members of professional groups such as actors. Monks specialized in textual interpretations, recitations and meditative practices, but were also successful fund raisers who actively influenced Buddhist imagery. Figures of lay worshippers carved in a naturalistic style are privileged in sculptures from this monastery. Visiting monks were instrumental in introducing elements of Kusāna royal symbolism into local art production. The role of this monastery was primarily to help local political elite to gain legitimation through their association with the Kusāna name and royal symbols on the one hand, and on the other, with a local nāga cult. Worshippers of the nāga deity, who otherwise occupied a low position in society, gained recognition by joining the patronage network of the monastery. Certain groups—craftsmen, merchants and agriculturalists—as well as women, however, seem to be conspicuously absent as donors at this site.

'The Cry of the Little People of Guam ': American Colonialism, Medical Philanthropy, and the Susana Hospital for Chamorro Women, 1898-1941

The Susana Hospital opened its doors to the islands native Chamorro women and children in 1905, following a successful fundraising drive by American navy wives whose husbands governed Guam. This paper examines the history, as it unfolded at the Susana Hospital, of Chamorro women as midwives, expectant mothers, and nursing students. As the physical space in which western and native notions of maternal health collided, it became a contact zone where mothers and midwives produced a hybridised version of obstetrical care, in the process disrupting colonial authority by rewriting the meanings of programmes designed for their 'benevolent assimilation. '

'The Cry of the Little People of Guam ': American Colonialism, Medical Philanthropy, and the Susana Hospital for Chamorro Women, 1898-1941

The Susana Hospital opened its doors to the island's native Chamorro women and children in 1905, following a successful fundraising drive by American navy wives whose husbands governed Guam. This paper examines the history, as it unfolded at the Susana Hospital, of Chamorro women as midwives, expectant mothers, and nursing students. As the physical space in which western and native notions of maternal health collided, it became a contact zone where mothers and midwives produced a hybridised version of obstetrical care, in the process disrupting colonial authority by rewriting the meanings of programmes designed for their 'benevolent assimilation.'

Government of the future

Crowdfunding is regarded as a novel way of collecting money for innovators to introduce products or services they ultimately wish to launch. The question arises, however, of what makes funding projects on these online platforms, with their different features of project evaluation and risk management, more successful than traditional fundraising approaches. We examine this question in the context of a pre-ordering model, which is also known as the reward-based crowdfunding model. A large-sample data analysis based on 116,956 crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter showed that most founder (i.e., identity disclosure and prior experience) and project (i.e., comments, updates, description elaborateness, and campaign duration) features have a positive effect on successful crowd fundraising. We also found a negative relationship between the funding goal amount and successful fundraising. Our findings may contribute not only to knowledge accumulation in crowdfunding research, but also to founders by offering evidence-based guidelines on the design of successful crowdfunding projects in an online fundraising platform.

A history of St Jude Children's Research Hospital.

A history of St Jude Children's Research Hospital.

"No Justice, No Peace": The Figure of Emmett Till in African American Literature

I take the first part of my title from the now-familiar cry of those who perceive the American judicial system to be hostile to their rights and concerns. In mm, the second part of my title alludes to one of the great injustices perpetrated by that judicial system. When, in September 1955, after sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, a Mississippi jury let Emmett Till's murderers, against all reasonable evidence, walk free, African Americans did not have in their arsenal of protest the slogan Justice, No Peace. But what they lacked in words they did not lack in sentiment, and African American newspapers throughout the country shouted out in protest against the infamous decision. In a memoir published in the Pittsburgh Courier a week after he returned from Mississippi, Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs proclaimed, Emmett Till trial is over, but we, as Negroes, should never forget its meaning. The fact that [J.W.] Milam and [Roy] Bryant were acquitted shows us how tremendous a job we face to bring complete democracy to our entire nation. Negroes and other clear-thinking Americans must combine their efforts to press for freedom and equality through both political and legal channels (4). A similar call to arms was expressed by a concerned reader of the Courier: Poor little Emmett Till was just another Negro--but above all he was a human being. We cannot return Emmett Till to the arms of his mother, but we can surely see that there will never be a repetition of this unforgiveable [sic] crime. Don't let that fourteen-year-old boy's life be lost for nothing. Demand and get a retrial for the two who are responsible for his death (Routledge 9). And demand they did. For several months, African American political and religious leaders sponsored Emmett Till protest rallies throughout the country. Gatherings in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, and Los Angeles attracted thousands of outraged protesters, and the mother of the slain boy, Mamie Till Bradley, joined forces with the NAACP and toured the nation, telling her story to packed auditoriums and churches and helping to generate one of the most successful fundraising and membership campaigns in NAACP history. As we all know, however, this community's search for justice in the courts failed. Not surprisingly, Milam and Bryant were never retried for murder in Mississippi, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell refused to bring the federal government into the case because the crime did not involve interstate activities. When, a month and half after their acquittal on murder charges, Milam and Bryant were found not guilty of kidnapping, a crime to which both had previously confessed, it soon became apparent that justice would never be secured in the case. As if to add final insult to final injury, in December of that year both men met with journalist William Bradford Huie from Look magazine, who paid them $4000 to tell their shocking story. Protected by laws against double jeopardy and the absence of far-reaching federal civil rights legislation, the two men told how they kidnapped Till from his uncle's house in the dead of night, beat and taunted him for several hours for daring to speak to a white woman, carried him to a local barn where they forced him to pick up a seventy-pound gin fan that they intended to tie around his neck after they killed him, how they then drove him to the Tallahatchie River where Milam shot him in the head with a single bullet, after which the two men tied the gin fan around Till's neck and, as a new day dawned in the east, dropped him from a bridge into the muddy waters below. (1) But the story of Emmett Till does not end here in the pages of Look magazine, and, as I want to argue in this essay, neither has the long search for justice in his case. Certainly, within a year of the murder most calls for legal justice had ceased, and, unlike that other high-profile Mississippi murder from the civil rights era, Byron de la Beckwith's early morning execution of Medgar Evers, there has never been a serious attempt to reopen the Till case. …

Successful Fundraising: Case Studies of Academic Libraries (review)

Editor Meredith Butler explains that her primary goal in developing this book was "to assist library directors and those who want to become fundraisers for libraries to learn more about fundraising and find answers to their questions." (p. 4) Authors with a broad spectrum of academic library fundraising experience contributed the 12 chapters of the book. The majority are deans or directors of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries in the United States although there is representation from a Canadian ARL director, a non-ARL library director, and two (non-library) fundraising professionals. Butler, herself a chapter contributor, is a widely regarded administrator who has served as Dean of the Library Faculty and Director of Libraries at the University at Albany, [End Page 683] State University of New York since 1989.

The Open Library. Financial and Human Aspects

The year 2000 Seminar of the LIBER architecture group in Warsaw provided an opportunity to discuss new frontiers in the development of library buildings. New ways of financing are needed in an economically fast changing world. It was impressive to hear from Robert Rzesos about the successful financing activities for the University library of Warsaw. Alan MacDougall gave an outstanding paper concerning successful fundraising activities for new library buildings, based on experiences he has made in Dublin. Graham Bulpitt gave an overview on income generation through library buildings.

Information and technology as management tools in today's development organization

AbstractChanges in technology lead to changes in the management infrastructure required for successful fundraising.

TIME IS MONEY: Suggestions for More Effective Fundraising in the 1990s

Successful fundraising is an ongoing, proactive process that requires a clear focus on donors' interests and aspirations. Key measures for timely goal attainment include researching prospective donors carefully, using volunteers effectively, and specifying requests when asking for gifts. Personal solicitations together with conscientious acknowledgments of donor gifts and volunteer efforts help expedite and sustain a fundraising campaign.

Creating a Successful Fund-Raising Letter

Abstract One of the most challenging tasks in a fund-raising campaign is creating a fund-raising letter, the most effective and efficient method of contacting potential donors. However, writing the letter calls for creative writing skills—skills fund raisers may not always possess.