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NEW: The Love Project - Volume 1

This is the first of three research reports on the study of love in fundraising. In this report, we review the literature and what we presently understand about the science of love and its relevance on the way we practice our fundraising. We then pull together literature from other fields to generate a Fundraising Taxonomy of Love.

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NEW: The Love Project - Volume 2

Love in the context of fundraising has been the subject of surprisingly little research to date. This report explores which forms of love are appropriate in fundraising and how love can impact behaviour and how we might feel about our “self” and our philanthropy.

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Development Plans and Fundraising Performance

The first study of its kind to examine how planning is undertaken in the fundraising sector and its impact on income. This report presents new data from a study of 325 fundraisers globally, demonstrating the importance of fundraising planning[i] and providing statistical evidence to show that strategic planning drives higher income growth, donor retention and fundraiser confidence. While the large majority of organisations do have fundraising plans in place and recognise the need for strategic planning, the report identifies that many lack philanthropic culture[ii] and engagement from the board.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our report’s sponsors; Barbara O’Reilly (Windmill Hill Consulting), Matthew J. Beem (Hartsook Companies) Bloomerang and Donor Search.

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Donor Retention

We generated this report for the Association of Fundraising Professionals a couple of years ago. It summarises what we know from academic and professional research about why people stop giving and what organisations might do about it. This may also be a helpful review because readers can obviously source the particular studies that speak to the issues their organisation is addressing.

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Everything Research Can Tell Us About Legacy Giving in 2018

With legacy giving on the rise across the world, there is a significant opportunity for charitable organisations to engage their donors in a conversation about what they want to pass on to future generations. Yet so many say they lack the knowledge, tools and confidence to do that well.

So, Legacy Voice commissioned a major literature review (a world’s first actually), and asked some of the leading academics in fundraising to pull together everything that research can tell us about legacy giving.

The result is an in depth report, compiled from more than 150 papers across fundraising, marketing, sociology, psychology and behavioural economics.

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Fundraising Self-Regulation: An Analysis and Review

This report explores existing research and thinking around fundraising self-regulation including definitions, drivers, accountability, effectiveness and resources.

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Great Fundraising

Our outstanding fundraising project looks at how and under what circumstances, organisations develop exceptional fundraising. We explore the practices of successful leaders, concluding that what makes leaders exceptional is their ability to think differently from their peers. We explore the thinking processes of some of the sector’s most innovative and successful fundraisers and provide a series of case studies of cutting edge professional practice.

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Great Fundraising and Brands

In the commercial sector, brands are quite literally big business. Many have argued that brands can facilitate strong fundraising. This report explores the value of brands to fundraising asking what is it about brands that facilitates excellence in fundraising and how do organisations manage the dynamic to ensure that their brands are indeed leveraged to deliver massive fundraising growth?

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Great Fundraising Events

Our fundraising events project investigates what it is that ultimately makes an event successful, and how nonprofits running events can provide new and exciting forms of value for participants. The report examines the major themes that emerged from both researcher analysis and international interviewee contributions.

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Growing Philanthropy UK Summit

Forty years of increasingly sophisticated fundraising practice, the development of regular (monthly) giving, the appearance of the internet and the rise of new digital channels have seemingly done little to increase our generosity. In this paper we address this issue, drawing on the discussions that took place at the UK’s first Growing Philanthropy Summit, held at the Hilton Metropole Hotel in London on 6 July 2011.

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Growing Philanthropy US Summit

Forty years of increasingly sophisticated fundraising practice, the development of planned giving vehicles, the appearance of the internet and the rise of new digital channels have done nothing to move the needle on giving. The intention of this paper is to address this issue, drawing on the available research and the discussions that took place at the nation’s first Growing Philanthropy Summit, held in Washington, D.C. on 9 June 2011.

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How Boards Can Help Create Sustainable Growth in Schools and H.E. Institutions

This research explains why fundraisers and board members need to work together and how, both for the organisations outcomes’ and their own fundamental human needs, in order to drive sustainable fundraising growth. Looking specifically at schools and universities, the research suggests how fundraising strategy can transform the way a mission is accomplished and build a fundraising system for substantive growth.

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Insights into the Future of Philanthropic Innovation: Philanthropic Literacy for Future Leaders

This study provides insight into the future of philanthropic innovation and how it might best be managed. Using a mixed method approach including an extensive literature review and interviews with sector leaders, we distilled the collective thinking into a new theoretical construct, “philanthropic literacy”, which has the potential to make the future a much better place.

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Learning to Say Thank You: The Role of Donor Acknowledgements

How should we be thanking supporters? Should we thank donors for their gift, for the difference they have made or for being the kind of person they are or would like to be? And should a thank-you be designed differently for donors at different stages in their relationship?

Do certain types of thank-you allow donors to experience higher levels of well being and what does this mean for subsequent behaviour? Our latest report has the answers.

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Loyalty Meets Philanthropic Psychology

In this report, we discuss a large scale survey we undertook with donors of two large national non-profits, measuring satisfaction, commitment and trust together with a range of variables drawn from philanthropic psychology and future giving intentions.

Recording data a year later, we found that what predicts giving intentions is broadly NOT what predicts actual behaviour. Rather, what appears to drive subsequent behaviour is how giving leaves people feeling.

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Major Gift Fundraising: Unlocking the Potential for Smaller Nonprofits

Major gift philanthropy plays a significant role in the nonprofit sector around the world. To date, relatively little academic interest has focused on how major gifts are solicited and the critical factors that should be managed in order to achieve superior performance.

In this report we draw together strands of literature to identify what critical success factors might be in the context of major gift fundraising and in particular, what they might be in smaller organisations reporting an income of $10 million or less.

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Meaningful Philanthropy in the 21st Century: The Role of Self

Executive Summary, January 2023

In our latest research, we explored the motivations of High and Ultra High Net Worth Individuals when considering their philanthropy. We found the success of a philanthropist is never defined by how much money or even the percentage of their wealth that they give. It is almost always defined by meeting goals that are meaningful for the communities they care about.

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The full research is available in a book ‘Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind The Giving’

Measuring donor loyalty: key reasons why Net Promoter Score (NPS) is not the way

This paper reviewed the weaknesses of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measure of donor loyalty for fundraisers working in nonprofit organizations, argued that the measure is fundamentally
flawed and inappropriate for use in this context, and outlined six major critiques of the NPS approach and offered an alternative way of measuring future loyalty and value.

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Philanthropic Orientation: A Review of the Literature

In this report, we explore what it might mean for an organisation to develop a culture of philanthropy or a strategic “philanthropic orientation.” The report documents the evidence that different “business orientations” do make a difference to organisational performance, notably market orientation. We review that literature and posit what a philanthropic culture (or orientation) might look like and what organisations should seek to manage to actively build one.

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Philanthropic Orientation: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

We were asked by Brook Recognition to define and scope what it might mean for an organisation to have a “philanthropic orientation” and to look at the relationship between the extent to which such an orientation has been adopted, and key aspects of organisational performance including revenue growth, donor retention, fundraiser confidence, and fundraiser identity importance and esteem. This paper reports the results of that early empirical testing and suggests a plausible model.

Philanthropic orientation is posited as including donor centricity, philanthropic core, case quality, board engagement, professional engagement, innovation orientation, interfunctional collaboration, and donor feedback.

Watch this space though as further work on scales to measure philanthropic orientation is ongoing, working in partnership with our friends at the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies.

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Relationship Fundraising - Volume 1

Volume 1 – The Why Relationship marketing has completely transformed the way businesses interact with consumers. Volume 1 explores why the concept matters for nonprofits by assessing whether this can be transferred to fundraising and under what circumstances.

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Relationship Fundraising - Volume 2

Volume 2 – The How Volume 2 explores how fundraisers can utilize and adapt current and emerging theories in social psychology to build better relationships that help meet their donors’ needs.

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Relationship Fundraising - Volume 3

Volume 3 – The Who In Volume 3, leading relationship fundraising practitioners from around the world describe current trends in relationship fundraising and outline some of key challenges they think it faces, and what the profession needs to do to meet those challenges.

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Relationship Fundraising - Volume 4

Volume 4 – What Next? As the Executive Summary of the ground breaking Relationship Fundraising research, Volume 4 helps you put insight into action by summarizing the findings from volumes 1-3 and recommending future directions that relationship fundraising could take going forward.

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Relationship Fundraising 3.0

In this report, we chart the development of the concept of relationship fundraising, tracking trends in both academic and practitioner perspectives. Relationship Fundraising 3.0 builds on the new science of Philanthropic Psychology to form a new approach based on four years of experiments with fundraising communications with uplifts in excess of 100% in real world giving.

Relationship Fundraising 3.0 can dramatically increase giving while at the same time deliver enhanced levels of supporter satisfaction and wellbeing.

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Risk and Philanthropy

This report examines how various development actors might encourage philanthropists to take and accept more risk in their philanthropy. Our Rockefeller Foundation and Resource Alliance funded report analyses the results of a series of interviews with some of the world’s leading development philanthropists, development agencies and intermediary organisations.

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NEW: The Love Project - Volume 1

This is the first of three research reports on the study of love in fundraising. In this report, we review the literature and what we presently understand about the science of love and its relevance on the way we practice our fundraising. We then pull together literature from other fields to generate a Fundraising Taxonomy of Love.

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The Science of Legacy Fundraising

We have been working with Listen to test how the latest academic thinking can be applied to telephone legacy fundraising. In this report, we explore what psychological factors drive legacy decisions. We then go on to investigate how best to apply this understanding during telephone conversations, and to identify the most meaningful and positive ways to support legacy decision-making.

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What price Fundraising Regulation?

Adrian Sargeant’s opinion piece on the new Fundraising Regulator, April 2017

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[i] The Institute operationalised fundraising performance to constitute revenue growth, donor retention (first year and subsequent), and fundraiser confidence in respect of their ability to achieve their fundraising objectives.

[ii] The Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy measures philanthropic culture against six metrics, including donor centricity; philanthropic core; significant board engagement with fundraising; respect for fundraising as a profession; an emotional/compelling case for support; and innovation in relation to fundraising.