Legacy fundraising: a practical guide to the basics

• Remember a Charity, the public awareness campaign run by over 130 charities in the UK, has stated that donations in wills are the largest single source of voluntary income for charities—currently worth £1.3 billion per year (April 2005).
• So can legacies to charity still be described as just windfall money? Should charities spend precious funds on promoting legacy giving when it is difficult to monitor results? It so, what is the message? Who are the target audiences? What form should legacy promotional literature take? What part could or should solicitors and funeral directors play in legacy campaigns? Patrick Wise looks back on his twenty plus years of experience in the world of charitable legacies, and gives his views on the answers to these questions, and why he thinks all charities should take legacy promotion very seriously.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using data in legacy fundraising: a practical approach

• Legacies provide a major source of income to charities, and their importance is only likely to increase with the passing on of the baby-boomer generation. Legacy fundraising is a long-term process, based on developing relationships with donors over time. Data have a key role to play in the development of these relationships, allowing legacy fundraisers to measure and track their donors, and to contribute to the development of effective fundraising strategies. This paper discusses the effective collection and use of data in legacy fundraising, from consolidating data, to analysing the results and building legacy targeting models. The authors discuss how these principles have been applied in UK-based charity, Help the Aged, in conjunction with their Data Agency, Tangible Data (formerly Talking Numbers) and to give practical advice on how they may be implemented in other organisations.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implications of corporate culture: a manager's guide to action

Drawing on cultural anthropology, Sathe develops a way of thinking about corporate culture that makes the concept analytically useful for dealing with managerial problems. He shows that by distinguishing between culture and behavior, and examining both simultaneously, it is possible to see more clearly why culture can be both an asset and a liability, and why it has such a subtle but powerful influence on organizational life. Not all cultures are equally powerful, however; Sathe presents some approaches for diagnosing a culture and understanding its strengths along with some implications for managerial action. Noting that a "perfect" culture-person fit is difficult to engineer, he makes suggestions for avoiding such mismatches and for better managing the culture shocks that inevitably hit the newcomer to an organization. He then turns to the question of how culture/person misfits may be understood and managed and what it takes to successfully deviate from the organization's culture when one is required to do so.     

Why comparative advantage is a problematic guide to practical policy

Previous criticisms of comparative advantage theory have mainly stressed the inapplicability of its theoretical assumptions. This article focuses on the dilemma involved in using it as a guide to practical policy. Since its inception, comparative advantage theory has gradually split into two schools, representing two ways of thinking and two methodologies. Economic policy based on comparative advantage may succeed in the short run but fail in the long run, because the development model based on this approach has an inherent destructive mechanism.     

打造强势企业文化引领企业快速发展

开滦集团范各庄矿业公司1964年10月投产,是我国第一座自行勘察、自行设计、自行施工建造的大型现代化矿井。企业年产原煤450万吨以上,年利润6亿元以上,是开滦集团的骨干矿井。改革开放30年为范各庄矿业公司的发展提供了前所未有的新机遇,注入了前所未有的新理     

浅谈如何用企业文化引领企业提升发展

随着市场竞争的日益激烈,企业之间的竞争越来越表现为文化的竞争。文章以中石化南京工程公司为例,主要分析了影响公司企业文化建设中的主要因素,提出了企业文化建设的作用、主要思路和途径等。     

中国区域城市体系演化实证研究

针对我国区域城市体系发展现状,对该体系的演化过程进行了实证分析,考察了我国城市体系的区域分布特征、区域城市体系的分布密度以及规模结构.研究结论显示,东部省份城市的数量和空间分布密度要明显高于中西部地区,说明东部地区城市体系的发育程度处于领先地位;同时,分析结果也表明,各地区城市体系的规模结构演化趋势较为一致,都经历了一个先分散、后集中的过程.     

Reassessing measures of sustainable firm performance: A consultant's guide to identifying hidden costs in corporate disclosures

Strategy, management, corporate social responsibility, critical accounting, and other business researchers frequently utilize financial metrics such as return on assets, return on equity, and return on sales as proxy measures for the financial performance of firms. Large data sets offer convenience but exclude the textual data of corporate disclosures that offers critical insight into specific executive actions and social and environmental outcomes. This study looks at the detrimental consequences of the prevalent practice of relying on macrofinancial metrics as measures of firm performance. Insight from the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM) is then applied to help an external analyst develop the perspective of an internal consultant to identify hidden costs in corporate disclosures. An extensive case on former CEO Robert Nardelli's tenure at Home Depot is presented as an example of applied SEAM theory to explore how a causal network of dysfunctions can be traced through publicly available financial disclosures. The management discussion and analysis as well as the executive incentive compensation formulas serve as a roadmap to discover hidden costs. The study offers a critical perspective of financial disclosures to allow researchers to externally diagnose dysfunctions sooner rather than years later, an insight formerly only available to internal consultants.     

Applying a stakeholder management approach to ethics in charitable fundraising

While nonprofit accountability literature recognizes many stakeholders, even theoretically grounded approaches to fundraising ethics tend to focus more narrowly on donors, organizations, and their missions. This paper draws on business ethics scholarship by proposing a stakeholder management approach to ethics in fundraising. This approach foregrounds intentional examination of the multiple stakeholders in the fundraising process: the organization; its donors; current beneficiaries; the broader population within the issue; the fundraisers themselves; and the community. Following stakeholder theory, ethical fundraising activities must align with the charitable mission of the organization, and take into account the legitimate interests of those groups and individuals who can affect, or be affected by, its activities. The process of intentionally identifying, prioritizing, mapping claims, engaging with, and monitoring stakeholders offers fundraisers, nonprofit executives, and members of governing and advisory boards a pragmatic means of aligning fundraising efforts with the mission, values, and long-term strategy of their organizations.     

Just keep it simple: a field experiment on fundraising letters

• This paper studies how the use of a colour picture in fundraising letters affect response rates and the amount donated in a fundraising campaign. Envelopes, with a full colour picture were tested against envelopes, without a picture in a controlled field experiment at a national religious charity in the Netherlands. Letters (89 937) were sent out to planned as well as incidental donors in four experimental groups. Results show that packages with more graphics yield lower donations, because both response rates are lower and the amount donated per letter is lower. We interpret this finding from donor aversion against high fundraising costs.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Selection of individuals to serve on major gift fundraising teams: a study of membership choice criteria

Major gift fundraising (MGF) is a crucial activity for large UK charities and is one that is normally undertaken by teams. This paper examines the criteria that the managements of large charities apply when selecting individuals to serve on MGF teams. It also explores possible connections between team composition and MGF success. A questionnaire exploring this matter was distributed to a sampling frame comprising 500 of the UK's largest fundraising charities, resulting in 151 replies. It emerged that MGF teams which contained people who had been chosen on the basis of their commitment to the MGF function, their communication and relationship nurturing abilities, and their wide‐ranging connections throughout an organisation were reported to perform better than teams that were not deliberately assembled in this way. The more background research was completed into an MGF prospect's circumstances and preferences and the more diverse an MGF team's composition, the higher the probability of success. However, team size did not exert significant effects on performance nor did (i) the personal status of any of a team's members or (contrary to expectations) (ii) the inclusion of individuals who knew a prospect personally. Teams with members who possessed extensive experience of MGF did not perform substantially better than others. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

着力构建以人为本的企业文化

以人为本是对人性基本规律和人的发展客观规律的尊重,符合当今时代发展的要求,也是实现企业管理最优化的必然要求。在新的历史时期,加快企业发展,构建和谐企业,应该全面建设和践行以人为本的先进文化,充分调动员工的主体力量,有效促进企业的发展和     

Do‐it‐yourself DRTV: a practical guide to making direct response television advertising work for charities

Direct response television advertising (DRTV) has been used by charities as a form of promotion for many years; in the case of the UK for over two decades. In that period many charities have tried the medium but only a handful have achieved consistent success. In the process, a layer of mystique has attached itself to DRTV and a number of outright myths have been perpetuated. DRTV should work for many more charities than currently use it. This is in contrast to other media which are in danger of being swamped by overuse by charities. Any charity raising or wishing to raise money from the general public should at least consider this medium. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

How can regional,local and national fundraising work together more closely? A case study — The WaterAid Munro Challenge 1995

The WaterAid Munro Challenge 1995 started life as a small, local, hill-climbing event and after the event's potential was recognised WaterAid decided to execute the event nationally. This paper examines how the transition was managed, how the nine regional committees were co-ordinated, and how some of the difficult issues were tackled from one office with one staff member.     

A quantitative approach to corporate social responsibility programme formulation

This paper proposes a quantitative methodology to support executive decision making in the allocation of scarce resources to competing demands in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The Analytical Hierarchy Process is used to translate subjective value judgements such as preferences and perceptions into quantitative measures. These utility values are then used to isolate the factors which determine the choice among the competing CSR programmes. The approach is illustrated with two case studies of South African organizations.