Global Fundraising

How the World is Changing the Rules of Philanthropy

Penelope Cagney, Bernard Ross

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118417263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

A practical guide to the challenges and successes of global fundraising, written by an international team of highly respected philanthropy professionals and edited by two of the leading nonprofit thinkers, Global Fundraising is the first book to genuinely offer a global overview of philanthropy with an internationalist perspective.

As the world becomes more interdependent, and economies struggle, global philanthropy continues to increase. More than that, nonprofits are taking up roles that have traditionally been filled by the government—including social welfare, healthcare, and human rights. GlobalFundraising provides complete coverage of the implications of this growth for nonprofit culture and how it drives changes in fundraising practices.

• Organized into thematic chapters—a mixture of geographic and topical issues—it places North American philanthropy in a wider context
• It features a companion website with a variety of online tools and materials
• The book includes contributions by international leading experts Matt Ide, Mair Bosworth, Usha Menon, Anup Tiwari, Paula Guillet de Monthoux, Angela Cluff, Norma Galafassi, Mike Muchilwa, Tariq Cheema, Lu Bo and Nan Fang, Masataka Uo, Chris Carnie, Sean Triner, Andrea McManus, Marcelo Inniarra, Ashley Baldwin, Rebecca Mauger, YoungWoo Choi, R.F. Shangraw, Jr., Sudeshna Mukherjee, and Anca Zaharia.

The book skillfully tracks how the world of fundraising is changing rapidly due to a number of factors including: continuing growth of great wealth; non-profit innovation emerging everywhere; growth of indigenous NGOs; increased professionalism in fundraising; and the value and role of new and social technologies. Written by a team of philanthropy leaders, GlobalFundraising offers timely coverage of fundraising around the world. A must-have for INGO leaders and anyone, anywhere, interested in the future of philanthropy and effective fundraising practices.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Global Fundraising

PENELOPE CAGNEY AND BERNARD ROSS

Editing this book has been a humbling and exciting experience; humbling because, as two experienced—and supposedly internationally savvy—fundraisers, we were constantly impressed at the extraordinary achievements in fundraising happening outside the North American/European bubble; and exciting because many of those developments seemed to offer innovation or developments that have implications for European and U.S. fundraisers. Just as the economic balance is changing in the world, so the balance in fundraising may be changing.

What This Book Is About

This book is about global developments in philanthropy that are rocking the fundraising world and shattering conceptions about where philanthropy is strong and where fundraising innovation and creativity exist. This book presents successes from India, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Japan, and many other countries that inspire fundraisers. The book is also intended to enlighten readers about specific areas of fundraising important to the new global order—technology, innovation, and major donors. It is also about truly global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—the charity giants—that in relative scale are like the behemoth Jupiter is in relationship to the other planets of the solar system.

Who This Book Is For

First and foremost, this book is for fundraisers, everywhere. It is also for nonprofit CEOs who are considering the philanthropic potential outside of their own country’s borders. It is for other nonprofit professionals who work hand in hand with fundraisers and must understand these new global developments to most effectively carry out their own work. Those involved with grant-making and other philanthropy will learn from profiles of exemplary yet little-known international philanthropists and about general developments in the nonprofit sector worldwide. The book is for those who provide essential infrastructure for the sector—the associations, regulatory bodies, and resource organizations. Finally, this book is designed to open the eyes of anyone who still thinks that fundraising and philanthropy are the prerogative of North Americans and Europeans alone.

About the Editors and Contributors

Editor Bernard Ross is recognized around the world as one of the few whose fundraising, training, and management consulting expertise and experience really spans the globe. One of his company’s (=mc) specialties is meeting the unique needs of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). He is a regular presenter at fundraising conferences around the world including the Resource Alliance’s International Fundraising Congress (IFC) and AFP International’s annual convening.

Editor Penelope Cagney has more than two decades of fundraising consulting experience on three continents. Early in her career she recognized the growing influence of globalization on the nonprofit sector. After graduate study of the growth of private sector funding in Great Britain, she cofounded a consulting firm there. It was then that the editors first met and had their first literary collaboration on a book about nonprofit management.

The contributors to this book are top professionals from around the world whose achievements would be recognized anywhere. Most of them are fundraising practitioners and consultants who have helped advance the work of many of the most significant NGOs on earth. All of them have been chosen not only for their success in the field, but also for their understanding, insight, and contribution to the development of philanthropy in their own region.

Seven Global Megatrends

There are some megatrends we spotted while reviewing the inputs from the skilled and experienced contributors featured in this book.

As you read this book we’d be glad to know if you pick up on the same broad issues and if they represent your view on the big trends that are happening. You may well look at the same data and think differently about it.

Trend 1: There Is a Continuing Growth of Great Wealth and Some of It Is Being Diverted to Philanthropy

Great wealth is no longer confined to the developed world—but it is still concentrated in a small number of countries. It is also concentrated in the hands of a small number of people as global inequalities increase. The inequalities exist in many nations—but they raise some significant challenges in territories like those in the Gulf or nations like Russia where there is a more limited commitment to transparency about how wealth is acquired or distributed. For fundraisers the challenge may not simply be securing funds but ensuring that the funds secured will fit with the value and ethical base of their charity.

Regardless of the ethical challenges about who really owns the money, or even how they got it, there is a growing interest among nonprofits in major donors, with increasing numbers of domestic and international NGOs making specialist appointments to improve their potential. But this organizational issue in fundraising is not necessarily matched by donor interest in philanthropy. So although the Giving Pledge has taken off in the United States, it has been less successful in engaging the rich elsewhere. And Carlos Slim—one of the world’s richest men—has publicly expressed his frustration at the poor performance of NGOs in addressing the challenges in his native Mexico. Many philanthropists indeed are setting up their own operating agencies or looking for new ways to deliver change. This is a challenge to NGOs that have believed that all philanthropy should be channeled through them.

Even where NGOs are the preferred channel, the culture of philanthropy needs to take root and become more sophisticated to enable fundraisers to do their work well. In parallel we need donors to become more effective in how they invest. If not we may see more of the dreadful if well-meaning philanthropic ineptitude of Madonna in Malawi and Oprah Winfrey in South Africa.

Trend 2: Nonprofit Innovations, in Fundraising and Elsewhere, Are No Longer Coming Just from the United States or Europe

There are exciting and challenging innovations growing up in fundraising in India and China and Argentina and Kenya. These innovations are not simply technological, but may relate to recognition of how different cultures can engage in fundraising and philanthropy. By learning about these developments we may inform our own learning on fundraising.

In Argentina, for example, there are extremely high levels of online giving. This is partly a result of a poor postal system. But that lack of a postal system has driven charities to be more creative and imaginative in the way they engage with donors—moving to online engagement on a scale only dreamed of elsewhere.

In Ethiopia we’re seeing some of the largest mass participation events in the world, especially marathons but also telethons—creating simple acquisition channels for charities to gain access to potential donors.

Hogar de Christo in Chile is a parish and faith-based charity that relies on the world’s largest and possibly best-organized team of volunteers and door-to-door collections to deliver fundraising results. At a time when many charities are struggling to engage volunteers, this domestic NGO offers real insights into new ways of gathering and aligning supporters.

In Thailand Cabbages and Condoms1 avoids donor-based fundraising and instead runs commercial businesses to raise cash for its social projects. (And it does so as a conscious and successful choice.) Thanks to its success as a socially engaged business it not only runs a chain of restaurants and a holiday resort but it uses the significant profits generated to pay for education, HIV work, prison reform projects, and many more.

We see the same phenomenon in Kenya where the Red Cross Society, once financially dysfunctional, now successfully runs a chain of hotels that provide income for its relief services.

All of these experiments contain important lessons for any fundraiser anywhere in the world.

Trend 3: Indigenous NGOs/NPOs2 Continue to Grow in Number throughout the World, But There Are Some Leviathans Emerging

As the role of the state is challenged worldwide, charities, NPOs (nonprofit organizations) and NGOs are growing in number and increasingly taking on civil society roles in health, education, and social service. So the Red Cross in Kenya has set up and runs a successful ambulance service where the government service is seen as ineffective. This growth—for example, the number of NGOs in the Philippines has grown by 50 percent in the past 10 years—is increasing pressure on fundraisers and fundraising to deliver more money for more causes.

At the same time a small number of large INGOs—Save the Children, UNICEF, World Vision, for example—have broken away in growth terms to form a super league of agencies able to fundraise and operate almost anywhere in the world. They have aggressive market entry strategies, significant investment funds, and teams dedicated to setting up and sustaining fundraising domestic operations. To many domestic NGOs these agencies can seem like Walmart or McDonald’s—a form of unwelcome globalization.

These super league agencies can invest in developing new markets and are aggressively doing so. Some markets—Brazil, South Korea, India—represent the fundraising equivalent of BRICs. And just as businesses are flocking to BRICs, so INGOs are flocking to these high-growth philanthropic markets.

Most of these agencies are European or North American in origin and act in many ways like commercial multinationals. Surprisingly, perhaps, there are still only early signs of a developing world agency growing to global INGO status. Early candidates like Asia’s BRAC and Grameen have grown and work in a number of countries. But both may never really grow to global status as they suffer under significant political pressure as result of their success and growth.

Trend 4: There Is Considerable Debate Worldwide about the Role of Philanthropy and the Role of the State

There is certainly a growth in adoption of the capitalist/free-market ideology worldwide generally—despite the recent global financial crisis and the challenges offered by the Occupy movement and other critics.

Philanthropy in some areas is a companion ideology to free-market capitalism. An increased role for fundraising is being accelerated by the global financial crisis—philanthropy is being asked to do more as governments have reduced funds and so seek to do less.

As noted earlier, specifically there is a perceived growing role for wealthy donors. This approach is shared in the book Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop. It can be summarized as “a new approach to solving social problems based on innovative partnerships between business, nonprofits, and government.”3 In practice the partnership seeks to draw in corporations and wealthy individuals to what has historically been a governmental space in many countries.

But it’s important to stress that not everyone agrees with this growth in the role of philanthropy in addressing social challenges. The Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge has not played well in some European and Eastern nations where some millionaires have seen the pledge as potentially undermining the “proper” role of the state in education, in health, and in social security. In this case they may see the proper role for wealthy individuals’ philanthropy as more focused in other directions like culture, medical research, and overseas aid.

The growth of philanthropy is also tied to demo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Global Fundraising
• Part I: An Overview of Giving by Region
• Part II: Overall Topics in Giving
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index