Comment 1 - Intro to Fundraising & McGee & Donoghue's Article

The Introduction to Fundraising from our Fundraising Crash Course gave a short explanation of what we would be learning as we read on throughout the book. While reading these two pages, I highlighted some key points that I thought stood out. I learned that the backbone of any nonprofit organization and business is its ability to raise funds and that the “process of fundraising is part science and part art.” What I felt stood out most of all was that if all an event does is raise money, the campaign “might not be as successful in the long term.” As I read on I found that if an organization falls short of funds “the fault should ultimately fall on the shoulders of your board.” I felt that a valuable strategy that was written in this introduction that I could probably use in the long run while taking this class was that funds might go away at any given moment and grant moneys are “temporary sources of funding.”

As for McGee and Donoghue’s article, they executed this article by using an example based on fundraising in Ireland due to the limited resources. These two authors state that “nonprofit organizations need to engage in fundraising as resource dependent organizations.” However, these two believe that there is a problem with this because nonprofits “rely on trustworthiness to attract resources..[but] they need to manage and negotiate the tensions that can arise from being perceived as..moving too far from their voluntary or nonprofit roots.” In effort, these two argue throughout the article that this dilemma has stopped the “effectiveness of the fundraising effort in Ireland.” In other words, these two authors believe that nonprofit organizations should primarily be seen as a volunteer activity. They also stated as one of their arguments that “organizations are not investing in their marketing effort and are not developing practice” which is inevitably “leading to a lack of development in the profession of fundraising.” In some way I agree with this because not all nonprofits tend strive or are motivated with the aspect of voluntary work and are instead ran by money which brings me back to what I had mentioned earlier from our Fundraising Crash Course book stating that if all an event does is raise money, the campaign “might not be as successful in the long term.” Voluntary work is extremely important for nonprofits because this is the basis of why they are founded and their mission.