People in nonprofits often imagine that it would be easier to raise money for a different NGO than the one they are in. People in the arts think social service fundraising is a cinch, people in advocacy imagine that providing free legal services would really loosen the purse strings, environmentalists covet the fundraising jobs of labor rights activists, and so on. For the most part, people kid themselves that fundraising would be much easier in another setting, but occasionally special circumstances make fundraising more difficult for certain kinds of organizations or at certain times in an organization's existence. An accurate analysis of your fundraising situation is essential for creating a robust and sustainable fundraising program.
Most of the problems an organization has will show up in its income, and often show up there first, leading people in the organization to think that funding or fundraising is their problem. However, it is worth a few moments to understand that challenges seemingly related to fundraising are often symptoms of different problems, ones that must be solved before fundraising (or even fundraising problems) can be addressed. We have discussed examples of how an organization's own myopia may affect its fundraising, but external factors also play a much bigger role than organizations realize. An organization's fundraising may be diminished for any of the following reasons:
- When the economy is in really bad shape, people just don't have that much money to give. With rising concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few and a massively increasing number of people at or near poverty, fundraising will be affected.
- A scandal in a large, well‐known nonprofit can cause distrust of all nonprofits and decrease revenues temporarily. A series of scandals can cause an overall decline in public confidence, which takes a toll on fundraising.
- The sheer number of nonprofits asking for donations can contribute to donor fatigue.
Natural disasters, wars, and elections take attention and sometimes funding away from the day‐in and day‐out work of organizations. The COVID pandemic, along with the disasters brought about by climate change, continue to absorb a great deal of donor concentration.
Issues come into style and go out of style; long after it has ceased to be popular to fund solutions to a particular problem, the problem will still exist.
This section focuses on two of the more common special circumstances that an organization may find itself in, being brand new or being rural; and two common structural issues, fundraising for a coalition, and being an all‐volunteer organization.
These four should give you a sense of how to think through special circumstances of your own and make fundraising plans that overcome the adversity and take advantage of the opportunity the special situation presents.