4 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER MARKETING, VOL. 13 NO. 2 1996 pp. 4-13 © MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS 0736-3761
Introduction
There has been much debate on the relevance of the marketing concept to
nonprofit organizations since the late 1960s. The origins of this debate can be
traced to the Kotler and Levy (1969) classic article, “Broadening the concept
of marketing”. Since then work by many authors has contributed to
widespread acceptance that the marketing concept is applicable in a broad
range of contexts (Arndt, 1978; Kotler, 1986; Shapiro, 1973; Yorke, 1984).
Among practitioners, of all the management functions, marketing has
attracted the greatest interest in recent years (Lovelock and Weinberg, 1983).
The marketing concept has been adopted by many nonprofit organizations as
they have had to face new and complex marketplace problems (Kotler, 1979).
In the charity sector, these problems have arisen from changes in the social,
economic and political environment. Waning governmental and public
support has diminished their financial resources and charitable organizations
have looked to marketing to increase income from donations. In the UK
donations to charity are estimated at approximately £5.3 billion per annum,
that is, close to 1 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) (Halfpenny
and Lowe, 1994). In the USA the voluntary sector is the largest employer of
labor and its value represents 2.24 percent of the country’s GNP (Weber,
1990). The size and importance of the voluntary sector in the UK has
burgeoned in recent years. At present, there are over 176,000 charities
registered in England and Wales alone (Henderson, 1993) and there is an
increase of 4,000 every year (Burnett, 1993). This growth has led to a rapid
increase in competition among charities and marketing is now a crucial
fundraising function which enables an organization to compete effectively for
donor pounds.
Charities tend to spend the main part of their marketing budgets on
fundraising and, over two decades, authors have documented marketing’s
contribution to improving the operations of fundraisers (Guy and Patton,
1989; Kotler and Andreasen, 1991; Lovelock and Weinberg, 1984). A
significant part of this fundraising budget goes on mass fundraising, as
individuals are the biggest contributors to charities. In the UK about 80
percent of the total amount donated to charities is given by individuals and
about 80 percent of adults make some kind of donation in the course of the
year. This is broadly comparable with countries such as the USA, Canada
and Australia (Burnett, 1993).
Because such a large proportion of the income for charities is provided by
individual donations it is important that the design of fundraising campaigns
maximizes the response among these individual contributors. This article,
therefore, focusses on marketing for fundraising among individual donors.
Giving to charity: questioning
the donor decision process
Sally Hibbert and Suzanne Horne
The marketing concept
and nonprofit
organizations
Individuals are the
biggest contributors
An executive summary
for managers and
executives can be found
at the end of this article