Fundraising for Social Change, 7th Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE 7TH EDITION

This is a how-to book. Its goal is to provide organizations with budgets of less than $2,500,000 (which describes the vast majority of nonprofits) with the information they need to establish, maintain, and expand a successful fundraising program that is based on individual donors. A large number of individual donors who support the important work of an organization year in and year out give organizations maximum freedom to pursue their mission. This book will be particularly helpful to nonprofits with one or two staff people and a large number of active volunteers.

As with all the writing I have done on fundraising, this book is based on experience and observation. I wrote the first, second, and third editions of this book because there was almost no written information about fundraising for small organizations working for social change. Most of my writing has been an effort to teach organizations how to translate more traditional fundraising strategies practiced by large, mainstream organizations to their own settings. But in my lived experience as a development director, executive director, then as a trainer and consultant, I could see that activist organizations had a lot of important information to share but didn’t have the time to write it down. The fourth and fifth editions of Fundraising for Social Change had the advantage of other literature and research to draw on, and, of course, I had much more experience myself.

In the sixth edition ...