In 1988, tax-deductible donations to US charities surpassed One Hundred billion for the first time in US history and church fundraising was a major percentage of that number. To put it in perspective, One Hundred billion is more than the profit revenue of all the Fortune 500 companies put together. And if charitable giving were used as a sales figure, charitable organizations would rank #2 in the Fortune 500 behind only General Motors and almost Twenty billion ahead of Exxon Mobil. It’s no exaggeration to say church fundraising is major business.
The chase for charitable donations has reached new levels in recent years, particularly in church fundraising. To offset a decline in federal funding during the 1980s and to maximize their share of philanthropic giving, the estimated 800,000 organizations that are categorized by the IRS as charities are increasingly hiring fundraising managers and charging them to raise increasingly larger totals of gift revenue.
Although no dependable statistics are available, it can be guessed that tens of thousands of men and women today carry out fundraising jobs as paid workers involved in church fundraising as well as activities for other non-profit organizations. One meter of this growth is that membership in the National Society of Fund Raising Executives has grown from fewer than 2,000 to more than than 10,000 in only 10 years.
The practitioners, whether they are involved in church fundraising or raising donations for another organization, conduct prospect searches to identify potential givers, accept credit card payments from contributors, coordinate special events to cultivate givers, solicit gifts by direct mail, phonathons, proposals, and face-to-face meetings; and write and edit publications to report fundraising results and to recognize givers.
To help them carry out these jobs, practitioners rely on church fundraising principles that have changed through anecdotal material and studies that have primarily been administrative in purpose. Collectively, these principles form a dominant perspective of the church fundraising function that focuses on how to generate money without questioning the rationale for the function of its effect on recipient organizations and society.
Although varying opinions may be offered in response, church fundraising research has made little progress in answering these questions. Without a theoretical base founded in the literature of academic disciplines, church fundraising traditionally has been ignored by educators as a subject worthy of scholarly study.
Part-time practitioner/scholars generally have provided research on church fundraising that has been rare. Even though there has been a dramatic increase of scholarly activity in the area of philanthropy, church fundraising as an organizational function has not been identified as one of the agreed upon problems that define that domain of study. This lack of scholarly interest in church fundraising is shown by the fact that only 3% of research projects on philanthropy and nonprofit organizations over the last 5 years have focused on church fundraising, but interest in this topic continues to increase.
This article was written by Todd Nelson, Marketing Director for Capital Merchant Solutions, Inc (HolyProcessing.com). CMS has been in the merchant account business for nearly 10 years, and offers free merchant accounts to both online and retail businesses. CMS also offers special programs for Churches and their members. One of these unique programs is called "Automatic Tithing", which allows Churches to allow their members to automatically donate using their credit card or debit card. This article may be republished as long as absolutely no changes are made, and the resource box is included. Copyright 2007 – Capital merchant Solutions, Inc. – All rights reserved.
- Todd Nelson
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