Week 4

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. 

This week at my onsite placement I continued to speak with more gift officers on the various roadblocks associated with encouraging donations, and was able to see more of the topics I’ve been writing about be actively reflected. One such topic was the idea of an organization’s projected values potentially affirming or dissuading a donor from donating: if a donor shares the values an organization puts forward they will be more likely to provide a charitable contribution, but if that organization’s values conflict with the donor’s own ideals, the opposite is true. These dual points lead to the inevitability that some number of potential donors will always feel opposed to an organization’s values and not donate, and this manifests itself with different donor age groups at the foundation. One of the main struggles being faced in the effort to attract more donors is the difference between the values of younger and older generations of donors, and since the organization in this case is a college associated with the state, a number of differences come up. These include the balance between the college’s past identity and its growth and evolution changing it from the organization it used to be, and differences in whether or not people want to support an organization affiliated with the state. These constraints make it especially important to find the right balance between the values an organization projects. Some of the values the organization currently projects are of academic integrity, educational and personal growth, and general community ideals. These are more general concepts that are in line with the goal of reaching a broader base of donors. 

Alongside work at the foundation, I’ve also, as ever, continued work on the research paper. This week I focused on further improving readability by adding subtitles and splitting up my longer paragraphs. I also began to write the paper’s introduction, and am in the process of finding more statistics to further build it out. I’ve also continued making progress on the strategies section of the paper, and my next steps for it include further breaking it up into subsections to improve readability, and incorporate an introduction and overview of some important concepts relevant to the section. Once that’s done I’ll start work on the paper’s conclusion, and with that the first draft will be complete.

For those who are interested, an article on the employment of specific values can be found here: https://doi-org.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.1353/sof.0.0191 

See you all next week.