Week 1

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. 

The main highlight of this week was starting at my onsite placement: the Brooklyn College Foundation. The work I’m doing here provides insight into the process of fundraising, and many of the motivating factors identified in my preliminary research have been reflected in the employed appeals. One of the most prevalent examples is that of social motivators. As I examined various examples of physical outreach the Foundation sends out to potential donors, I noticed that the notions of a collective effort and joining the community were present in nearly all of the pamphlets and envelopes. Much of the language in the captions present on each was geared towards this idea of community, tying back into the concepts of social visibility and the mentality of “buying-in” that motivate people to give. Since much of the target base of donors for the foundation are alumni, this focus on community and social motivation make sense. Many nudges I’d previously explored also came up, implemented in extensive highlighting of the ways donations have been allocated, potential positive impacts a donation could have, and specific testimony from recipients and people who have been positively impacted by the college as a whole. In addition to the physical outreach, I was able to learn about other influential factors in the Foundation’s outreach, including their fundraising calendar and segmentation of the donor-base. This provided examples of currently employed strategies and other external elements to take into consideration, including effective timing for solicitation and the likelihood of different age ranges to donate.

Aside from work at my onsite placement, my independent research has continued. So far, the majority of work done has been in gathering sources for review, though I’ve started on notes for some of them. Worryingly, my compiled research document is already fifteen pages long. A rough estimate tells me that at the end of this project that document should be around eighty-three pages. The research I’ve done so far has been mostly into the motivating factors, as per the first phase of my research outline, though I plan to pivot into behavioral economic concepts relatively soon. My guess is that by the next blog post, my compiled research will be around twenty-six pages in length, but we’ll confirm the accuracy of that prediction later on.

See you all next week.