Week 2

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog.

Since starting work at my onsite placement, I’ve gotten the chance to have a more in depth look into the way the fundraising process is organized. One thing that especially struck me this week was how the concept was broken down. By nature fundraising is an umbrella term, so who works on what aspect can be divided based on donation size, donation type, and which donors are being targeted, among other factors. Another interesting finding ties back into the language from the physical solicitation I identified last week. As I got to analyze a wider array of solicitation types going out to a broader range of potential and previous donors, the degrees of similarity and difference between the language used piqued my interest. There is an obvious need for consistency in an organization’s word choice when it comes to outreach, but a balance needs to be struck between the desire for consistency and effectiveness of a more personalized message. The amount of people being solicited at once also factors into this choice, with a more consistent and less personal message being favored the broader the target audience. 

As I continue to work at my onsite placement, I’ve also made substantial progress on the main body of my senior project: the research paper. After going through the sources I had gathered, I’ve compiled a first draft of the literature review section of the paper. Since this section will most likely be the largest part of the paper, I’m glad to have made more progress on it. Some of my next steps include incorporating more of my own analysis into the research I have so far, and generally planning out how I want to structure the information and paper as a whole. I also ran into the first major problem with my project, which has led me to slightly modify my research question. I found that having financial motivators as one of my motivation categories was too limiting of a definition, and couldn’t encompass all of the concepts I had aimed to cover with this motivating group. An example of this comes in some of the individual motivators I’ve identified: while tax benefits fit cleanly into the category of financial motivation and are a very important factor into why people donate, something like access to exclusive dinners and events as a result of giving to a cause doesn’t work as well, while still in a similar vein to what I had hoped to summarize in this motivating group. As a result, I’ve decided to extend the category into the broader idea of extrinsic motivators for giving, to give myself a broader net for categorization of factors that I found relevant, but didn’t fit anywhere else. 

See you all next week.