Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, Third Edition

Understanding Marketing

What is constituency development but marketing? Relationship marketing.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”8 Marketing is not selling. ``Here’s my product, will you buy it?” That’s selling. Marketing starts with a blank page. ``Who are you? What are you interested in? What do you want or need?” Then you create a product to suit.

As Ken Burnett wrote when introducing the term “relationship fundraising,” it is ``an approach to the marketing of a cause which centres not around raising money but on developing to its full potential the unique and special relationship that exists between a charity and its supporter.”9

Ken10 went on to state:

Whatever strategies and techniques are employed to boost funds, the overriding consideration in relationship fundraising is to care for and develop that special bond and not to do anything that might damage or jeopardise it. In relationship fundraising every activity of the organization is therefore geared towards making donors feel important, valued, and considered. In this way relationship fundraising will ensure more funds per donor in the long term.11

Yes, customer-centered and donor-centered are the most productive way to perform. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s the moral way to behave. This customer-centric and ...