Fundraising: Case Studies Although it

¶ … Fundraising: Case studies

Although it might seem more like an inspirational, rather than a promotional brochure, the Common Ground Center skillfully uses the psychology of marketing and advertising to solicit funding. The Center carefully delineates its fundraising needs at the end of its brochure, only after using a message of diversity and family togetherness to encourage readers to support its cause. It stresses how families today need but often fail to communicate, a sentiment likely to resonate with many potential donors. It also includes verbal and pictorial testimonials underlining benefits of intergenerational, multicultural bonding, the kind that can take place at the Center for families battling cancer, serious illnesses, and other problems that inhibit children's social functioning such as racism and a lack of social opportunities.

The brochure is filled with photographs of families benefiting from the work of the Common Ground Center. The need for funds is carefully broken down into comprehensible, easy-to-read pie charts, to show that donor dollars are being spent responsibly. The presence of the individual case studies of beneficiaries of the center is designed to personalize the Center's need and its mission, as well as tug upon the heartstrings. The stress upon diversity and how the Center creates an atmosphere of inclusion underlines an ideology presumably sympathetic with the likely donor's politics, while the evident need of beneficiaries also acts as a subtle form of guilt.

In contrast, the University of Kentucky' College of Health Sciences uses a cooler and more distanced technique. The positive social missions of the school encompass education and research. This benefits students, but also benefits society (and thus potential donors), by providing health professionals and higher-quality care to society as a whole. The University of Kentucky brochure's approach is less personalized in nature than the Center for Common Ground, other than showing photographs of the students and employees. The University takes a more verbally than a visually persuasive approach, and includes letters from official personnel and information about the school that dominate the visuals. The problem with this technique is that it is less emotionally compelling. The brochure's designers likely thought such a sober attitude was appropriate for a school's potential pool donors (such as the government and alumni). Yet it may also be less effective, particularly because it does not even indicate in a clear fashion how donor's contributions are used, unlike the Common Ground Center.