Major
Marketing
Advisor
Leonard, Hillary
Advisor Department
Marketing
Date
5-2011
Keywords
marketing; non-profits; charity; organization
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Abstract
I am a senior Marketing major, and I wanted to incorporate what I have learned the past four years into my honors project. Acting as a consultant to a local non-profit here in Rhode Island, I developed a marketing plan to help The Welcome House target their local affluent community. The mission of Welcome House is to provide emergency shelter to homeless men, women & families of Washington County, and to provide transitional, supported, permanent, affordable and safe housing to the poor of the community.
Homelessness is becoming a tiring and depressing subject due to its repetitive negative exposure and government’s lack of funding. Due to declining local, state & federal funding, the Welcome House is seeking affluent donors for financial support in order to be more self-sustaining. Their main objective is to increase the level of donations by building brand recognition within the affluent community.
Wealthy donors have high expectations of charitable organizations, ranking the following factors most important when determining which non-profit to support:
1) The demonstration of sound business and operational practices
2) The detailed information about the organization’s effectiveness in meeting goals
3) The protection of personal information along with full financial disclosure.
In addition there are key pieces of relationship building such as trust, stewardship and commitment that the Welcome House also needs to consider when it comes to donors, and getting to know when and how they want to be asked to support an organization