When Straight-Line Planning for Fundraising Doesn’t Work
Rich-get-richer effect seems to be most related to capitalism and free market economy, yet this phenomenon is also observed in seemingly unrelated field of economy: charity and fundraising. The Article When Straight-Line Planning Doesn’t Work written by Chris Percy, Andy Martin, and Ed Aspel provides one of most prominent examples by giving a list of recent major UK fundraising days.
The graph proves that even fundraising is “clearly a winners-win-big market.” This indicates two major points about charity market; first, larger the events are, the more money they will gather; second, there is clearly no linear relationship between the initial investment for fundraising and the campaign-day success. According to the article, “networks often evolve according to a “proportionate growth” pattern (the bigger you are, the faster you grow) or a “preferential attachment” pattern (new joiners to a network tend to be attracted to the biggest nodes first), leading to “winners win big” effects.” Indeed, this explanation complies with the mathematical rich-get-richer model, in which node j will exactly follow the decision made by node i with the probability of 1-p. This means that with certain given probability, one’s behavior in decision-making process will imitate that of others. So more a certain option is chosen by the population, higher the chance that option will be chosen again by the new individual.
Given this theory and the evidence from the real charity market, it is not a big surprise to realize that the campaign-day success of each fundraising event is highly uneven and unfair. The article therefore provides a new suggestion for change in campaign strategy; “it is better to have a share of a single breakout idea than to independently advance a handful of average ideas, even if the shared approach takes more effort.” In other words, collaboration becomes a more obvious choice for different smaller organizations when they organize fundraising events. Also, in order to quickly adopt a breakout campaign, fundraising organizations need to change to more flexible structures.
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/when_straight_line_planning_doesnt_work