Fundraising and Social Marketing in the Non-governmental Organizations

Abstract

Identifying and accessing funding sources has always been a challenge for non-governmental organizations. Social marketing, through the special techniques taken from the marketing of economic companies and adapted to social organizations, managed to come up with a new perspective for identifying these important revenues for the sustainability of organizations. This paper describes the results of an exploratory qualitative research, the objective of which was to identify the difficulties faced by non-governmental organizations, especially from the perspective of fundraising. The research was carried out in the period 2020–2022, on a number of 15 non-governmental organizations accredited by the Romanian Government, from Brasov County, Romania. Data collection was carried out through interviews, both semi-structured and unstructured with people from the management structures of the non-governmental organizations. The results of the research show that the difficulties of non-governmental organizations are related to the lack of human resources and the lack of finance. Although they make great efforts to have funds to provide social services to beneficiaries, we can observe that most nongovernmental organizations do not follow a model or strategies of social marketing and funding, which limits the development of the organizations. This research highlights that social marketing strategies come with ingenious solutions for the financial stability of non-governmental organizations, strategies that need to be known by both, non-governmental organizations, and businesses.