Fund Raising Consultancy and PR

Professional fund raising techniques have been developed relatively recently (in the last fifty years or so in the US and “imported” to the UK in the late 1950s) and give a good range of methods for the development of a base of influence through which a particular end can be achieved. In fund raising consultancy financial influence is all important. Techniques employed thus aim to research and identify potential sources of finance for a project, identify particular individuals with the maximum influence on the application of funds from those sources, develop the involvement of those individuals in the aims of the project so that their influence will be brought to bear on the sources of funds they represent. Clearly this process can be applied equally as well to non‐financial targets as to financial ones; the process in fact provides a well defined methodology for tackling personal communications problems of the kind frequently encountered by public relations agencies, management consultants and lobby consultants. This monograph commences in Part I with a detailed description of the development, theory and practice of fund raising consultancy, including two descriptive case histories. It then discuses in Part II the role of public relations, both in relation to communications theory and to the marketing mix, and concludes with examples from a detailed survey carried out by the author of some of the types of problems currently undertaken by PR agencies which would benefit from the application of communications techniques developed in fund raising.