FUNDRAISING FOR SOCIAL IMPACT
PA F388L Fall 2023
Course Description
This is a practical course on applying grant-writing and direct fundraising skills. Each student in each class will develop her/his/their own project to raise money in a topic area of personal interest and with a client; self-clients are acceptable. The course addresses legal techniques (other than taxes) for raising resources for not-for-profit or governmental activities: grants, contracts, direct fundraising, swaps, gifts, deferred giving, etc. Course materials include video presentations from people in diverse public sector and non-profit institutions involved in the process of raising and managing funds. Topics include: presentation of self and organizations, project development, the proposal process, project assessment, and project financial management. Additional subjects include: diversity of information of grant sources, planned giving, capital campaigns, political fundraising, on-line or digital fundraising, benefit events, annual or renewable giving, strategic fundraising plans, as well as processes for raising and spending money through philanthropy.
The course is directed at two sets of participants: working professionals and graduate students. Employees of local/state governments, non-profit organizations, or political parties can benefit from the course by developing skills directly applicable to their current or future jobs. Students with dissertation or thesis research ideas can use the course to prepare funding requests. As this is a graduate level course, it is expected that a person who enrolls either will have completed an undergraduate degree or will have practical experience equivalent to an undergraduate degree.
This syllabus includes recorded video content of lectures by speakers. These lectures will be useful to students as they will be able to learn from professionals in each topic area about practices in the field. The syllabus includes diverse materials from previous students who have taken the class; those materials include recorded video content, presentation slides, notes, and website links. This content will be useful to students to be able to visualize what can be accomplished by students seeking to raise funds from donors.
Note: The recorded presentations included in this syllabus have been automatically captioned without subsequent editing, and captions are therefore not necessarily representative of actual words spoken.