Decision Support Systems for the Management of the Fund Raising Process: a Review

In fund raising management, an important research field in Social Economics, many databases (DB) are available for the Non Profit Associations (NPOs) in order to optimize their activity; in fact, the information on Donors and Contacts is crucial in order to decide their fund raising strategies. For large-sized and medium-sized NPOs, the information takes into consideration both quantitative and qualitative features; the first ones concern information on the donations and some Donors’ characteristics while the second ones are about advanced features of the Donors’ personal profile, like the personal interests and the relationships network. The small-sized Associations normally store only some quantitative information or do not use a DB to decide their strategies at all. Many software packages are available, which query the DB to support the management for the decisions. However, these products, even though very specialized and customized for each kind of Association, do not represent an actual Decision Support System (DSS), because they exploit only sketchily the large amount of available information. For this reason, for more than one decade a wide quantitative research filed has been developing to create DSSs which are able to properly use the DB information to optimize the fund raising strategies. These DSSs employ advanced mathematical techniques, which are appropriately selected basing on the specific examined Association class or on the considered part of the fund raising process. In fact, the fund raising problem is very articulate and many different aspects and issues can be considered. Moreover, many results from both the econometric literature in the field and the operational literature of fund raising are employed by this kind of DSSs to individuate the optimal strategy for the considered context. In this chapter, the DSSs for fund raising management are reviewed, classified and compared, with particular reference to the different considered approaches, the mathematical methods employed, the specific considered parts of the process, the requirements and the conclusions of the related studies, the applications utilized by the Associations, the complexity and the usability of the systems, the numerical achieved results, the possible further developments. This leads to an overall and synthetic point of view, guiding into the variety of issues studied and developed. This new concept constitutes a de facto complete novel DSS, which selects and implements the proper method that is chosen by the state of the art in the field.