A fundraiser is an event or campaign whose primary purpose is to raise money for a cause, charity or non-profit organization. Fundraising is the process of gathering voluntary contributions of money or other resources, by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies. Fundraising typically refers to efforts to gather money for non-profit organizations. Many non-profit organizations take advantage of the services of professional fundraisers. These fundraisers may be paid for their services either through fees unrelated to the amounts of money to be raised, or by retaining a percentage of raised funds (percentage-based compensation).

Types of fundraising are:

• Charitable giving,

• Special events,

• In-kind gift.

Charitable giving programs are set up by corporations in which the company matches donations made by employees to eligible nonprofit organizations or provides grants to eligible nonprofit organizations as way to recognize and promote employee volunteerism. Special events are another method of raising funds. These range from formal dinners to benefit concerts to walkathons. Events are used to increase visibility and support for an organization as well as raising funds. When goods or professional services are donated to an organization rather than cash, this is called an in-kind gift.

The Association for Project Management (UK) is a professional membership organisation for project managers and is a registered charity. In 2014, the trustees asked them to conduct a study into the feasibility of launching an appeal to fund a range of potential projects. They needed to know whether their membership would support this, as well as what sort of projects they would donate to and how much could realistically be raised. The study was produced on time and to budget and provided two options for the APM trustees to consider. APM expressed its satisfaction with the study and will be using the findings to inform its decision making and planning of its future fundraising.

A number of charities and non-profit organizations are increasingly using the internet as a means to raise funds; this practice is referred to as online fundraising. Some of them operates trough a search engine which generates funds via Pay per click links. This is just the beginning of a new era of fundraising and using social media and digital technology to better the world. One of the top trends for 2016 in the world for fundraising says that smart nonprofits are:

• Investing more staff and resources in donor relations.
• Measuring the performance of their donor relations programming.
• Educating their leadership and board members in this important new metric.

There are over 120,000 donor agencies, including governmental and non-governmental, around the world. In addition to it, there are several portals for mobilizing funds from individual and institutional donors.

But, IPMA is association registered in Switzerland. In Switzerland, fundraising is a profession and the country itself holds the highest number of foundations in Europe. IPMA is growing in size by number of member associations and new projects. Both generated costs, and fundraising represents a serious option of gaining additional finance resources to achieve our vision! What is your opinion or experience about fundraising?