Factors associated with fundraising dependency among nonprofit organisations in Australia

Despite the importance of fundraising to the nonprofit sector there has been surprisingly little research on fundraising as a revenue source in Australia. Research that has been conducted both here and internationally has focused on the cost of fundraising – the proportion of fundraising expenses to total fundraising revenue, and fundraising performance – the absolute or relative amount of money raised by organisations via fundraising. This paper examines why some nonprofit organisations are more dependent on fundraising as a source of revenue than others. The paper applies multivariate techniques to examine the influence that three broad sets of factors: organisational; revenue generation model; and fundraising approach, have on what we term ‘fundraising dependency’ – the percentage of a nonprofit organisation's total revenue that is derived from fundraising activities. It finds that fundraising dependency is associated with a range of organisational characteristics (e.g. size, geographical scope of the organisation and tax status); alternative forms of revenue generation (e.g. reliance on government funding and commercial venturing) and fundraising approach (e.g. whether professional fundraising staff are employed, the use of volunteer fundraisers and the number of fundraising practices used). The results support taking a multidimensional approach to understanding fundraising dependency.