These are perennial challenges that fundraising faces across the globe, particularly, but not only, in English-speaking cultures such as the USA, Canada, Ireland Australia and New Zealand.

 

And that’s not even considering more nuanced ethical issues such as the appropriate framing of beneficiaries in fundraising materials, or whether donor-centred fundraising fosters a sense of white saviourism.

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Fundraising practice has plenty of ethical prescriptions, which are mainly contained in its codes of practice – such as the Fundraising Regulator's Code of Fundraising Practice in the UK, and the International Statement on Ethical Principles in Fundraising, developed by the Association of Fundraising Professionals in the USA. These codes contain ‘applied’ ethics that tell fundraisers what they may or may not do.

 

But what the fundraising profession has much less of is what’s known as ‘normative’ ethics – theories that help fundraisers understand why they may or may not do certain things.

 

Unlike most other professions or emerging professions – including marketing and public relations, the two most closely related to fundraising – fundraising has very little in the way of a normative ethical foundation upon which its applied practices are built. There is very little scholarship on normative fundraising ethics and there is next to nothing to be found on ethical theory in fundraising published in academic journals. 

 

The absence of normative theory to inform fundraising’s applied ethics and practice means that when fundraisers encounter an ethical dilemma, they often have to make up their ethical policy on the fly/hoof without guidance or frameworks for them to follow, often leading to sub-optimal ethical decision-making and policies.

 

A major component of our work to build a richer and more robust knowledge base has thus been to develop new theories of professional ethics that will provide firm foundations for ethical best practice. You can access each of our work streams on fundraising ethics by click the links in the boxes below, or download our paper – Rethinking Fundraising: Professional Ethics – which gathers all our work on ethics in a single document.

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