ABSTRACT
This chapter examines: gaps in the research on philanthropy, weakness of the research on educational fund raising, the absence of fund raising as a topic in communication and public relations research, and the practitioners’ need for research. It discusses historical and current research on educational fund raising and concludes that the relatively few studies in this area are primarily administrative in purpose with very few introspective studies or basic studies that lead to theory building. The “newness” of defining fund raising as a function, or specialization, of public relations is revealed by the fact that only 6 citations are identified for the fund-raising subheading, whereas internal relations contains 29 citations. The chapter concludes that research on fund raising is sparse and generally of poor quality and that it receives little scholarly attention as a serious subject of study.
