My educated guess (based on researching on this topic interviewing a bunch of charities and fundraising consultants) is that the main reason is that fundraising via a marathon has lower ROI than spending fundraising resources on stewarding a major HNW donor or applying to an additional grant.
You can see this prioritization in org staffing—at larger orgs (e.g like GW recommended ones) - you could have several major gift officers, but only 1 annual fund (aka small donor) manager. And the one managing those folks are usually spending most of their time on donor communications (and sometimes events).
Another benefit of a marathon could be peer to peer fundraising. Peopel refer to those donors as “third party donors” who don’t have a strong loyalty to the org itself, making them less worth acquiring than simply retaining and upgrading existing donors.
Finally, rather than donations you could say the main benefit of participating is awareness. Most GW recommended charities from my research have foundation heavy portfolios, where public awareness is less important / has less obvious benefits.
(Side note: I would imagine that being 1⁄500 charities is probably not going to be a huge publicity boost without a lot of effort from the charity’s side, or there being a specific reason why this event vs a more targeted one for their org)
I also would guess (having not looked into this marathon specifically) that most charities are going to be local UK charities, vs international ones.
I’d love to hear from actual GW charities though! (I expect you may have better luck directly contacting them, as I’m not sure fundraising staff at a lot of these orgs actually frequent the forum).
My educated guess (based on researching on this topic interviewing a bunch of charities and fundraising consultants) is that the main reason is that fundraising via a marathon has lower ROI than spending fundraising resources on stewarding a major HNW donor or applying to an additional grant.
You can see this prioritization in org staffing—at larger orgs (e.g like GW recommended ones) - you could have several major gift officers, but only 1 annual fund (aka small donor) manager. And the one managing those folks are usually spending most of their time on donor communications (and sometimes events).
Another benefit of a marathon could be peer to peer fundraising. Peopel refer to those donors as “third party donors” who don’t have a strong loyalty to the org itself, making them less worth acquiring than simply retaining and upgrading existing donors.
Finally, rather than donations you could say the main benefit of participating is awareness. Most GW recommended charities from my research have foundation heavy portfolios, where public awareness is less important / has less obvious benefits.
(Side note: I would imagine that being 1⁄500 charities is probably not going to be a huge publicity boost without a lot of effort from the charity’s side, or there being a specific reason why this event vs a more targeted one for their org)
I also would guess (having not looked into this marathon specifically) that most charities are going to be local UK charities, vs international ones.
I’d love to hear from actual GW charities though! (I expect you may have better luck directly contacting them, as I’m not sure fundraising staff at a lot of these orgs actually frequent the forum).