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When referring to the origin of nonprofit organizations or the third department, most tend to attribute the phenomenon to a mechanism that serves to compensate the government and market deficiencies. As curtailed by Taiwan’s unique situation in the past of an extended Marshal Law order that once put the development of nonprofit organizations to a setback. Yet following the lifting of the Marshal Law in 1987, many political, religious, educational, cultural, environment protective and medical foundations have mushroomed, and with a thriving nonprofit foundation development and a host of drastic changes to the social environment, such as the stock market crash, economic downturn, industry outflow, fund solicitation drawn by large-scale religious, natural disasters, resource squelching, dropping interest rates, and the impacted of the so-called “low interest-rate” or even the “zero interest-rate” era, nonprofit organizations are expected to face ever more harsh challenges. Just as the contemporary management guru Peter Drucker has said, “To any organization, marketing remains most fundamental; therefore, we are nearly unable to treat it as any singular function, and to gauge from the end result of business activities, it can be said that marketing has come to represent everything about business from the consumer’s standpoint”. As a result, nonprofit organizations are increasingly paying attention to the concept of marketing by utilizing it to draw the concern of sponsors and the general public for fundraising in expanding services and achieving its organizational mission. Nevertheless, as businesses that take to a marketing approach for profiting have long been criticized, this has spawned the need for developmental, implementation and monitoring proposals that would poise to integrate the concept and services in the domain of market segregation, customer behavioral study, communication through facilitation, steering and exchanging theories to trigger the response of target groups in order to achieve maximum social marketing. A main purpose of the study has been to study, taking to the above background and using a quantitative, explorative research method, together with case interviews and gathering relevant literature, how best for large local nonprofit organizations, as curtailed by the changing environment, manpower downsizing, and limited resources, to adopt social marketing strategy to conduct service fundraising, and to analyze the impact of social marketing, in order to identify an optimal marketing fundraising strategy as operational references to nonprofit organizations. The study findings are concluded as follows, nonprofit organizations, when faced with a multiple pressure of the environment, peer competition and manpower downsizing, are best to utilize their core ability based on their organizational mission and vision derived from the SWOT analysis, combining the business social marketing strategy, in order to secure market segregation and product position. When attempting to locate target market and adopt a marketing portfolio, it is prudent to focus on varied target subjects with sensual pursuit broaching from social marketing through the mass media and marketers, integrating a customer first service mentality and a comprehensive distribution channel. The study finds that the social marketing strategy produces a positive impact toward fundraising, if not for how its dynamics are often linked to the prevailing social environment and social marketing strategy. At a time when there are little other social headlines present, a nonprofit organization’s zeroing in on target audiences with market segregation, coupled with promotional giveaway and a swift and convenient distribution channel would produce optimized fundraising yield, or else the fundraising yield may be limited. And despite major social headlights do come to hinder the receipts of a fundraiser, yet a positive pursuit that caters to the public needs and shuns from a head-on conflict, coupled with media promotion, could nevertheless overturn a weak fundraiser. Essentially an increased media exposure on a given social market event bears an indirect impact to the increase of a foundation’s overall fundraising efforts. While social value perspective that emphasizes the service topic also presents a prime opportunity for social marketing; getting large corporations’ sponsorships could help to ease an organization’s fundraising pressure, but it also affects the willingness of other similar natured corporations to pledge sponsorship, presenting a decision dilemma, and the lack of planning by professional marketers remains a major marketing downfall. As foundations tend to base on an optimized fundraising yield as the premise for setting the solicitation goal when it comes to defining a target marketing strategy, the future marketing strategy will continue be dominated by nationwide media, and backed by local media and marketers, hence presenting the need to actively delve into non-urban potential donors in a move to secure maximum fundraising yield with the least human resources. Yet as curtailed by funding, creating a strategic alliance with major corporations remains a crucial consideration to most foundations.
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