Art And Practice Of The American Non-profit Fund-raising Organization

In addition to government and business, nonprofit organizations play an importantrole as the “third sector” of American society. This reflects the American people’shistorical tradition and values of autonomy, voluntary association, and independentspirit. Compared with government and business, nonprofit organizations have anadvantage of flexibility, which has a role to play in promoting economic growth andcreating new jobs. In USA, due to the characteristics of nonprofit organizations inorganizing management, fundraising, sponsoring, a plenty of nonprofit organizationsare established in art and culture field, so in order to do research on fundraising of artorganizations, we have no choices but to put the question in the big background ofwhole nonprofit organizations.Museums and galleries, as the most typical and important arts nonprofit institutions,have rich sources of funds and complete fundraising mechanisms, and are goodsubjects of research on nonprofit organization fundraising. The Metropolitan museumof Art, America’s largest art museum, has the most comprehensive source of donatedfunds. Its system of management and fundraising has undergone a series of reformsand improvements, providing a good case study for fundraising.Based on the research about The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sources of funds,fundraising strategies, revenue, and the data in annual reports, this paper will explorethe effects of the American tradition of autonomy, culture policy, tax system and soforth, on nonprofit organization fundraising. At the same time, this paper combinesprincipals of sociology, economics, psychology to study the theory and practice offundraising.