There is a large population of people out there which will donate to charities if they can get to earn recognition within their local communities while doing so. You can be quite sure that such a population exists when you come across people who exhibit lukewarm responses to organized charities, citing reasons like, "I don’t have control on how my money is utilized", and so on. Watch the same people loosen their purse strings when a local school or old age care home offers them a chance to be the chief guest at a local community function.
By no stretch of imagination are we suggesting here that these people will donate to any school or any old age care home just for the chance of being a chief guest. But the point is, ulterior motives do exist when it comes to donating to charities. The mere satisfaction of ‘giving for the sake of giving’ is not necessarily enough for some people, even if they don’t realize this themselves, or articulate explicitly.
Large global NPOs (not-for-profit organizations) will do well to recognize the existence of this category of people who aspire to social recognition while donating to charities. Doing so will help them enhance their donor base and their collections. However, most of them operate on global scale with global charters. Apart from sending birthday and anniversary cards, they don’t — and can’t — have the required bandwidth for facilitating any more recognition for their average donors.
To tap this category of people and make donors out of them, NPOs might want to explore an alternative structure where they organize themselves as a huge network of small units operating at a community level — some sort of "Grameen Charity", similar in principle to Grameen Bank, whose founder Mohammed Younus won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for popularizing the concept of micro financing at the local community level in Bangladesh. By operating at this level, local units of an NPO will find it easy to get immersed in local events and day-to-day activities of their respective communities. This will in turn provide their donors with ample opportunities to play leading roles in local affairs — including being chief guests at local functions — and gain the recognition they might be aspiring for in addition to the satisfaction of contributing to a good cause.