World Vision Shifts the Focus of its Development Efforts From Silos to Support and Gets Everyone Working Together to Engage Donors in Saving the World’s Children

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Airplanes and on-ramps. Talk to Atul Tandon about fundraising, and you get a lot of metaphors about movement.

Whether it’s drawing a picture of specific programming as on-ramps to the highway of donor engagement, or comparing the development of an overall donor-centric attitude within an organization while also keeping a variety of strategies robust to repairing an airplane while it’s still in the air, the senior vice president of donor engagement at World Vision U.S. is clear about his point: Fundraising is far from a static endeavor and, to keep up, an organization — even one as venerable and stalwart as the 57-year-old World Vision — has to keep moving.

World Vision

34834 Weyerhaeuser Way South
Federal Way, WA 98001

Phone: 253.815.1000

Web: www.worldvision.org

Annual operating budget: $946 million

Percent contributed income: $819 million (87 percent)

Mission: World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice.

Programs: World Vision focuses its work on projects that help communities address the root causes — not just the symptoms — of poverty. Among them: Sponsorship (children and families connected to sponsors through life-changing relationships); Child Crisis Partnerships (helping the world’s most vulnerable children escape a life of horror); Food and Water Programs (fresh water wells, seeds, tools, agricultural training and livestock); Health Care (immunizations, health clinics, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention); Education (school fees, teachers, tutoring, building and repairing schools); Economic Development (microloans, business training, job skills, new markets for entrepreneurs); Emergency Aid (prepositioned relief goods, family survival kits, disaster mitigation and shelter).