Abstract:

The topic of the paper was chosen on the basis of the ever-increasing need for additional funding for schools. Multi-source funding is increasingly used in education and schools are actively approaching complementary funding for their activities. Fundraising is one of the possibilities for schools to be more financially self-sufficient and to develop and deepen their activities in relation to the educational field.

Fundraising is a professional, targeted, organizationally and time wise thought through activity aimed atsponsorsseeking and fundraising to support publicly beneficial and charitable activities. Fundraising can therefore be referred to as a method of procuring capital. Given the situation in school financing, it has recently been widely used in this area.

This paper focuses on fundraising and its use in the activities and development of pre-primary education. The main objective is to analyse and evaluate the use of fundraising in the selected nursery schools. The theoretical part explains the concept of fundraising and its connection with the chosen nursery schools. The practical part then investigates by the means of qualitative research the use fundraising in the researched nursery schools.

Several other sub-goals are derived from the main objective, which are as follows: to evaluate the use of fundraising by nursery schools, to clarify the use of public relations tools of nursery schools in relation to fundraising, to assess other fundraising opportunities for nursery schools.

Fundraising is also based on the principles of marketing, and establishing and maintaining public relations is crucial. The connection of these areas will also be the subject of the text.

The research is conducted through interviews with headmasters of the nursery schools. Information obtained from the interviewsis subsequently analysed by means of coding. In this case, open coding is chosen, which is among the methods of the grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1999, p. 14).

The outputs consist mainly in the identification of sources of fundraising in pre-primary education. It also presents practical experience of fundraising and public relations.

The text shows that the topic of fundraising is justified and necessary to be used in education. It also provides interesting information on how fundraising is actually used in practice, where there are gaps in use, and also mentions possible future recommendations.

Keywords:

Fundraising, pre-primary education, public relations.