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Funding of non-profit organization of consumer protection
KLICPEROVÁ, Markéta
The topic of this thesis is Financing of Non-profit Organisations in Consumer Protection. Its aim was to analyse forms and possibilities of financing non-profit organisations in this area and to compare consumer protection in the Czech Republic and in selected EU countries. The first part of the thesis contains a literary search that defines non-governmental non-profit organisations (NPOs) in general, their visions, functions, aims and position in market economy. Furthermore, it describes the system of consumer protection in the Czech Republic, introduces particular organisations working in this sector and outlines their financial management and fund-raising. Czech consumer sector is compared to consumer sectors of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Slovak Republic. They differ from the Czech Republic especially in tax assignments system and in higher degree of governmental support. The following practical part analyses the forms of financing non-governmental non-profit organisations in consumer protection sector in two ways. The first one examines data from annual reports of three selected consumer protection NPOs. The other one analyses primary data from questionnaires completed by the same selected organisations. The results of the two forms of examination, independent of each other, confirmed the fact that consumer protection NPOs are forced to function with insufficient funding, the amount of which fluctuates year by year, having a tendency to decrease. A tendency to grow can only be observed with a few types of income sources, such as membership fees and private donations. One of the selected organisations makes earnings from its own activities a substantial part of its revenues. On the contrary, grants from Ministry of Industry and Trade show a tendency to decrease in the long term. To support the research, a questionnaire for consumers was analysed in practical part of this thesis. It was aimed to examine consumers´ awareness of activities, importance and funding of consumer protection NPOs and their willingness to financially support these organisations. The questionnaire analysis yielded a clear result that the public is not sufficiently informed of the function and importance of consumer protection NPOs, and this fact brings low willingness to participate on running or financing these organisations in general. To conclude, there is a relation between poor awareness of the public, not able to appreciate the value of NPOs, and long-lasting underfunding of these organisations as the outsiders of public interest. The reasons for this situation can be seen in combination of several factors: development of civil society being interrupted by decades of totalitarian regime, generally low public interest in community activities, lack of information about this part of community life, poor access to information about these organisations, vague conception of NPOs´ Public Relations and their insufficient cooperation with the media, and last but not least, unsystematic governmental support.
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