Donor motivations for giving: Creating an internationally validated scale for academic and practical purposes

• In Event: Motivations for giving

Abstract

This methodological paper aims to develop an internationally validated scale for why donors give to charitable organizations. We define motivations for charitable giving as the reasons people consciously or unconsciously have for making charitable donations with the intention to benefit the public good.

There are a few instruments in existence measuring donor motivations. The existing scales differ from ours in that they cover a limited number of dimensions known to influence charitable giving behavior, such as empathy (Davis, 1983) or the principle of care (Bekkers & Ottoni-Wilhelm, 2016). One exception is Konrath and Handy (2017)’s ‘Motives to Donate Scale’, which captures six motives as identified and measured in the literature. We attempt to develop a scale that covers a wider range of dimensions known to influence charitable giving behavior identified in the literature. We derived these dimensions through deductive and inductive methods, incorporating a literature review and focus group discussions.

Our scale will further differ from existing scales by including self-reported motivations and reported actual behavior. Self-reported motivations through survey instruments have several constraints, including susceptibility to social desirability and people’s limited awareness of how their behavior is motivated (Johnson & Van de Vijver, 2003). Self-reported scales can only capture motives people are aware of or willing to disclose. There are motivations that the participants may not even be aware of, including for example the importance of being asked to give (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011). By asking about motivations and actual behavior we aim to capture a more comprehensive image of people’s motivations for giving. Additionally, like Konrath and Handy’s (2017) scale, our scale draws from interdisciplinary knowledge, spanning economics, psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology, in contrast to scales typically grounded in a single discipline, such as psychology.

The development of an internationally validated donor motivation scale: Deductive and inductive approach

Starting with deductive item generation, we conducted an extensive literature search of existing donor motivations in the academic literature (including -but not limited to- Adloff, 2016; Barman, 2017; Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011; Chapman, Masser, & Louis, 2020; Konrath & Handy, 2017). Reviewing 89 articles, we deducted 401 motivations for giving to charity. We then clustered these motivations from the literature into distinct dimensions of donor motivations clustered along the concepts of “Individual motivations”, “Social motivations”, “Organizational motivations” and “Beneficiary motivations”. Second, we will use inductive item generation and present these dimensions and motivations to different international focus groups of scholars and (fundraising) practitioners for comments and feedback. This process will add another range of motivations to our set.

As the next steps, we will follow the steps of scale development and validation as outlined by Boateng et al. (2018), starting with steps of content validity, assesses whether our items adequately measure a wide range of international donor motivations as we set out to achieve.

At ISTR we will present the validated donor motivation scale, and discuss its relevance for both academics and practitioners.

References

Adloff, F. (2016). Approaching philanthropy from a social theory perspective (T. Jung, S. D. Phillips, & J. Harrow, Eds.). In (pp. 56–71). Routledge London.
Barman, E. (2017). The social bases of philanthropy. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, 271–290.
Bekkers, R., & Ottoni-Wilhelm, M. (2016). Principle of care and giving to help people in need. European Journal of Personality, 30(3), 240–257.
Bekkers, R., & Wiepking, P. (2011). A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 40(5), 924–973.
Boateng, G. O., Neilands, T. B., Frongillo, E. A., Melgar-Quiñonez, H. R., & Young, S. L. (2018). Best practices for developing and validating scales for health, social, and behavioral research: A primer. Frontiers in Public Health, 6, 149.
Chapman, C. M., Masser, B. M., & Louis, W. R. (2020). Identity motives in charitable giving: Explanations for charity preferences from a global donor survey. Psychology & Marketing, 37(9), 1277–1291.
Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113.
Johnson, T. P., & Van de Vijver, F. J. (2003). Social desirability in cross-cultural research. Cross-Cultural Survey Methods, 325, 195–204.
Konrath, S., & Handy, F. (2017). The Development and Validation of the Motives to Donate Scale. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0899764017744894.
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Sargeant, A., & Woodliffe, L. (2007). Gift Giving: An Interdisciplinary Review. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 12(4), 275–307.

Authors

• Pamala Wiepking, IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

• Cassandra Chapman, The University of Queensland

• Aakash Thottam, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland