Avenues for New Research: What Do Fundraisers Want?

By Adrian Sargeant, Joe Saxton and Jen Shang

A recent search of a popular bibliographic database (ABI Inform) revealed that no less than 372 academic articles have been published on the topic of fundraising in the last ten years. Among the more recent contributions are a comparison of the effectiveness of matching and challenge gifts in capital campaigns, a new method for pre-testing the response from direct mail appeals, a review of previous studies of giving behaviour and an analysis of the causes of attrition among door-to-door recruits. All interesting work and much here that on the face of it would seem to offer value to fundraisers, yet little or none of this material may ever be gainfully employed by fundraisers.

Part of the difficulty historically has been the absence of a mechanism to allow this to happen. In every other profession, practitioners decide on ( and periodically review) what they consider to be the body of knowledge that they would expect every competent professional to know and to know at varying levels of responsibility within the organization. This has yet to happen in the U.S. The other reason for the neglect of academic research to date has been the often marked difference between the focus of academics and the needs of practitioners for information. While academics tend to focus on issues that are theoretically interesting, fundraisers hunger for practical relevance and general applicability.

So what do fundraisers want? We asked fundraisers attending major sector conferences in early/mid 2008 to complete a brief online poll to tell us their priorities. Our results are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 and show that topics such as the motives for major giving, donor psychology and the drivers of behavior, donor loyalty and internet giving are all considered key. These generic categories aside, we also invited respondents to suggest specific research questions that future projects might address. Click on each chart to enlarge:

In the realm of major gifts, respondents wanted to see more work on stewardship, defining it, identifying the expectations that donors might have of it and ascertaining how it could be used to foster giving. A need for more data was also perceived about trends in major giving, tracking its growth and the characteristics of effective major gift programs, the length of time to initiate a successful program and the determinants of that success.  In short, why are some organizations highly successful at this form of fundraising and others not?

Not surprisingly there was a good deal of interest in the broader topic of individual giving, beginning with a perceived need to improve the availability and quality of donation data so that trends in how people give could be monitored. Similar data was felt valuable in both the foundation and corporate giving markets. In the case of individual giving it was felt that this market data should ideally permit a meaningful analysis of the behavior (and triggers to giving) of particular segments of society.  A number of gaps were also highlighted in our understanding of specific fundraising markets and notable here was the absence of any data covering the realm of events. Research into the size, scale and potential of the challenge market and other community fundraising activities/products was welcomed.

The need for more work in what might be termed philanthropic psychology was also stressed. Respondents wanted to understand more about the issue of charitable choice and thus how individuals selected between the plethora of alternatives available to them. They also wanted to know more about the mechanisms that might be employed to ‘grow the pie’ encouraging more people to give and to give generously when they do so. The focus here was on both what charities might do in their communications and what government might do through its social policy.

We have already acknowledged the general interest in Internet fundraising. Here respondents wanted to understand more about the characteristics of effective online fundraising, what donors wanted to find on sites (in terms of content and functionality) and the role/utility of social networking and of new online media such as video fundraising. Respondents wanted to know which of the new media technologies were working well, which not, and how this was likely to shape up in the future.

A lot of the additional comments supplied referred to aspects of relationship fundraising and understanding more about donor requirements for communication and appropriate choice and interaction. The frequency of appeals, what donors might expect ‘in return’ for their giving and generally how to move individuals up the donor pyramid were all considered important. Respondents wanted to understand more about what constituted relationship fundraising and what applying this approach would mean in terms of practical steps for an organization seeking to implement it.

There were also a number of managerial issues that were felt to warrant attention; how to originate and grow board involvement in fundraising, how to retain fundraising staff and investigating the quality of organizational leadership and its relationship with fundraising success. Calls for more benchmarking activity were also common with participants expressing a need to better understand attrition rates (for different segments), the impact of different mailing and development strategies and the performance of different categories of nonprofit in all these respects.

Finally there were a number of suggestions surrounding the issue of donor trust. They wanted to understand the trust either in the sector as a whole or in specific nonprofits. How donors use information and the information they find most valuable in taking decisions about the acceptability of  performance was also highlighted.

Although some research has addressed these issues, it is fair to say that considerable scope for development remains. All of these ideas provide fertile ground for researchers seeking to enter the field. By contrast though, it was interesting to note that around 10% of the suggestions for additional research were actually questions already addressed by researchers and where existing research could and should be informing practice. 

As an example, we now understand a significant amount about loyalty. There are three significant drivers, namely; satisfaction (with the quality of service provided to the donor), trust in the organization (e.g. to have the desired impact on the cause) and commitment. We also know the components of service quality that should be of the greatest interest and the primary drivers of the bond of commitment, including deepening an understanding of the organization and what it is trying to achieve, the number of two-way interactions the donor experiences and the development of shared values. There is also an increasing amount of high quality data now available from the AFP’s Fundraising Effectiveness Project and the excellent Target Analytics’ Quarterly Index of Fundraising Performance. Taken in aggregate there is a good deal we know about loyalty and how to engender it.

We also understand a significant amount about why some segments of society elect not to give. In descending order of significance, they choose not to give because of financial reasons, they find our solicitations inappropriate or intrusive, they believe the work undertaken by charities should be carried out by the government, that charities are wasteful of funds or that charities are just not deserving of funds. This latter theme derives from of a lack of trust and there has been interest in this too in the literature. Drivers of trust in an organization include a perception of role competence (i.e. that an organization is perceived as having the right skills to conduct its operations), good judgment (i.e that an organization will apply its funds in the way indicated and in a manner consistent with its ethics) and the perceived quality of service it provides to its donors.

We are also understanding increasing amounts about giving at different points in our life cycle and how giving changes with different life events. We can even model the impact of the giving behaviour of our parents on our own giving and track how the philanthropy of new immigrants begins to reflect the ‘typical’ behaviour of their newly adopted country over time. This insight derives from an Indiana  panel study that has been tracking the behavior of a sample of families (and ultimately their children’s families) since the late 1960s.
A range of other topics such as the relationship between branding and fundraising, the role of the concept of identity in giving, public perceptions of fundraising and fundraising cost, the role of financial advisors in stimulating giving, how (and to what degree) challenge grants impact the size of gifts, the needs of corporate donors and the criteria employed by them to select between partners, have all been studied and results reported in recent papers. The fact that many professionals are unaware of the existence of this data should be a matter of great concern.