NVSQuarterly

How much of their income do people usually donate to charity?

Michaela Neumayr & Astrid Pennerstorfer, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.

What amount of donations can you expect from people when fundraising for your organization? Who are the people who do not donate any money at all, and who are those who donate substantial amounts? Basically, charitable donations are considered to strongly vary across income classes, and fundraisers know that the amounts of individuals’ donations increase with their financial resources. But what proportion of income can you expect to be donated by people of different income groups? Which income groups are more ‘generous’, those with higher or lower incomes?

Such questions have been discussed in scholarly research since the 1990s and answers to these questions are surprisingly diverse and even contradictory. In the debate concerning the “charitable giving profile” all kinds of shapes have been proposed. Some argue that it follows a U-shaped curve, with individuals at both ends of the income distribution donating the highest proportions of their income. For the US, for instance, those below an annual income of 10,000 USD donate about 4.6% of their income, while those with an income higher than 150,000 USD give 2.2%, and those in the middle 1.4%. Other studies do not find that lower-income groups are more generous, but rather describe the charitable-giving profile as a flat curve with an upward slope for higher-income groups. Yet other studies doubt the upwards swing on the right-hand side and instead find higher relative donation levels for lower income groups. We could go on with an account of yet other assumed shapes of previous studies, but we stop at this point to tell you about our study.

Neighborhood Development Organizations – Tackling Neighborhood Disadvantage at the Intersection of Race and Resource Inequity

Bryant Crubaugh, Pepperdine University, Malibu.

Neighborhood equity requires more than the inclusion of nonprofits. How is the relationship between neighborhood development organizations and neighborhood disadvantage dependent on race, resources, and residential mobility? The answer to this question is vital as cities attempt to correct structural inequalities and rely on nonprofit organizations in their plans.

For example, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is attempting to tackle two persistent, decades-old issues within Chicago: violence and concentrated poverty. Throughout her first two years in office, nonprofit leaders have been meeting with and standing at her side. In February, before the onset of Covid-19 in the US, Chicago’s city leaders and nonprofit organizational representatives met to discuss plans to reinvest in long divested corridors in the West and South sides of the city, hoping to spur job growth and help long-isolated communities escape concentrated poverty. More recently, as Chicago has seen a continued increase in gun violence, Lightfoot has responded to calls with a formalized plan to lean on nonprofit organizations to help reduce violence, though the plan so far has not included significant steps away from traditional policing.

Generating satisfying volunteer experiences: How to design National Days of Service volunteer projects

Stephanie Maas^1,2,Lucas Meijs¹, Jeffrey Brudney³

¹Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, ²Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, ³University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA.

The way in which people volunteer is changing. An increasing trend is event-based, short-term activities, such as National Day of Service (NDS) volunteering events, rather than long-term, traditional or ongoing volunteer commitments. NDS events are common across the globe, for example, 9/11 Day, Make a Difference Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, Sewa Day in 25 different countries, Mandela Day in South Africa, and NLdoet in the Netherlands – just to name a few. All of these examples are nationwide volunteering events in which individuals and groups support nonprofit organizations by contributing their time to one-day service projects. In NDS events volunteers may cook for the elderly, maintain buildings, gardens and playgrounds, support a fun afternoon for people with disabilities, and so forth.

These events mobilize large numbers of people to engage in volunteer service, creating enormous amounts of donated labor to help communities. But organizers of NDS events also intend to enhance the profile and create an ethic of volunteering. Intentions to continue volunteering typically depend on volunteer satisfaction, and volunteer managers are interested in achieving retention. This goal is not easy, due to the limited contact time between volunteer and volunteer management; moreover, general volunteer management practices used for long-term volunteer commitments might not work. Nevertheless, nonprofits can plan, structure, and organize NDS projects far in advance to enhance satisfaction of volunteer participants. So, how to design a NDS volunteer project to promote volunteer satisfaction?

FACT CHECK: Is there a crisis of trust in nonprofits?

Cassandra Chapman, Matthew Hornsey & Nicole Gillespie

University of Queensland

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that there is a crisis of confidence in the charity sector. In recent years a series of high-profile scandals have rocked the sector, including the Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal and the suicide of an elderly British donor Olive Cooke, who had received an estimated 3,000 charity appeals in the year before her death.

Scholars, practitioners, and the media have lamented falling trust in charities and worried about the ramifications for the nonprofit sector. Trust is known to be an essential ingredient for fundraising success. Drops in charity confidence could therefore threaten the survival of the sector as a whole.

My colleagues and I study charity scandals and trust in nonprofits. Through a series of experiments, we have demonstrated that scandals emerging within nonprofits have dire consequences for transgressing organizations. In fact, nonprofits lose trust and consumer support at faster rates after a scandal than commercial organizations do.