Understanding donor profiles is crucial for donor relationship management. Whereas previous research has focused on profiling blood, money, or time donor segments separately, we define seven donor profiles based on their former donation behavior for blood, money, and time donation and compare them to non‐donors. Relying on representative data from the German Socio Economic Panel, we use an extensive set of characteristics that include sociodemographic, psychographic, health‐related, and geographical measures and simultaneously investigate profiles of donors for single and multiple donation forms and non‐donors by means of a multinomial logistic model. Our results reveal valuable insights for donor acquisition and retention strategies of nonprofit organizations along the identified profiling characteristics of donor segments. By this, our findings help nonprofit organization managers to better target single and multiple donors across three donation forms.

The objective of this paper is to quantify selection effects related to blood donation behavior and their impact on donors' perceived health status. We rely on data from the 2009 and 2010 survey waves of the German socio-economic panel (N = 12,000), including information on health-related, demographic and psychographic factors as well as monetary donation behavior and volunteer work. We propose a propensity score matching approach to control for the healthy donor effect related to the health requirements for active blood donations. We estimate two separate models and quantify selection biases between (1) active and inactive blood donors and (2) active donors and non-donors. Our results reveal that active donors are more satisfied with their health status; after controlling for selection effects, however, the differences become non-significant, revealing selection biases of up to 82% compared with non-donors. These differences also exist between active and inactive donors, but the differences are less distinct. Our methodological approach reveals and quantifies selection biases attributable to the healthy donor effect. These biases are substantial enough to lead to erroneous statistical artifacts, implying that researchers should rigorously control for selection biases when comparing the health outcomes of different blood donor groups.

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I n this research paper, we investigate whether direct marketing campaigns that rely on emergencies are a successful strategy for nonprofit services. Prior literature grounded in monetary donations suggests that using direct marketing mailings with an emergency context should lead to a higher intention to donate blood than using mailings that are unrelated to emergencies. Contrary to this suggestion, we argue that mailings with an emergency context do not significantly increase the intention to donate beyond the effect from traditional standard invitation mailings with a rational appeal. To control for selection effects, we conducted a large experimental study (N = 1 054). We discover that in mailings of blood donation services, neither the use of emergencies nor the attribution of innocence to emergency victims leads to a significant increase in the intention to donate blood, for both former donors and nondonors, compared to a standard invitation mailing with a rational appeal to donate blood. We did not discover any interaction effect between the attribution of innocence to emergency victims and the drivers of donation behavior. However, the attribution of guilt to emergency victims shows a negative interaction effect on the extrinsic motive of social benefits for nondonors: the donation intention of nondonors driven by social benefits is significantly lower if they are addressed with mailings attributing guilt to the victims of emergencies. These results are highly relevant for the planning of direct marketing activities of nonprofit services.