Understanding online donor behavior: the role of donor characteristics, perceptions of the internet, website and program, and influence from social networks

Abstract

Online donation platforms, albeit a recent phenomenon, are becoming more important for human service nonprofits, allowing them to reach a broader target population of donors at relatively little cost. In developing countries such as India, internet use is flourishing, and this has allowed fund‐raisers to reach a population hitherto difficult to reach. A cross‐sectional research design was utilized to survey donors of one online donation program in India (n = 479). This research was exploratory, investigating the factors that influence people's willingness to donate online, including the socio‐demographic characteristics of donors. Results show that gender, perception of the organization, and influence from others are variables that influence the likelihood of donating online. Further research and implications for human service nonprofits seeking to undertake online charitable campaigns are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Giving is caring

“…Individual capacity and inclination. Individual capacity generally refers to "a person's human and financial resources (level of education and income, respectively)" [41]. To the extent that charities provide collective goods, they face a collective action problem wherein the rational self-interested individual prefers to free-ride on other people's donations rather than make a donation herself [32].…”

“…To the extent that charities provide collective goods, they face a collective action problem wherein the rational self-interested individual prefers to free-ride on other people's donations rather than make a donation herself [32]. Individual inclination "typically refers to the social and psychological propensity that a person has towards giving" [41]. The degree to which an individual is altruistic, the extent to which a donation (or lack of thereof) will influence his personal reputation, the psychological benefits that accrue from making a donation, and his values are all important forces that drive charitable giving [8].…”

“…Recently, studies of large donation websites such as www.give-india.com [41] and www.kiva.org [27] have allowed for a large population of study. Specifically, [27] build a text classifier that identifies reasons for why people donate to charities from their free-text elaborations on the topic.…”

“…Social pressure and reward have been found to be powerful motivators [8], as well as social identity in the form of social norms such as gender and income [2]. However, in a recent study of online charitable behavior on GiveIndia, Shier & Handy [41] find an inverse relationship between perceived social pressure to donate (both explicit like solicitations and implicit like other members of social group donating) and likelihood of donating to a cause. This finding puts in question the role of social propensity in an individual's motivations.…”

Connectivity and college students’ participation in micro-charity: a qualitative study in China

“…By comparison, there is a huge body of literature written by non-Chinese scholars concerning people's giving behaviour in online charity. Many of these studies put their analytic lens on the role of demographic and socio-psychological variables, including gender (Shier & Handy, 2012), social class (Piff, Kraus, Côté, Cheng, & Keltner, 2010), empathy (andreoni, Rao, & Trachtman, 2011), religiosity and altruism (Opoku, 2013), self-construal (Bennett, Kerrigan, O'Reilly, Skarmeas, & Shabbir, 2011), money perception (Wiepking & Breeze, 2012), shared vision and perceived accessibility (Du et al, 2014), social pressure (Reyniers & Bhalla, 2013) and so forth. These studies have captured some influential factors on people's online charitable behaviours.…”