Do community giving days increase or displace charitable giving?

by Bobbie

Earlier this month, Give Local America held its second annual community giving day across the US. The Chronicle of Philanthropy  summarizes the event as follows:

“Organizations participating in the second year of Give Local America, held May 5-6, raised $68.5 million over about 24 hours, 29 percent more than last year’s inaugural event. More than 9,000 nonprofits participated, building on the growing trend of local giving days, which harness the support of community foundations and local United Way branches to encourage giving to local nonprofits.

As with other giving days, the event cultivated new donors: 35 percent of donors indicated it was their first gift to a particular charity.

Human services groups received 28 percent of the donations, followed by education and then arts and culture groups, which received 19 percent and 16 percent respectively.”

Similarly, on June 6 2015, the 100in1Day festival is being held across four Canadian cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Hamilton), inviting community members to come out and participate in small initiatives to spark change. 

My early thoughts on these local giving and civic engagement events:

1. Do community giving events merely displace other charitable donations?

35 percent of donors at Give Local America’s community giving day said that it was their first gift to a particular charity, which means that 65 percent of donations came from individuals who had already donated to that particular charity. For this 65 percent, did the event actually encourage them to give more to the charity than they otherwise would have? It’s easy to imagine that some donors simply substituted a community giving day donation for their Christmas donation. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that the event either had no substitution effect or even had a positive effect on future giving by making recurring donors more personally connected to the charity.

A charity could get some leverage on this question by comparing the subsequent donation records of existing donors who made a donation during the community giving day to those who did not.

Second, among the 35 percent of new donors to a particular charity, we don’t know whether these individuals were regular donors to other charities or whether they were new to the whole charitable giving scene. If it’s the former, then I have similar concerns about whether community giving days simply displace donations to other charities or whether they help to build a “giving identity” that encourages donors to give more in the future.

2. Do these kinds of events risk creating a “give local” movement?

Giving to charity is a great thing to do, whether it’s to a local, national, or international charity. As of now, it seems that community giving days and other local giving events are simply aimed at getting people to come out and give more, rather than making the argument that local charities are somehow more worthy of charitable donations than national or international charities.

However, if these community giving events ever begin to advertise that local charities are somehow more worthy of charitable donations than national or international charities (resembling the “eat local” movement), then this would be a major concern. For organizations such as GiveWell and Giving What We Can who are devoted to finding the most impactful charitable giving opportunities, their top charity recommendations are non-profits doing international work (e.g. GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation).

Give Local America’s next Community Giving Day is May 3, 2016. If anyone can convince the organizers to collect more data to answer the questions above, that would be great.

Inaugural Post

Why are we writing this blog?

Two main reasons:

(1) To think out loud (and in public). This blog is a commitment device for us to write regularly about half-baked ideas, which serves three purposes. First, it forces us to sit down and concretely think through vague ideas that we’d otherwise forget about in a few days. Second, because of this, it allows us to realize how little we actually know about these topics. Third, it serves as a way to legitimize the many wasteful hours we already spend debating these issues in lengthy back-and-forth email exchanges.

(2) To communicate about social science research. There is a ton of exciting research being produced today in psychology, political science, and economics. We think that social scientists of all stripes can benefit a lot from knowing more about innovations in fields other than their own.

 

What is this blog about?

We are motivated by five broad questions:

(1) Why are some individuals and groups much more pro-social, co-operative, and compassionate than others?

(2) How can developing economies overcome the political constraints to economic development, social cohesion, and prosperity?

(3) How should the whole social scientific enterprise be organized and what new methods can help us better understand human behavior and complex social systems?

(4) What should we do with our lives? More specifically, what topics warrant our research efforts? If we want to maximize our impact on global well-being, should we be doing more policy-relevant research or leave the academic world all together?

(5) What kinds of changes should we make in our daily lives to reduce negative impacts on the well-being of other humans and animals? And where should we be allocating our charitable donations?

 

Most of this blog will be devoted to short posts commenting on new research surrounding these questions, though we will also test some of our own half-baked ideas in longer thought pieces.

We are always open to feedback, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading.