Predicting Intentions To Donate To Human Service Nonprofits And Public Broadcasting Organizations Using A Revised Theory Of Planned Behavior

Different types of nonprofit organizations including human service nonprofits like homeless shelters, public broadcasting organizations, and the like thrive on donations. Effective fundraising techniques are essential to a nonprofit’s existence. This research study explored a revised theory of planned behavior to include guilt and convenience in order to understand whether these factors are important in donors’ intentions to give. This study also examined the impact of two different kinds of guilt; anticipated guilt and existential guilt to determine if there was any difference between the types of guilt and the roles that they play as predicting factors in a revised TPB model. This study also explored how human service nonprofits and public broadcasting organizations compare in the factors that help better predict their donating intentions. An online survey was administered to a convenience sample, and hierarchical regression analysis was used to determine significant predicting factors within each revised TPB model. This study confirmed that the standard theory of planned behavior model was a significant predictor of intentions to donate for donors of both human service nonprofits and public broadcasting organizations. However, in both contexts, not all traditional factors of the TPB model contributed to the donation intentions. This study also provides further evidence that guilt can increase the predictive value of the standard TPB model for both types of nonprofits. Anticipated guilt more specifically, was a significant predicting factor for donors’ intentions to give to public broadcasting organizations. In contrast, convenience did not affect the explanatory power of the TPB model in either context. The TPB models for the two nonprofits are compared and theoretical and practical explanations are discussed

What kind of cause unites a crowd? Understanding crowdfunding as collective action

This paper explores the types of shared goals that underlie fundraising activities in web-enabled charitable crowdfunding, as well as how these goals unite donors and fundseekers. A grounded theory analysis is undertaken using a stratified sample of records from Pledgie.com, a crowdfunding website dedicated to charitable causes. Content analysis of these records reveals three types of information sharing associated with successful fundraising (1) information supporting impact (2) information supporting morality and (3) information supporting external relationships. These information types are related back to existing literature on collective action to explain how and why communities of donors form around specific fundraising initiatives. Findings suggest that while most existing models of charitable crowdfunding adopt a view of information sharing based on dyadic communication between donors and fundseekers, charitable crowdfunding should also be viewed as a technological paradigm capable of forming action-oriented collectives based around specific causes, beliefs, and/or identities