A paper published by Burgoyne, Young, and Walker in the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology in 2005 provided much insight on the decision process to give to charity within households. A study was conducted with six focus groups of mixed gender and socioeconomic backgrounds in which participants from the UK, in the age range of 24 to 72 years who were married or living with a partner, discussed how charitable giving decisions were made in their households. The major findings from the study revealed that how and who managed household finances greatly influenced giving to charity. Factors that influence charitable giving within households were personal involvement with the cause and charity, reciprocity of past and future benefits, and emotional and social appeals. Typically, decisions about charitable donations that involved large sums of money or regular payments were made jointly by household members while smaller one-time donations were usually decided on an individual basis. Not surprisingly, the male partner in participants’ households typically had more say in whether and how to give while the woman usually initiated the discussion and followed through with the donation itself. An interesting finding was that women tended to give more frequently to different charities and in smaller amounts whereas men favored larger, more spontaneous donations to fewer charities. Results from the study also found that factors that deterred charitable giving included perceptions of the charity (its size, economic efficiency, integrity, and how it solicited donations). Participants mentioned “compassion fatigue”, expressing that they reacted negatively if charities adopted commercial tactics and constantly pestered them for donations or give suggestions for donation amounts. These findings are reasonable given the nature of the study, but I’m curious about how much they would have differed if a more diverse group of participants was chosen, one that was inclusive of different nationalities, varied ethnic groups, and same-sex couples.
It seems somewhat surprising that we did not consider charitable decision-making in the household context in our design process, given that many people do not have complete financial autonomy. One of the main goals of our Effective Giving platform is to guide people through the charitable giving decision-making process, but our design is currently catered to the individual donor. Perhaps we could consider adding features such as household profiles in addition to user profiles in which each member of the household could learn about charities, and track and plan donations jointly. Although we do facilitate collaborations and discussions among different users, it would have been beneficial to design for collaborative donating between users who have closer relationships. However, our design does a good job in addressing important concerns households have when giving to charity. We consider the factors that encourage and deter giving in our platform by allowing users to associate their personal preferences with charities and providing holistic overviews of the integrity and economic efficiency of charities. Our app facilitates both one-time large donations and smaller, more frequent donations to a wide range of charities. It is also important that our team decided to prioritize user autonomy, allowing users to learn and make their own judgments about which charities they should donate to, making the “monthly-recurring payments” an opt-in option, and omitting suggested donations since the results from the study indicated that participants had negative feelings about feeling pressured in the donation process.
Link to original paper here.