Why Do People Give?

By Alan Clayton

At first glance this seems the simplest question of all.  Why do people give?

The answer is rather important, perhaps even the be-all-and-end-all for anyone who wants to be any good at fundraising. Familiarity with the answer is crucial to appreciating the core benefits of our ‘product’, to understanding donor motivations, to appreciating the skilful combination of need plus solution that is so important for effective fundraising. Regardless of how and what you want to communicate, the individual donor’s reason or reasons for giving should be firmly at the root of every communication we produce.

So why is the answer to this question at best simplified and at worst avoided wherever and whenever fundraisers gather? 

When asked why their donors give, most fundraisers suggest a simple, single concept, even a one word answer, such as guilt, duty, need, genetics, selfishness, or empathy.  Others avoid the subject altogether, perhaps because the debate can involve painful self-examination of their own motives or because a contentious argument between (for example) Darwinist and Christian might ensue.  Worst is when a fundraiser argues that why a donor gives is not as important as why that person should give, thus reducing the debate to a subjective rant rather than an empirical marketing study. Professional fundraisers certainly have to understand the one-word answer and all its potential combinations.  Unless they do, they won’t understand their audiences and won’t raise much money, which, after all, is their purpose. Fundraisers have to put aside their personal views, embarrassments and prejudices in the interest of professionalism.

But my 15 years as a fundraiser have encouraged me to conclude that there isn’t one single answer, nor even a range of ‘right’ answers.  Certainly, the answers are far from simple. And although there are several models around that might claim to hold the answer or answers, to find the best ‘answers’ for you and your organisation, you as a fundraiser need to be a bit clever. You need to look closely at what’s on offer, because there are behavioural models, needs models, cultural models, values models and frameworks of society that can all lay claim to analyse your donor’s motivations. You could indeed call upon any or all of these to drive your future communications and so influence donor behaviour and outcomes.  The most important outcome for a fundraiser, however, is not that you have a single answer to the question, but that to serve the unique situation and needs of your organisation and your audiences, you identify and adapt the very best model available.  To create this model for your fundraising you must put aside subjective arguments such as ‘altruism versus transaction’ or ‘philanthropy versus entrepreneurialism’, so that you can hypothesise and test something that will actually work.

To find out the most likely set of best answers to why donors give, it is prudent to go back to the mid 1950s and look at the work of a guy called Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) and his famous Hierarchy of Needs.

Philanthropic Needs – (Developed from Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs)

It’s called a hierarchy because, as people develop, they grow from one level to the next until – hopefully – they ultimately achieve the final level, completeness.

Maslow’s hierarchy has never been superseded.  But it has been enhanced, for fundraisers. Another bright guy called Pat Dade of a company called Cultural Dynamics has taken Maslow’s hierarchy to the extreme and created a questionnaire and survey-based model which allows fundraisers to categorise donors by their needs at either three, twelve or even hundreds of levels of detail. Fundraisers need to recognise that people and their needs change, for example as they get older they seek wealth less and fulfilment more. If nothing else, this clearly and succinctly explains why most donors are older people.  It also encourages us to make the concept of ‘the supporter journey’ an essential element of our communications strategy.  An example of how Maslow’s hierarchy can be adapted for use by fundraisers can be seen in the diagram above.

It may be that, for organisations that have attracted a supporter base from a single proposition or brand position, the model will remain relatively simple.  So, obviously religious-based organisations such as Tear Fund, Jewish Care or Islamic Relief will be able to identify very well defined and consistent needs, values and behaviours throughout their supporter base.  Their model of motivations is clearly laid out in the writings and teachings of their religion. The fundraiser can simply adapt from these and apply them to his or her work.  Duty is a powerful motivator and all major religions include at the core of their values the duties of care and giving.  This is a good thing. Such frameworks have been responsible for much of the good works done by charitable organisations throughout history.  No one should underestimate the importance of religious motivations for giving.  I estimate that, even today, about 70% of giving in the UK is driven by religious motivations.

However, for those organisations whose mission, vision and values are not directly aligned to religious duty and motivations, we must seek insight and inspiration elsewhere.  There are two main models that can help us find these, the ‘human needs’ model and the ‘values-based’ model.

Proponents of the human needs model argue that philanthropy is a genetic need of every human being. Fundraisers who embrace the human needs model have concluded that giving is a transaction. They dismiss ‘pure altruism’, preferring to ascribe a range of benefits to the giver such as satisfaction, self-esteem, even self-aggrandisement.  The genetic argument is clearly made in Richard Dawkin’s seminal book, The Selfish Gene, which I consider a must-read for all fundraisers.  But it’s not the only such work – Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue gives a different slant on the same theme.

The human needs model, however, does not always give us fundraisers everything we need.  People do not always behave according to their needs; they are also influenced by their immediate circumstances.  This leads us to consider the values-based model, a statistical model which attempts to match behavioural measures to susceptibility to give at all and to give to different causes.  Thus, we know that people who give to ‘conservation’ and ‘environment’, even if they look demographically identical, are often entirely different in their behaviours and values.  Conservationists value local and personal issues while environmentalists value big, global solutions.  It is only through thorough understanding of these behavioural indicators that marketers can distinguish between different values.  Both conservationists and environmentalists live in the same types of house and have the same number of children. It may be a vast over simplification, but it’s not inaccurate to claim that one way to tell them apart is that conservationists read right wing newspapers and don’t use new media, whereas environmentalists read left-of-centre press and communicate and purchase on-line. 

The ‘value-based’ model, though, is still in its infancy and, crucially, its findings will be unique to each fundraising organisation.  There is no off-the-shelf solution.  You will have to research and create your own.

To further complicate things, both of these models can be gone into in much more detail, and even combined.  They are constantly evolving and offer no easy, precise answer.  But because populations are changing faster than ever before, the important thing now is that the subject is neither avoided nor simplified. It has to be taken head-on.  If it is, it will certainly be instructive and might even be fun. Young people now are very different in their needs and values from their grandparents.  If fundraising does not embrace these changes, whole generations of donors will be lost even before they have been found.  So, the debate must be joined.  I look forward to it, at the International Fundraising Congress 2007 if not before.

© Alan Clayton 2007

Alan Clayton is founder and managing director of the Cascaid Group of companies and is an acknowledged world-class motivational speaker and expert on motivation and inspiration.