People don’t always give to charity because they want to improve schools or fight disease. Often they simply want to do a good turn for the person asking for the money, researchers have found.
But that proposition has its limits on social media. As the size of a fundraiser’s social network grows, potential donors feel less desire to help the fundraiser and make, on average, smaller donations.
THE TEST
Economists Kimberley Scharf of the University of Warwick and Sarah Smith of the University of Bristol found in a 2012 study that a personal connection to the fundraiser was among the most important reasons people gave for donating — more important than a charity’s reputation or the prospect of a tax break.
In a forthcoming study in the Journal of Public Economics, Scharf and Smith follow up their earlier work with the results of an analysis of 35,571 online fundraising pages set up by people who rode bikes, ran marathons, and participated in other activities to raise money for charity. The pitches were linked to each participant’s Facebook page, allowing the researchers to see how many friends the fundraisers had at the time of the solicitation.
THE RESULTS
Donations per page dropped as the number of Facebook friends increased. For instance, the average donation to a person with 252 friends was 10 percent lower than donations to a person with 77 friends. When the number of friends increased to 654, the average size of each donor’s gift dropped 20 percent.
This reflects the phenomenon of “free riding": the belief among donors that the larger a potential pool of contributors, the less they need to give because others will pick up the slack. The concept is typically applied to prominent, well-funded charities, to which an individual donor may feel less obligation to give because plenty of others will.
But Ms. Scharf and Ms. Smith posit that free riding alone cannot account for the negative correlation between donation amount and the size of the fundraiser’s social set (as represented by number of Facebook friends). They chalk that up to what they call “relational altruism.” Rather than feeling the “warm glow” associated with contributing to a public good, donors get it from supporting a person to whom they feel a bond. The smaller the fundraiser’s social group, the more connected an individual will feel to the fundraiser, and the more generously he or she will give.
The donors “may or may not care about Cancer Research UK, but they do care about the fundraiser,” Ms. Scharf says. “They want to make the fundraiser happy, so they make a contribution.”
DIGGING DEEPER
Charities that enlist individuals to take part in fundraising drives and encourage them to do so via social media might want to suggest they segment their pitches to Facebook contacts who are especially close to them, like family, neighbors, and co-workers, Ms. Scharf says. Those on the outer edges of the fundraiser’s orbit may respond, but not as generously.
“They care about your warm glow, but not as intensely as my mother [does],” she says.
