Charitable giving and me
This past November, after being told by her longtime friends Ebony and Daniel Sampson that they were facing foreclosure unless they paid $10,000 within 2 weeks, Jaki Grier wrote on her LJ about their struggle and asked for donations. Within five days, thanks to word of mouth through the internet, she received $11,000. (CNN)
Yet when I talked to someone last week that does marketing for the Phoenix chapter of the Boys and Girls Club, he said that the economy is dealing a double blow to them - more people need their help, but less people are giving donations. An AZCentral article asks for donations, saying that requests for funding from their Season for Sharing program is up almost 10% from last year. One of their benefactors, the United Food Bank, has double the requests for food from last year, and the amount that they are unable to fill is up 60% from last year.
Where does the answer to those needs come from? And why do their struggles persist when the Sampsons were able to raise so much money so quickly?
In psychology, acting for the benefit of others is called prosocial behavior. I read more about it on psychwiki.com, but the article didn't answer how to produce more of it.
Some more digging on google returned a surprising result: a marketing professor and an operations and information management professor at Wharton School of business both did studies on ways to produce greater charitable giving. Wharton also interviewed the CEO of World Wildlife Fund and director of YouthAIDS about their strategies.
Isn't prosocial behavior something that predominantly psychologists would study? I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that since promoting charities is about business, it would first be people in business that would seek to improve their methods.
The marketing professor found that people are more generous when presented with the story of an individual victim than with statistics of many victims, which explains why the Sampsons were saved while many charities are left lacking. Even though helping one instead of many is less helpful, being presented with helping one triggers the greatest amount of sympathetic emotion. Also, even the concurrent mention of the bigger picture results in smaller donations, which the author believes is because of the emotionally disconnecting effect that big problems have on us.
The operations professor found that people will give more when told another donator gave a high number (anchoring), but only if they believe that number is reasonable.
What does this all mean to me? It explains why I've had difficulty picking a charity to donate to: no single face in the crowd has said, "Help me." It also makes me wonder what role I could play in promoting prosocial behavior and what it would take to get there...