Factors influencing monetary donations to nonprofit organizations

The public sector in the United States relies more on private non-profit institutions than most developed countries. American charities rely on individual contributors for more than 80 percent of the funding that allows them to carry out their missions and run their organizations (Harvey 1990). In 1994 this translated into individual contributions in excess of $124 billion dollars (Braus 1994). However, the challenge facing charitable organizations to attract and retain donors is increasing as corporate donations decrease, recession lingers, reports of fund mismanagement abound (Epstein 1993) and competition for individual contributions increases. Thus, effective segmentation of potential donors is as important to non-profit organizations as segmentation of potential customers is to profit-seeking businesses. The interest in charitable behavior spreads across several disciplines resulting in a broad base of literature. Unfortunately, researchers often do not incorporate the literature from other disciplines in their attempts to address questions regarding charitable behavior, which has resulted in a highly fragmented body of knowledge (Schlegelmilch, Diamantopoulos, and Love 1992). Scales measuring consumer attitudes and motivations toward giving to charity have yielded ambiguous results in the past. The purpose of this research is to synthesize the currently fragmented literature base examining charitable giving, to offer a typology of motives for charitable giving and to develop scales for measuring factors which influence monetary donations to charitable organizations.