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An Experimental Examination of US Individual Donors’ Information Needs and Use
Author(s) -
McDowell Evelyn A.,
Li Wei,
Smith Pamela C.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
financial accountability and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.661
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1468-0408
pISSN - 0267-4424
DOI - 10.1111/faam.12017
Subject(s) - donation , proxy (statistics) , business , information needs , marketing , accounting , finance , actuarial science , economics , machine learning , world wide web , computer science , economic growth
This paper adopts an internet‐based experiment to investigate whether and how individual donors use nonprofit organizations’ financial and nonfinancial information when making their donation decisions. Using undergraduate students in the United States (US) to proxy for individual donors, our results indicate that individual donors are more likely to acquire nonfinancial information, such as nonprofit organizations’ goals, outcomes, programs and missions, than financial information. Donors integrate nonfinancial information into their decisions as their actual donations are significantly correlated with such information. Our results also indicate that while individual donors acquire financial efficiency measures, including the program expense ratio and fundraising expense ratio, they do not seem to integrate such information into their decisions as their actual donations are not significantly correlated with the efficiency information. This study contributes to the nonprofit literature and research domain focusing on charitable giving and donor preferences.