Donation intention and threat – what’s the link and why does it matter?

Threats or danger posed by our environment are nothing new and have continuously challenged humans for centuries. Understanding then how people behave when under threat has been a topic of interest by many researchers. Thankfully, this intrigue has made its way into our domain - giving! Now we have new insight shedding light on how threats affect people’s intention to donate. What better time to understand the impact of threats on donation intention than right after a global pandemic? It turns out that this knowledge can seriously impact your fundraising!

A brief background to provide context….

Humans can experience two types of threat – personal (e.g., hunger or illness) or collective (e.g., suffering the effects of pollution that cloud your city). Research by Zheng et al (2020) sought to understand whether people who are under a collective threat, specifically, will choose to look inward and help themselves or to look outward and help others. Important stuff given in the last 2 years the world has a collective shared experience of a rather large threat...

But why the focus on collective threats and not personal threats? Well because a collective threat is concerned with something you experience with others - others who will know what that threat felt like, smelt like, how it made them feel in their body and mind. We know from research that people tend to help those who have had a similar experience to their own, because there is a sense of a shared plight, and they can have empathy towards one another. Thus, it makes the most sense to delve deeper into how experiencing collective threats, which by their nature include others, can affect one’s intention to help another by donating to charity.

It's also worth mentioning that in this study they chose to focus on the effect of persistent collective threats. A persistent threat could be long-term air pollution or a pandemic. So, for obvious reasons, there was an interest in seeing how threats that were felt for a prolonged period can affect donation behaviour.

So, what were the research findings and what could they mean in practice…

Finding 1 - The more severe a collective threat is, the more likely people are to donate to others experiencing that same threat.

Action/Advice - Fundraisers only have so much that they can choose to focus on when communicating with donors, as there are so many ‘chunks’ of information a person can hold in their brain at once. So, our first piece of advice would be to focus attention on the most severe collective threat if you want to increase the chances of donors giving to that issue. Don’t overload your donors with too many threats that will cloud their working memory.

A prime example of a collective threat imposed on a group would be the COVID-19 pandemic, but this threat could also be child hunger ravaging impoverished areas, or gross human rights violations, for example. Now, what if the donor and beneficiary have no shared collective threat? Then we turn to Finding 2.

Finding 2 - When donors and donation recipients are experiencing different collective threats, the severity of the respective threats will not affect people’s donation intention.

Action/Advice - It doesn’t always have to be that two people experience the exact same threat to feel connectedness, nor do the threats have to be equal in severity. Simply, people won’t change their giving behaviour because they perceive one threat to be more severe than the threat another experiences.

There are also many touchpoints through which two individuals can feel authentically connected other than a shared experience. PhilPsych® teaches us that when we look past situations and focus on how to build heart-to-heart connections then we can overcome ALL barriers and foster love between the donor and beneficiary, and between donors too. PhilPsych® drills down into what identities the donor holds and how that can connect with an identity the beneficiary holds. Maybe they both identify as Christian, or maybe they can both connect as mothers, fathers, parents. Whatever the heart pull is, focus on that identity to build those connections and then it won’t matter whether the threat is collective or personal, severe or not - because what matters is what binds the two individuals, not what separates them.

Finding 3 - When you focus on connecting hearts through identities that they share, then you can leverage the positive impacts that empathy has on increasing people’s intention to donate.

Action/Advice - There’s a reason that experiencing a traumatic event means people are more willing to participate in charitable activities. It’s because, as we mentioned already, there is a shared experience and so you can understand the perspective of that individual far easier. At the Institute we see empathy as a vehicle through which we experience emotion and thus the degree to which we can take the perspective of another. So, whilst emotional connections between hearts can be built, if we can’t get our donors to take the perspective of others and feel empathy then emotion cannot properly flow. And emotion needs to flow easily for donors to take action.

However, if getting donors to take another’s perspective isn’t possible – or it might be too distressing – then let’s ask what emotions beneficiaries would want donors to feel instead which are easier to tap into. Would that be pity, sympathy? I would argue not. But perhaps hope and love instead. Fundraisers should be mindful of how we communicate and how that can impact on donors and beneficiaries in other ways. Fundamentally, fundraising can strengthen important identities and generate really substantive wellbeing, but it needs to be crafted appropriately to facilitate that. If empathy isn’t possible to go after – or it would hurt your donors too much to the point where they don’t want to give at all – then see what other emotions your donors are able to travel to that will not only charge them but boost their psychological wellbeing. To find out more about PhilPsych® and how you can use it for your nonprofit, please sign up to our newsletter to be kept up to date with the latest Institute news and research.

Harriet Day

March 2022