Do Personal Values Differentiate Support for Charitable Causes? An Abstract

Abstract

Charities operate in increasingly challenging economic conditions. Faced with rising demand for nonprofit services coupled with a decline in public sector support (Eisenberg 2012), funding from individual donors is essential, offering invaluable, essentially unrestricted income (Young-Powell 2013). In 2012 individuals in the US gave $228.93 billion (Brown 2013). Although this figure seems substantial at first glance, it was in fact distributed among over 1.6 million active charitable organizations (IRS 2013). As a result, competition between charities for individual donors is acute. One of the consistent themes within the academic and philanthropic literatures is that people give in accordance with what they value in life (for review, see Bekkers and Weipking 2011). However, most of the studies examining the relation between personal values and giving focus on those who endorse “moral” or pro-social values, such as universalism or benevolence, and conclude that these people give more than others. Implicit in this assumption is that those who do not prioritize these types of values are reluctant to give. This assumption has limited our understanding of the giving behavior of individuals who strongly endorse other values. Indeed, individuals with different value priorities also donate to charity, but the motivation underlying their giving behavior is likely to differ from those who are guided by a pro-social orientation. The present study explores this idea by identifying subgroups of consumers based on their preferences for arts and culture, education, religious, and animal welfare charities and examining differences between these subgroups with respect to their values. A total of 942 US-based members of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace (median age group 30–34 years; 54 % female) participated in this study. Participants completed a modified version of Lee et al. (2008)’s best-worst values survey and indicated if they had donated to a range of causes in the past 12 months and which cause was most important to them. To address the aims of the present study, only those participants who indicated that arts or cultural, religious or spiritual, education causes or animal welfare were most important to them were used in subsequent analyses (N = 384). Participants overall placed more importance on self-transcendence and openness to change and less on conservation and self-enhancement, which is consistent with previous research (Schwartz and Bardi 2001). However, the charitable cause subgroups differed significantly with respect to their values, beyond the 1 % level, based on a series of ANOVAs. Specifically, self-transcendence was more important to the animal welfare group, self-enhancement was most important (although still not very important) to the arts and culture group, conservation was most important to the religious group, and openness to change was most important to the arts and culture group (although it was also important to the education and animal welfare groups). The findings clearly show that people who place a higher importance on specific charitable causes differ significantly in their values. This suggests a promising new research direction, adding to existing literature, which has focused on the relation between self-transcendence and charitable donations and largely ignored Schwartz’s (1992) other higher-order values.