Millions of charities compete for donations, yet no empirical study has examined patterns of shared giving behavior across the nonprofit sector. To understand which types of charities are more likely to share donors, we conducted a social network analysis using behavioral data from 1,504,848 donors to 52 large charities in Australia. Three hypotheses were tested, which considered how patterns of shared donations may be determined by charity sub-type (e.g., health, social services, religious), type of beneficiaries (i.e., humans, animals, the environment), or geographic focus (i.e., international, national, regional). Overall, results indicate that patterns of shared giving are strongly shaped by geography: international charities typically share donors, as do charities operating in the same local region. Some-albeit inconsistent-evidence also emerged to support the notion that sub-type may be an organizing principle for donation distributions, but little support was found for the idea that beneficiaries influence shared giving patterns. A key managerial implication is that the practice of supporter list swapping may be most beneficial when lists are shared between organizations that both operate in the same geographic region rather than between organizations that both operate as the same subtype of charity or both share similar beneficiaries.
| INTRODUCTIONEach year, Australians donate over $10 billion to charities and nonprofits; yet this giving is dispersed among over 59,000 registered charities (ACNC, 2021). This kind of dispersed giving is observed all around the world: for example, there are 168,000 registered charities in the United Kingdom and over 1.5 million in the United States (Charity Commission, 2018;NCCS, 2020). Despite the importance of understanding how donors distribute their charitable dollars across the charity network, only a handful of studies have considered the question of charity section at all and no empirical research has investigated which types of charities are more likely to attract the same donors. For example, do charities share donors in relatively arbitrary ways, or rather are patterns of shared giving behavior explained by charity sub-type, beneficiaries served, or geographic focus? The current study fills this important gap by conducting a social network analysis on transactional data from over 1.5 million donors to examine their patterns of shared giving between 52 large charities.
| Understanding charity selectionCharitable giving refers to voluntary donations of money that benefit non-kin others (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011a). Traditionally, scholars of giving have focused primarily on identifying who gives to charity and