Charitable technologies: opportunities for collaborative computing in nonprofit fundraising

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research analyzing the role of computational technology in the domain of nonprofit fundraising. Nonprofits are a cornerstone of many societies and are especially prominent in the United States, where $295 billion, or slightly more than 2% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (i.e. total national revenue), was directed toward charitable causes in 2006. Nonprofits afford many worthwhile endeavors, including crisis relief, basic services to those in need, public education and the arts, and preservation of the natural environment. In this paper, we identify six roles that computational technology plays in support of nonprofit fundraising and present two models characterizing technology use in this domain: (1) a cycle of technology-assisted fundraising and (2) a model of relationships among stakeholders in technology-assisted fundraising. Finally, we identify challenges and research opportunities for collaborative computing in the unique and exciting nonprofit fundraising domain.

References

1. Anderson, C. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Hyperion, New York, 2006.
2. Andreoni, J. Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving. The Economic Journal 100, 401 (1990), 464--477.
3. Andresen, K. and Mann, S. The wired fundraiser: How technology is making fundraising "good to go". White paper, Network for Good, 2007. http://www.fundraising123org/NFG/The_Wired_Fundraiser.pdf
4. Bearman, J. E. More giving together: An updated study of the continuing growth and powerful impact of giving circles and shared giving. White paper, Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, 2006. http://www.givingforum.org/s_forum/bin.asp?DID=5316
5. Brainard, L. A. and Brinkerhoff, J. M. Lost in cyberspace: Shedding light on the dark matter of grassroots organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 33, 3 Supp. (2004), 32S-53S.
6. Bryant, S. L., Forte, A. and Bruckman, A. Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proc. GROUP 2005, ACM Press (2005), 1--10.
7. Burt, E. and Taylor, J. New technologies, embedded values, and strategic change: Evidence from the U.K. voluntary sector. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 32, 1 (2003), 115--127.
8. Burt, E. and Taylor, J. A. Information and communication technologies: Reshaping voluntary organizations? Nonprofit Management and Leadership 11, 2 (2000). 131--143.
9. Carpenter, K., Nardi, B., Moore, J., Robertson, S., Drezner, D., Benson, I., Foot, K. and Jett, Q. Online political organizing: Lessons from the field. In Proc. CSCW 2004, ACM Press (2004), 59--62.
10. Chen, Y., Li, X. and MacKie-Mason, J. K. Online fund-raising mechanisms: A field experiment. The B. E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 5, 2 (2006), Article 4.
11. Cone, Inc. 2006 Cone nonprofit research fact sheet. White paper, 2006. http://www.solutionsmc.net/2006%20Cone%20Nonprofit%20Research%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
12. Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. Expressive negotiation over donations to charities. In Proc. EC 2004, ACM Press (2004), 51--60.
13. Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. S. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (3rd ed.). Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2008.
14. Croson, R. and Shang, J. The impact of downward social information on contribution decisions. Experimental Economics 11, 3 (2008), 221--233.
15. Dave, K., Wattenberg, M. and Muller, M. Flash forms and ForumReader: Navigating a new kind of large-scale online discussion. In Proc. CSCW 2004, ACM Press (2004), 299--308.
16. Dourish, P. Re-space-ing place: "Place" and "space" ten years on. In Proc. CSCW 2006, ACM Press (2006), 299--308.
17. Flannery, H. and Harris, R. 2006 donorCentrics™ internet giving benchmarking analysis. White paper, Target Analysis Group and Donordigital, 2006. http://www.donordigital.com/benchmark
18. Fraser, C., Hite, R. E. and Sauer, P. L. Increasing contributions in solicitation campaigns: The use of large and small anchorpoints. Journal of Consumer Research 15, 2 (1988), 284--287.
19. Giving USA Foundation. Giving USA 2007: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2006. Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, 2007.
20. Harbaugh, W. T. What do donations buy?: A model of philanthropy based on prestige and warm glow. Journal of Public Economics 67, 2 (1998), 269--284.
21. Harbaugh, W. T., Mayr, U. and Burghart, D. R. Neural responses to taxation and voluntary giving reveal motives for charitable donations. Science 316, 5831 (2007), 1622--1625.
22. Höök, K., Benyon, D. and Munro, A. J. Designing Information Systems: The Social Navigation. Springer, Berlin, 2003.
23. Karlan, D. and List, J. A. Does price matter in charitable giving? Evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment American Economic Review 97, 5 (2007), 1774--1793.
24. Klein, K. Fundraising for Social Change (5th ed.). Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2007.
25. Kolm, S. C. The optimal production of social justice. In J. Margolis and H. Guitton (Eds.), Public Economics: An Analysis of Public Production and Consumption and their Relations to the Private Sectors. Macmillan, London, 1969, 145--200.
26. List, J. A. and Lucking-Reiley, D. The effects of seed money and refunds on charitable giving: Experimental evidence from a university capital campaign. Journal of Political Economy 110, 1 (2002), 215--233.
27. McPhail, B., Constantino, T., Bruckmann, D., Barclay, R. and Clement, A. CAVEAT exemplar: Participatory design in a non-profit volunteer organisation. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 7, 3--4 (1998), 223--241.
28. Merkel, C., Farooq, U., Xiao, L., Ganoe, C., Rosson, M. B. and Carroll, J.M. Managing technology use and learning in nonprofit community organizations: Methodological challenges and opportunities. In Proc. CHIMIT 2007, ACM Press (2007), Article No. 8.
29. Network for Good. The young and the generous: A study of $100 million in online giving to 23,000 charities. White paper, 2007. http://www.networkforgood.org/downloads/pdf/Whitepaper/20061009_young_and_generous.pdf
30. O'Neill, M. Nonprofit Nation: A New Look at the Third America. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2002.
31. Salamon, L. M. America's Nonprofit Sector: A Primer. The Foundation Center, New York, NY, 1999.
32. Salamon, L. M. and Sokolowski, S. W. Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector, Volume Two. Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2004.
33. Saraswat, S. P. and Williams, C. B. Charity begins at home: A socio-technical analysis of corporate websites to study the response to September 11. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 32, 1 (2002), 4--15.
34. Sargeant, A., Ford, J. B. and West, D. C. Perceptual determinants of nonprofit giving behavior. Journal of Business Research 59, 2 (2006), 155--165.
35. Scacchi, W. Understanding the requirements for developing open source software systems. IEE Proceedings--Software 149, 1 (2002), 24--39.
36. Shen, C., Lesh, N. B., Vernier, F., Forlines, C. and Frost, J. Sharing and building digital group histories. In Proc. CSCW 2002, ACM Press (2002), 324--333.
37. Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G. and Slovic, P. Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, 2 (2007), 143--153.
38. Terveen, L. G. and McDonald, D. W. Social matching: A framework and research agenda. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 12, 3 (2005), 401--434.
39. Torrey, C., Burke, M., Lee, M., Dey, A., Fussell, S. and Kiesler, S. Connected giving: Ordinary people coordinating disaster relief on the internet. In Proc. HICSS 2007, IEEE Computer Society (2007), 179a.
40. Warren, P. E. and Walker, I. Empathy, effectiveness and donations to charity: Social psychology's contribution. British Journal of Social Psychology 30, 4 (1991), 325--337.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

• Social and professional topics