The general sentiment of the charitable community toward the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 at the time of its passing seemed despondent. Due to individual income tax changes, the TCJA was set to produce tens of billions of projected charitable donation losses. Interestingly, current data show that total individual giving is on track with amounts before the TCJA's implementation, and overall giving has exceeded pre-TCJA levels, setting records along the way. This study attempts to explore this phenomenon and more by broadly analyzing how individual income taxation, itemization, donors, and donations changed during the TCJA's tenure. Researchers, lawmakers, and charitable leaders may use this study to be better prepared in their decision making when new tax legislation is enacted.
This study explores the types of online information that effectively drive donations, building on previous research that has largely focused on disclosure practices and platform adoption. The study employed an open-ended survey. Our respondents were netizens, digital users, who had donated after seeing posts from philanthropic organizations on social media. Of the 585 respondents, 78% visited the organization's website before donating, while 22% donated directly based on social media posts without further investigation. Website users seek confirmation of credibility, legality, program details, and transparency in fund distribution. On the other hand, netizens who donated directly based on social media posts without searching the philanthropic organization's website were motivated by trust formed by perceptions of institutional credibility, transparency, empathy, and religious values.
This commentary on “Disrupting Philanthropy?: A Reality Check for Digital Crowdfunding” examines the self-contradictory moral economy of crowdfunding, noting its misleading characterization of its own politics. It discusses the limits of crowdfunding as continuous with the limits of philanthropy and charity. Noting the typically patrician inflection of the term “philanthropy,” it suggests the class conflicts that the project of “disrupting philanthropy” engenders (or pretends to). Extending the authors' close reading of discourse about crowdfunding, the essay offers a complementary critique of this new form of finance. It suggests that in trading on rhetoric about disruption, democratization, revolution, and the power of “crowds,” crowdfunding justifies its de facto status as a substitute for social entitlements. Finally, it suggests opportunities for further research that examines the utility of crowdfunding's material failures and its actual accomplishments.
In recent years, social media has become increasingly central to the communication strategies of non-profit organizations. While the body of research on social media use in philanthropy is extensive and growing, it predominantly focuses on monetary donations. Studies examining the role of social media in facilitating non-monetary contributions, such as blood product donations, remain fragmented and lack a comprehensive perspective. This study addresses this gap by exploring how European blood product collection institutions (short blood banks) use social media to engage with donors and non-donors. Drawing on 22 interviews with communication specialists from 13 countries, we examine communication objectives, strategies, content types, performance measurement, and emerging trends and practices. We are contextualizing our findings within the broader intersections of non-profit communication, medical communication, and donor behavior, and provide actionable insights for practitioners and a foundation to bridge academic research and practice. These findings are not only useful for blood banks but are broadly generalizable to other non-profit contexts.
As the cannabis industry engages in philanthropy, nonprofits face complex decisions about whether to accept such donations. Although prior research has focused on the motivations behind corporate giving in stigmatized industries, much less is known about how potential recipients evaluate these contributions. This study explores the organizational and contextual characteristics that shape nonprofit openness to cannabis philanthropy, drawing on institutional, stakeholder, and legitimacy theories. Using survey data from over 300 Colorado nonprofits, we examine how factors such as size, age, mission, population served, federal funding, and local political context influence both attitudes toward and actual acceptance of cannabis-related funding. Results show that smaller and younger organizations appear to exhibit greater openness to cannabis-related donation acceptance. Additionally, mission alignment and the beneficiary population-particularly organizations serving youth-are the strongest predictors of rejection, whereas federal funding is also associated with reluctance. Contrary to expectations, political context does not significantly influence decisions. The findings highlight the normative and resource-dependence pressures through which nonprofits assess and legitimize emerging sources of controversial funding.
Donation of plasma, a blood component used to produce medicines, is not well known among the general population. This unfamiliarity, combined with considerable personal costs of plasma donation, that is, time and effort, and restrictive policies around donor compensation, poses a significant threat to plasma availability worldwide. Retention of existing plasma donors in particular poses challenges for plasma collection agencies. Loyalty programs, which reward returning donors, may contribute to donor retention. This study evaluates how plasma donors perceive and use a loyalty program and its effect on donation behavior. A total of 360 plasma donors participated in an online survey, and their answers were linked to their use of the loyalty program and donation behavior. Ten percent of survey participants had not registered for the program, mainly because they found it unnecessary to save for and receive rewards for donating. For users, we ran a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to estimate paths between perceptions (e.g., attitudes, expectations), use intention, actual use, and donation behavior. Results regarding perceptions were somewhat mixed, yet clear effects were observed for the path from intention to use the loyalty program to actual use of the program and to actual donation behavior. In conclusion, we find that online, easy-to-use loyalty programs give donors more control over whether to use their loyalty points and how and what to save for (as compared to the smaller gifts they would receive in standard milestone-based appreciation programs) and can have a positive impact on their donation behavior and ultimately, on plasma availability.
A brand's status as for-profit or non-profit shapes individuals' expectations along two fundamental dimensions: competence and warmth. These dimensions, grounded in person-perception models, influence how audiences evaluate brands. While the ideal brand is perceived as both highly competent and highly warm, for-profits and non-profits begin from different stereotypes: for-profits are generally seen as more competent (but less warm), whereas non-profits are viewed as warmer (but less competent). To overcome these imbalances, for-profits often emphasize warmth (e.g., through corporate social responsibility) and non-profits stress competence (e.g., through efficiency and performance signals). Across two experimental studies, we find that for-profit brands receive more favorable brand evaluations when emphasizing warmth, while non-profits receive less favorable evaluations when emphasizing competence. In practical terms, for-profit firms benefit from humanizing their image and showcasing prosocial engagement, but non-profits may inadvertently undermine their benevolent positioning when appearing overly business-like. A follow-up study revealed that political ideology moderates these effects: liberal audiences responded more favorably to warmth appeals for for-profits and showed more negative reactions to competence messaging for non-profits, whereas conservative consumers displayed minimal responses to both warmth cues for for-profits and competence-focused messages for non-profits. Together, these findings suggest that while warmth appeals enhance evaluations of for-profit brands, non-profits must tread carefully when emphasizing competence, particularly among liberal audiences who may view such messaging as inconsistent with nonprofit identity.
This practice paper describes a health marketing campaign at the community level that shifted towards co-creation in an effort to reach an excluded urban population with little to no access to formal healthcare. The campaign's early attempts to employ traditional, top-down messages were unsuccessful at providing meaningful participation because of cultural incongruence, distrust, and linguistic barriers. The campaign subsequently shifted towards a participatory strategy by engaging members of the target population in message creation, imagery, and delivery strategy. Based on inclusive marketing and participatory communication principles, the co-creation process resulted in culturally appropriate metaphors, localized images, oral forms of messages like WhatsApp voice notes and street theatre at the grassroots level. Major lessons learned were: the need to transform the role of the marketer from an expert to a facilitator, valuing cultural translation more than linear messaging, and understanding informal media as effective outreach tools. The article concludes with practical implications for philanthropic organizations seeking to enhance message legitimacy and local trust in health interventions. The article highlights that co-creation is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic imperative when operating in underserved settings. By prioritizing local voices and pursuing a flexible, iterative design approach, marketers can develop more efficacious and inclusive campaigns. The findings provide a transferrable framework for other non-profits seeking to develop authentic engagement with vulnerable communities.
This article examines the shift in beneficiary roles within Turkey's charitable aid sector from passive recipients to active 'customer-beneficiaries' within a clientelist welfare regime and weak transparency. Using interviews and user-generated online reviews (consumer complaint sites and social media), it shows how beneficiaries proactively demand transparency and improved services from local charities. The findings illustrate that aid users challenge distribution practices and appeal directly to donors. This proactive engagement has started to impact how aid organizations manage their reputational accountability to enhance credibility. The analysis contributes to debates on nonprofit accountability by showing how beneficiaries pursue accountability from below in hybrid and authoritarian regimes where formal channels are limited, and by applying insights from research on online consumer reviews to the underexplored field of charitable aid.
Crowdfunding promised to revolutionize philanthropy by using digital technology to make charitable giving cheaper, easier, and more accessible. Has this been realized in practice? We highlight three crucial questions for charity professionals and academic researchers to consider regarding crowdfunding's "disruptive" capacity, and we answer them in light of nearly a decade of research on crowdfunding for health care and related personal costs. We argue that crowdfunding's benefits have been largely overstated. Instead of offering a radically novel approach, it puts a digital spin on an outdated charity model. While potentially empowering fundraising recipients, it can significantly undermine their autonomy in practice. And although crowdfunding is commonly used to support health and medical costs, it promotes values and practices that ultimately harm public health systems. Our synthesis highlights the considerable progress scholars have made in understanding this extremely popular, if flawed, approach to charity, and we call for more critical analyses of crowdfunding as it continues to evolve, alongside research into alternative approaches to charitable giving.
Over the course of nearly a decade, a strong body of academic research has emerged showing that the benefits of personal crowdfunding via GoFundMe and similar platforms are neither as easily attained nor as evenly distributed among users as many would hope. In this response to Lukk et al.'s (2025) article "Disrupting Philanthropy? A Reality Check for Digital Crowdfunding," I extend the authors' discussion of the harmful effects of the for-profit crowdfunding industry on equality, campaigner/beneficiary autonomy, and the spread of misinformation by examining how crowdfunding has shifted the meaning(s) ascribed to "philanthropy" in Western societies.
Inspired by Lukk and colleagues' analysis of crowdfunding as a re-entrenchment of inequalities in the North American context, this response applies the same questions to the Global South, focussing on medical crowdfunding for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Fiji. Grappling with an under-resourced health system, Fijians with medical complications from NCDs are resorting to crowdfunding platforms to help raise funds for lifesaving treatments. Far from being a novel development, we explore how the need for Fijians to crowdfund for survival emerges from neo-colonial inequalities. We argue that crowdfunding represents another layer of problematic aid, undermining the autonomy of Fijians, the accountability of governments and the ability of the Fijian healthcare system to care for its citizens. Significant cultural considerations emerge as crowdfunding platforms travel from Global North to South contexts, including the mismatch between neoliberal individualised campaigns versus communitarian values, the risk of eroding traditional cultural giving practices, and the privileging of the Western gaze. Finally, we reflect on the differential flows of vitality and toxicity, and how crowdfunding exacerbates inequality by distracting us from genuine upstream solutions.
Like all forms of philanthropic and charitable practice directed towards people with health needs, crowdfunding does not occur in isolation, but is always entangled with other aspects of health subjectivities and health citizenship. I focus my response to the claims about crowdfunding investigated in this article by advocating for more attention to nationally situated and culturally situated aspects of both the technology and the neoliberal logics that drive it. I also discuss the question of autonomy, and whether crowdfunding can truly ‘empower users’, by pointing out the difference between whether it empowers users as beneficiaries or as health citizens. I suggest moving beyond a dichotomy (i.e., of whether it is empowering or undermining autonomy) to instead consider what opportunities, engagements, or affordances it may provide for health citizens in various national and local contexts, as well as for distinct patient, disability, or health communities. As such, I highlight the overall need for a more reflexive and comparative approach, to avoid the risk of theorising features of crowdfunding as universal without sufficient attention to situated or sociocultural factors; opening the possibility of more plural answers to core questions about what crowdfunding is and does.
In this commentary response to Lukk et al. (2025), I argue that we should understand crowdfunding as an assemblage of platforms, donors and recipients that might offer different advantages and disadvantages dependent on the broader system context it takes place within. Drawing on my knowledge of health-related crowdfunding, I discuss examples of collective or civic crowdfunding and highlight especially significant scholarship around crowdfunding for gender-affirming healthcare for trans people. Exploring the ambiguities of these broader examples of crowdfunding complicates the task of reaching definitive judgements of the phenomenon as a whole but opens up valuable new lines of inquiry about what it does, for whom, and in what contexts.
Our opening pillar article for this special issue argued that the disruptive benefits of digital crowdfunding have been overstated. Responses to our piece draw on diverse cases and perspectives, inviting the field to both broaden its theoretical scope and expand its appreciation of crowdfunding's wide-ranging empirical manifestations. The exchange also surfaces valuable insights about the current state of crowdfunding scholarship, suggesting a consensus against understanding crowdfunding in terms of simple dichotomies, like good versus bad or oppressive versus liberating, while revealing generative frictions among scholars' approaches. We identify three unresolved questions about the nature of crowdfunding that emerge from the responses: What is crowdfunding? What does crowdfunding do? How is crowdfunding actually practiced? Answering these questions requires confronting essential debates in the literature, including about crowdfunding's relationship to autonomy, resistance, and structural change. In search of these answers, the responses highlight the need for expanded empirical research into additional aspects of the phenomenon across different contexts, including the elite networks shaping crowdfunding platforms and ordinary users' perspectives on agency and resistance. Overall, the dialog calls for future research that develops the field's critical edge while appreciating the diversity of practices that crowdfunding involves.
This study examines how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations influence monetary support in crowdfunding through the lens of self-determination theory and cultural background, offering implications for fundraising strategies. Using controlled lab experiments across varied crowdfunding contexts-art, music, small business, and nonprofit campaigns-we explore the overjustification effect and the role of sociocultural factors in shaping donor behavior. Rewards are categorized as extrinsic (gift and recognition) or intrinsic (participation and influence). Findings reveal that removing gifts slightly increases average contributions, whereas eliminating both gifts and recognition reduces support. Donor behavior also varies by country: US-born participants contribute the most overall, UK-born donors prefer gift-free scenarios, and Canadian-born donors are more generous when both gifts and recognition are absent. These results challenge conventional interpretations of the overjustification effect and highlight the importance of culturally responsive reward structures. We offer practical recommendations for campaign designers and nonprofit organizations to optimize crowdfunding strategies using targeted incentives and social proof. By anchoring donor motivations within a self-determination framework, this study contributes to the literature on philanthropic marketing and behavioral economics.
Similar to commercial banks, zakat institutions collect Islamic social funds, e.g., zakat (Islamic alms), infaq, and shadaqah (charitable funds) from the public and distribute such funds to the specified beneficiaries with aims at no profit. However, in contrast to such traditional financial institutions that operate under a standardised regulatory framework, zakat institutions do not possess a universally recognised framework for evaluating their institutional performance. This study explores the recent practice of measuring the performance of zakat institutions using a qualitative literature review of 14 research reports published by Indonesia's National Zakat Agency (Baznas RI). NVivo is used for deductive coding, guided by three predefined themes, i.e., organizational performance, zakat distribution metrics, and zakat collection metrics. A further step is data visualization using quantitative data generated from the reviewed publication, for which a Python script is used for visualization. The findings reveal Baznas RI's approach to measuring zakat institutions' performance that is in line with the core business of zakat administration, e.g., development of financial ratios, Shariah (Islamic law) compliance indices, risk management frameworks, social impact assessments, among others. These applied frameworks integrate Islamic principles with operational performance indicators to address governance, transparency, and sustainability issues. This study contributes to the discourse on nonprofit institution research, particularly in relation to the institution-driven performance evaluation models for zakat institutions.
Despite its relevance for nonprofit and fundraising practices, there is no evidence of the drivers of nonprofit social media marketing success. We address this research gap by empirically identifying the critical success factors in nonprofit social media marketing using structural equation modeling to analyze data from 116 social media marketing professionals in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Disaggregate analysis confirms seven success factors, while the more holistic aggregate analysis confirms three factors: Community and Dialog Orientation, Quality of Content Implementation, and Organizational Framework. We use importance-performance map analysis to provide an additional performance dimension and identify the most crucial levers of nonprofit social media marketing success. Measures of Community and Dialog Orientation prove to be the most important. This study contributes to theoretical understanding, and the managerial implications benefit an understanding of which measures NPO marketeers or fundraising professionals should prioritize to increase success.
This study offers a novel contribution to the charitable giving literature by empirically linking specific personal worldview convictions, particularly self-transcendent versus physical-self orientations, to both the likelihood and magnitude of charitable giving. While existing research has extensively explored demographic, religious, and psychological drivers of giving, few have systematically examined the foundational role of worldview in shaping financial generosity. Grounded in the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study uses original survey data from 471 participants to test how distinct worldview convictions serve as normative beliefs that inform charitable behavior. The results reveal that, although personal worldview convictions had limited influence on the decision to give, they strongly predicted how much individuals gave. Specifically, conviction in self-transcendent worldviews (e.g., monotheistic and polytheistic) was significantly associated with higher charitable contributions, while physical-self convictions (e.g., humanistic and post-modern) were negatively associated. By introducing personal worldview conviction as a meaningful social norm variable within the TPB framework, this paper expands the theoretical understanding of prosocial financial behavior and offers actionable insights for researchers, policymakers, and nonprofit practitioners.
Amid the anti-racist imperative of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and global decolonisation efforts, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in the UK are grappling with race and racism in their development communications. While attention to racial representation in visual narratives has increased, UK African diaspora perspectives remain marginalised. This paper introduces the ACT model-Activating Cultural Awareness, Community Collaboration, and Transformative Communication Practices-as a culturally competent framework for inclusive development communications. It advocates for empowering African diaspora communities to reshape development narratives and foster more equitable, authentic, and impactful communications across the sector.
