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Why Donors Donate: Disentangling Organizational and Structural Heuristics for International Philanthropy

Philanthropy
Experiment
Conjoint analysis
Bayes
INGOs

Suparna Chaudhry, Marc Dotson, and Andrew Heiss, Why Donors Donate: Disentangling Organizational and Structural Heuristics for International Philanthropy”

Authors
Affiliations

Suparna Chaudhry

Lewis & Clark College

Marc Dotson

Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University

Andrew Heiss

Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University

Published

February 2023

Abstract

As space for civil society has closed around the world, transnational NGOs have faced a crisis of funding. We explore how NGOs have shifted from traditionally Northern funding sources toward grassroots private philanthropic money. How do individual donors in the US feel about donating to legally besieged NGOs abroad? Do legal restrictions on NGOs influence donors’ decision to donate? We use a conjoint survey experiment to argue that domestic political environments of NGO host countries influence preferences of private donors and that legal crackdowns on NGOs serve as a heuristic of organizational deservingness.