SPEAKER_03 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropists podcast with Roger Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this week it is the sixth of our partnership with ERNOP, the European Research Network on Philanthropy. What we do in these partnership episodes is talk to three usually academics whose work has been featured in the latest series of ERNOP Research Notes, which are kind of practice-based research notes that summarise bits of academic research for an audience of people working in philanthropy who might not have the time or the inclination always to read full academic papers. And this month we've got another three, well, four great guests talking about three papers. One of them is a joint piece of work. So first up, we've got Rene Beckers from Vrie University in Amsterdam. So René is uh well, he'll be a name I'm sure that's very familiar to many of you who are uh kind of been in the world of philanthropy for a while. So he's a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Sociology in Amsterdam. Uh then next up we've got um a double header, um, and so it's Tara Bryan, who's an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska in in Omaha, uh, and Vladimir Hayanek, who is an associate professor in the Department of Public Economics at Masorik University in the Czech Republic. Um, and then last but not least, we have Yulia Litovchenko, um, who is uh an academic at uh Vienna University. Um so we'll be hearing from all of those uh shortly. I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find uh copies of the Earn Up research note that uh we're discussing uh and also the full um papers that they refer to in case you want to dig a bit deeper in the detail. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Okay, so first up, I'm talking to Renee Beckers uh about a paper that he wrote with GMA on consensus formation in non-profit and philanthropic studies, networks, reputation, and gender. So let's hear from Rene. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Rene Beckers. Hi there, Rene. Hi there. Uh it's absolutely great to have you on the podcast. Um, you know, I've been aware of your work for years now, and um, we've met a few times in the past, but it's really good to have an opportunity to talk to you a bit about um one of those particular papers that you've worked on. The one in question that's featured in the most recent Urnop uh research notes series is the paper that you did on consensus formation in nonprofit and philanthropic studies, uh, networks, reputation, and gender. And it's a really, really interesting paper in the context of these podcasts, because I was just saying to you before we started recording, I often talk to people about their research and then ask them about the wider context of research and academia on philanthropy. But that's very much the actual focus of your paper. So we'll probably end up talking about that uh from the outset. So maybe the best thing to do is if you're just able to say a bit about what the background to the paper was, what the focus of it was, and what some of the key findings were.

SPEAKER_04 3:48

Yeah, so the key finding is really good, and that's that the consistency of scholarship in nonprofit and and philanthropy research is increasing. And consistency, um, we we talk about consensus that to people then signals that we are all in agreement about everything. That's not what we mean. Consensus is a rather technical term uh that we use um to express how similar the the wordings are across research topics. So if we are both working on, let's say, research and volunteering, but you use the term unpaid work, and I use the term volunteering, we might mean exactly the same, but if we don't use the same words to a reader, it might be difficult to understand that we mean the same. So consensus means that we both use the same words to refer to the same things, and across topics in our field, not just in volunteering, but also in philanthropy and in in you know, social care or unemployment and provisions for people in in poverty, whatever, all these topics we see an increase in the level of consistency.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

So that's good news. Yeah, absolutely. And and one of the things I want to ask about sort of how you went about quantifying that in a moment. I guess the the other bit, as well as the language that I thought's really interesting, is the question of to what extent there is consensus on what the key questions or research topics are. And I thought that was really interesting because I I guess there's a positive spin on that, which is it's great if people increasingly you know agree that these are the big questions. It also struck me maybe there's there's a critical way of looking at it. You know, is there a danger that if everything converges too much on one set of questions, there isn't enough space for people to sort of challenge that that research um agenda?

SPEAKER_04 5:37

Well, the finding is not that the research questions become limited or similar. No, the finding is that the scholarship on research questions is increasingly using consistent language, and that in a sense is very good news uh because at the same time we do see that there is dispersion, the field of research and nonprofits and philanthropy is proliferating across an increasingly large number of disciplines. So, you know, 12 years ago when I published with Pamela Wiep King the review on philanthropy research 13 years ago, something like that, we found that the number of disciplines working uh on research on philanthropy had been, so to say, exploding. Because in in the early days, uh before the field really was named as such, it was only a handful of people in a handful of disciplines working on these questions. And now philanthropy research can be found in evolutionary psychology, in behavioral genetics, in public administration, in micro and macroeconomics, in law, in in all these fields. And then the good thing is that uh once this research is published, uh, we see that the language that researchers use, even in different disciplines, to refer to the same stuff, is becoming more similar. So that means increasing consistency when scholars publish about philanthropy and other topics, they are more able to understand what they mean when they talk to each other.

SPEAKER_03 7:09

And just following up on that, actually, because it's interesting. Do you have a sense of to what extent the corpus of material about philanthropic studies or that could be classed as philanthropic studies is still coming from academics who might see themselves primarily as working within a different academic discipline? And to what extent it is now driven by scholars who would self-identify as philanthropic studies scholars?

SPEAKER_04 7:34

Um, we didn't quantify that. Uh, but in in the previous literature review that I did with Pamela, uh, what we found was that there was an emergence of an own field of research on philanthropy with their own journals, of researchers no longer identifying primarily as economists or public administration scholars. But with the emergence and the formation and professionalization of organizations of researchers like Arnova, ISDR, the UrnoP, we are becoming an industry of our own. So the good news to me is that uh in these in these communities of researchers, the field is is maturing. And that's a sign of progress in science to begin with.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

Another thing, I mean, it I don't think it's covered specifically in the paper itself, but it occurred to me as I was reading it. Do you are there any comparable examples that we could look to of other cross-disciplinary fields that have emerged and and where their evolution and growth might be able to tell us something about how nonprofit studies might might evolve as a as an area?

SPEAKER_04 8:43

Oh wow, that's a great question, to which I don't have an answer. But I mean, if you think about the situation like 40 years ago, there was no field like uh sustainability science. Uh there is now with their own journals, and that's actually a field that is much larger than our than our own field. So I I think if we would turn our attention to that field and look at the bibliometrics of how that field changed, that would be an interesting comparison case.

SPEAKER_03 9:11

Yeah, absolutely. And then there may well be others, but as you say, I kind of it's not a question to which I had any answer. I was just curious.

SPEAKER_04 9:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:18

I wanted to ask a bit about how you actually went about quantifying some of the things that you you looked at in in this paper, because there was um in particular, I think, some really interesting uses of fairly new techniques around natural language processing to try and identify semantic similarities between different uses of concepts and words. So maybe you could sort of say a bit about that. That'd be really interesting.

SPEAKER_04 9:39

Yeah, that was a challenging task. So once we we'd done the philanthropy uh literature review, and in the latest year that we covered, uh that there were more than a hundred papers that had appeared on the topic of philanthropy alone. This particular paper that we're now discussing covers not just philanthropy research, but the entire field of nonprofit research. So that includes volunteering, the management of nonprofit organizations, board performance, everything. So that's an even larger field. And then our ambition was to look at the maturity of those fields, and we took this consensus measure as an operationalization, and then we realized we can only do this if we use high-performance computing services. So my co-author G Ma at the University of Texas was fortunate and able to mobilize um the infrastructure at the University of Texas for high performance computing. Imagine that for every paper that you read, you take a random other paper in your set of 70,000 papers, and then you have a computer quantifying the level of verbal similarity between those two papers, and then you do the same for every other randomly chosen paper paired with your focal paper within the same topic. So we limited uh our coverage in the paper as we published it to the 16 most commonly studied topics within the field, but the amount of computer time and the size and enormity of these analyses is just amazing. So you can do some of these similar, uh very simple uh verbal similarity measures on your laptop. If you would just you know input two PDFs in a script and would ask the computer to compute the similarity between these two papers, that would happen in like 10 seconds. But you really need a very large and uh powerful infrastructure to do that for the entire corpus that we compiled. Uh, so that was a challenge. And then in a way, we only looked at consensus in a very superficial manner. So it is computationally intensive, but the multidimensional uh multidimensionality of consensus is something that we couldn't pay attention to in its entirety. So we would have liked to really uh map how the same concept is linked to different other concepts in in the publications of uh people working in a field or in a topic. That's not something we did here. So there's more recent work. I mean, the the progress in the computing power and the algorithms that do this kind of stuff, um, yeah, it's it's doubling every day. Um, so the things that we can do now with much less computing time, yeah, those are amazing. And uh in the new research, uh that some of which has been produced recently, the disciplinary origin of those authors within uh these different fields that make up our research uh scholarship uh community uh can have been analyzed as well. So one of my favorite things is uh trying to build bridges between researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds. It's difficult to let people speak the same language when they discuss their favorite research topic. So I work a lot with people from different disciplines, and then just getting to the same language and understanding each other, that that already takes time in just getting to know each other and and knowing what we talk about. So that's one thing that I think uh where literature reviews can really help in building bridges across communities that would otherwise not really read each other's length, read each other's journals or read each other's papers. Uh you have to connect these different worlds to each other.

SPEAKER_03 13:53

Yeah, I mean it's something I hear a lot in the these interviews for this an op series is people saying that philanthropy is kind of inherently cross-disciplinary. And that's one of the things that makes it very rewarding, but it's also a frustration because there often are people working in quite sort of or coming from quite significantly different academic backgrounds. And I do, yeah, I agree. I think literature reviews of this kind and particularly utilizing new tools that can enable this kind of you know huge data analysis can be really valuable. Um, I just I wanted to move on to a couple of wider questions just about your perceptions of of um philanthropy and academia more broadly. But before I do, the one of the um the themes that you do touch on um in more detail in in this paper is around uh gender and kind of gender disparities within uh research within the field of philanthropic studies. Could you just say a little bit about what it was that you found with respect to that as a variable?

SPEAKER_04 14:47

Yeah, so if I go to conferences at Arnova, Urnop, or ISTAR these days, you see a majority of female scholars. But that was really different when I uh came into the field. So, in a relatively short period of time, we've seen an increasing prominence of female researchers. That's great, but still, if you look at the published scholarship and the citations that research gets, we find that uh male scholars have an advantage. So they are cited more often, and in a way, that is due to the topics that uh tend to be studied by male and female academics. Female academics uh we find tend to work on topics that are just generally across the board uh less cited. The other uh finding is that um as time goes by, these gaps close. So the advantage that male academics have had for a very long time, they still accumulate in terms of citation advantages across topics and and uh in different uh fields. So it will just take time for female academics to catch up with uh male academics. And the good news here is that once we control for the year of measurement, we find no difference between male and female academics in terms of citations. So yeah, it's a sort of product of the past, this male advantage, so to say, they have been more prominent for a long time. Uh, but if you uh look at uh scholars uh publishing in the same year, uh then the female disadvantage uh is is no longer present. So, in a way, that's good news. There's also no advantage that was something that we actually expected to happen in terms of uh consensus. Uh so if we shift our attention from citations to the consensus variable, like how much similarity is there? Well, it's often claimed that uh female uh scholars are better able to form collaborations and networks and and work across uh different disciplines, but we don't find evidence for that either. So there's just no difference uh if once we start controlling for time.

SPEAKER_03 17:30

Yeah, it's really interesting. And I just wanted to ask you talked there about some of the you know the challenges and the fact that you like focusing on building bridges across different, you know, academic disciplines with an interest in philanthropy. I guess the focus of this research note series from ERNOP is is partly about building those bridges outwards between academia and practice. I wondered what your experience was of doing that and whether you'd generally found it something that was easy to do or possible to do, or whether there are still significant barriers to maintaining those links between academia and practice in this field.

SPEAKER_04 18:03

Well, the incentive structure here is key. So if you want to build a career as an academic, it's still not possible to do that uh by working with practitioners a lot. That is just a very difficult thing to do. In our research group, we try to do that. So our research given in the Netherlands is co-financed by the government and by the philanthropy sector. And the way that we've organized this is that there's a scientific advisory board that guards the impartiality of the methods and the data uh collection and analysis. But the uh societal council for the study, composed of uh philanthropy sector representatives and the government, they jointly decide on the research questions and the topics that we pay specific attention to. There's a core of research questions that never change, like what are the trends, what is the current state of philanthropy. But every year there are specific topics, like you know, uh the war in Ukraine, uh uh relief efforts uh across the world as uh as disasters happen, uh the lack of trust or the decline of confidence in charitable organizations, these things uh they sometimes attract more attention, and then they will be called upon by the council to for us to study in particular. It's not always possible then to translate this these insights into academic research papers that you know will be rewarded in your academic career, but it's very valuable for the research community in practice. So um, even though maybe it's not always rewarded academically, we find it so important that we spend time and resources on these topics and questions that come from practice. And we also find it informative and valuable uh to see that our research is actually inspired by uh practice, even when it's it's not so rewarding in terms of an academic payoff.

SPEAKER_03 20:12

And then I guess finally, I mean, one of the other things that's often cited as a difference between practice and academia is the timescales. And I'm I'm aware when I talk to people about these research notes, it often relates to work that was done quite a few years ago. So um it would be just really interesting to hear what it is that you're currently focusing, what the kind of main uh priorities in your work are at the moment.

SPEAKER_04 20:34

So my current priority is in increasing the transparency of research and research across the board, but uh in particular uh by uh people working on philanthropy topics. The idea uh that is very common in the philanthropy world is that you can gain trust by being transparent about the quality of your work. It is sometimes a little bit discouraging to see that research is not always that transparent. And again, this has to do a lot with the incentives in academia. We are, as academics, often rewarded by the quantity of publications, the quantity of grant money acquired, but not so much by the quality. And there is the idea, I think to some extent an illusion, that being more prolific and productive in terms of a high quantity of research output indicates a higher quality. Well, I think in many cases it's the opposite. Slow science is usually better science. So, yeah, there the incentive structures have to change. And what I'm working on right now is is creating indicators that will eventually help, hopefully, help researchers be rewarded for transparent science rather than just productive science.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Work coming out of that. Just remains to say thanks ever so much, Renee, for finding time to come on the podcast. It's uh great to hear about this paper and about the work that you're doing, and all the best for the future. Thank you. Great. Right, next let's hear from Tara Bryan and Vladimir Hayanek. Uh and Tara and Vladimir are talking about a paper that they wrote um with Monica Lee on resilience, ambiguous governance, and the Ukrainian refugee crisis, perspectives from NGO leaders in the Czech Republic. So let's hear from Tara and Vladimir. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Tara Bryan and Vladimir Hayanek. Hello to both of you. Hello. Hello. Well, it's great to have you on the podcast. Um, obviously, here as part of one of the um the series that we do in partnership with Earn Opp, talking about papers that are featured in their research notes. Um, and we're talking about some really interesting research that both of you were involved with, looking at the way in which the uh the current situation in Ukraine and the um migration that that caused um affected NGOs working in the Czech Republic. So, Tara, perhaps if you want to just um set the scene by telling us a bit about what the research was all about, how it came about, and what the kind of uh key findings of it are.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Yeah, I'd I'd love to. Thank you for um inviting us on the podcast. So I it it came about interestingly, actually. So I was um living in the Czech Republic. I Vladimir and I uh were at Maastricht. Well, Vladimir is at Masorick, but I was there for a year and I was doing research on capacity issues in the NGO sector in the Czech Republic. Resilience was part of that conversation, um, specifically around COVID. So when the invasion occurred in February of 22, I had scheduled, I had these scheduled interviews. Um, and so with a lot of refugee serving organizations. So, really, in the moment, I added questions around Ukraine, just knowing that they were going through incredible um experience and crisis in the moment. So I think this paper is um unique in the sense that it's data from the very beginning. And it's so it's data from February 22nd. I literally had an interview on the 22nd through June of 22. So these were the first three months of the of the crisis. And so uh this paper is really looking at the resilience of these NGOs and what you know, their perceptions of their own resilience as organizations and what were the facilitators and barriers to that resilience. And so there were two like big findings. One was the challenges around governance at the system level. And when I say system, I mean specifically around government response and then the interaction between NGOs who were really on the front lines. They were the ones responding from the very beginning. And so that relationship um, you know, was identified as dysfunctional. And, you know, I think one of the interesting parts that we're actually doing another paper on is their narrative around their resilience or lack thereof. And they they always pointed to another crisis. So, for example, um, from the government perspective, the Syrian refugee crisis to it was, they viewed it as really elemental in terms of how people are responding or people, the reputation of the NGO sector in the Czech Republic was really um impacted by, negatively impacted by the Syrian refugee crisis. And on the other side, in terms of resilience for NGOs, they spoke of COVID helping them be resilient in the Ukrainian refugee crisis. So I think one of the one of the big findings for for us as researchers is to look at not only one crisis, but how different crises have impacts that moving forward, both from a building resilience, but also from um the barriers of the systematic issues at hand. So within this realm, we have the dysfunction of the governance system, but we also have strategies that were identified by NGOs in terms of how they're working together as a sector to respond to the NGO crisis or to the refugee crisis in the Czech Republic.

SPEAKER_03 26:49

Yeah, of course. And Vladimir, I mean, if there's anything you'd like to follow up on that, I'd be really interested to hear. But I guess um one of the things I wanted to pick up on um was around what Tara was saying there about prior crises, particularly Syria, having caused issues for um uh the resilience of organizations in terms of the narratives around trust in NGOs. Did that make it particularly challenging when the situation with Ukraine arose to respond appropriately? Uh but conversely, did you also find that through responding, actually, organizations were able to repair some of that damage to the public trust in them?

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Well, so um, as Tara said, uh I can only agree that the Syrian crisis was really a breaking point when we are talking about the reputation of NGOs here. Um, until uh this crisis, uh nobody cared about uh Czech NGOs. I mean uh uh like uh officials and uh government and uh local governments and so on. Simply everybody knew that there's something like nonprofit sectors, some associations and foundations and so on, but uh uh it has uh it really changed uh after uh after the Syrian crisis because um you know Czech Republic uh never had in its modern history some experience with bigger refugees in flux. And uh well, maybe in case of Syria, uh there were big discussions whether to accept or not uh, I don't know, 25 uh kids from Syria, for example. Yeah, it was like everywhere in newspapers, TV, and so on. And uh when you look uh to the public opinion research, uh the time series, so uh since uh 2015, the level of uh of uh simply since that time, uh Czech uh society expressed that uh it mostly doesn't uh trust the nonprofit sector as a whole. Yeah, so it was uh uh really a breaking point, and uh I really like uh the idea of thinking about this uh period like a period of crisis, because uh not only Czech NGOs but probably all European and also American NGOs were influenced uh uh by COVID uh and uh then uh with uh this Ukrainian war here in the Czech Republic, it was uh something special because we had some uh big big tornadoes and uh some NGOs have been really deeply involved in uh providing services during that time.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

So it's uh really I would say age of crisis and it's really challenging for uh all the nonprofit sector and and I I wondered as well actually in in terms of thinking about that comparison between different crises, to what extent in the research did you find any sense among the people you spoke to that the the Ukraine crisis was distinctive or unique in any way? Did they feel as though it was different because of the nature of the problem that had caused it or that the um the community that that they were dealing with from previous crises?

SPEAKER_00 30:04

You know, I think one of the things that surprised me as a researcher was how they reflected on COVID as being the ultimate crisis and how they built networks, they built relationships, they learned how to you know serve people in these in very difficult times. And so one of the things that surprised me was their narrative around how COVID facilitated their ability, their response to COVID and what they learned helped them in the Ukrainian crisis. I mean, I remember there were several interviewers when I asked about the resilience, they were like, well, we got through COVID. I mean, this is this is how we do things. And so in that way, I think that that's a really interesting theoretical conversation to have, which is like, I think we often think about crisis in terms of like the negative impacts it's had on the resilience of organizations, especially NGOs. But what they were really speaking to is a strengthening of their capabilities, forced because they had to, you know, serve very vulnerable populations at a time when, you know, we were all supposed to stay home and and and not interact with people. So um, so I I find that um really interesting. I I also wanted to point to, though it's not published yet, where we did an additional survey last year looking at, you know, and and we surveyed about 200 and I think it was 260 um NGOs, both refugee serving and non-refugee serving. And one of the questions we asked is their perception, has the reputation been improved by the response to Ukraine? And um the findings are showing that yes, there is a you know moderate, they view their reputation as having, you know, there being reputational gains um based on their response to the Ukrainian crisis. So we will be presenting that next month. But um, but we do have some evidence that that has happened.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

Yeah, it's really interesting. Um, and just on the content of the paper itself, one one final question before I want to sort of zoom out and ask a bit about your your thoughts on the kind of wider um links between academia and practice. But um, in terms of what we're talking about when we're talking about resilience, what kinds of things do the organizations themselves think are the important elements of being resilience as an organization? Is it just having the resources, you know, financial or staff resources? Is it about the governance structures they have in place, or is it also about their ability to kind of navigate some of that wider political environment as well? Vladimir, I don't know if you want to say something about that.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, thanks. Uh so basically all those elements are an uh easy answer. Um you know what uh was uh interesting for me was uh the ability of uh NGOs uh to uh cooperate uh more intensively with each other, especially in the region, but not only with other NGOs, but also with uh regional authorities, for example. Um it was not so good with uh the central authorities, it's a different story, but uh I think that uh uh today uh the relationship between the local or regional NGOs and regional authorities is better than before. Yeah, and um when Tara talked about uh those uh reputational gains, so I really really really am totally sure that they are only temporal. Yeah, I I think uh uh well maybe we can talk about it later, but um, you know, when you read this uh paper, well um you can see that uh some people uh told us or told Tara that uh well we really hope that uh now our position will be better. Well, and they probably trusted uh to these words, but it was in the beginning of the conflict. Today the situation is I would say um not slightly but significantly different. And uh well, maybe Tara could add something.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Yeah, yeah. You know, I would say um, so I love this question, by the way. Um, and you know, the way that I think about this, and the way that I would talk to a practitioner about this if they were asking me, is that um there are things that you have control over and there are things that you don't have control over. And so understanding obviously the system in which you exist and the challenges associated with that, you know, having an awareness of that is is is incredibly important. But I think what this paper really shows is um not the vertical, not the kind of the government NGO relationship, but as Vladimir was talking about, the horizontal um networks that can be incredibly impactful. Um and so that's what I would say is okay, within this system, what can we do? How can we collaborate um with each other? Um, how can we help mobilize both donations, um, but also support volunteers? Um, how can we provide direct assistance to those organizations that are um directly working with the population? So I think that is the one thing that you know, practitioners in particular, I think looking at these strategies, and there may be more given, you know, in different contexts. Um this was just um at the very beginning um of the of the crisis. And so uh so I think looking at those response strategies as a way to build resilience and to understand that your resilience isn't just about your organization, but there are resilience-enhancing aspects to that collaboration and coordination that I think is really important.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Great. And you've you've seamlessly moved on to answer one of my follow-up questions there, which is about you know the insights that practitioners and policymakers can get from the research, which I think are in this case are really evident because it's got a clear, sort of you know, practice-focused aspect to it and that the lessons from it are quite clear. But what's your wider sense of the current state of links between academia and practice? Have you found it you know easy or or kind of um have you found challenges in trying to engage in practitioners in your research? And conversely, when you're trying to disseminate your findings, have you found a you know a ready audience or have you found it difficult to get those findings out there?

SPEAKER_00 36:51

Can I respond, Vlad? So I I'm a self-described, yeah, I'm a self-described pracademic. Um, so I was a practitioner prior to getting a PhD. All of my research, in fact, one of the questions I always have to myself when I'm thinking about a research project is what impact is this gonna could this have on practice? What influence could it have? So um my work is very much connected to the field of practice. Um so um, and and I just I find pride in when when practitioners say, oh, you speak practice. Like, um, and so it's I think it's because of my background, but I don't actually, I actually think that's the most important part of my work. So I do it in the classroom because I'm teaching practitioners. Um, and I also do it in all of my research. So one way that I am really committed to doing um is you know having academic publications, obviously, but then having, I love this, you know, research to practice brief that that Ernapa's doing. It's it's wonderful. And I do those myself, actually, um where I'm um especially even before I publish to kind of give them a sense of what are the overall findings, um, not in a, you know, in a really simple like what are the takeaways for practice kind of way. They don't necessarily want to read a 20 to 30 page academic publication. Um, so I think that's incredibly important. And I hope that the field is moving even more in this direction. Um, because when I talk to practitioners, um, they're really hungry for this. They want to know um what what uh you know, they want to know the research. Um and so having these translational people, like academics as well as practitioners, um, that can kind of translate these worlds of research and practice, I think is is is important and I hope to be part of it.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

Yeah, and and uh Vladimir, what's your your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02 38:58

Yeah, you know, we discussed uh this uh thing with Tara many times uh when she was here in Brno, in the Czech Republic. Uh I would say that uh it's a different situation in the United States, for example, and in the Czech Republic, because uh it uh took us uh many years uh to prove to the nonprofit sector that uh we are not some you know useless uh academics. So we also have something to give them, but uh you need to cooperate with them and to talk with them. And uh it's simply and I really need this uh academics approach of uh of Tara, and uh it's uh something I think it simply it should be applied when you want to uh bring some additional value to the non-profit sector and non-profit institutions. So that's it. And uh I only wanted to add that I really appreciate this uh Airnop activities and research notes and also this podcast because it's uh excelant. And I use it here uh at my university to show other academics hey, look at those activities. This is something we also should do because it's useful and it's necessary to do.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Yeah, well, that's great to hear. Um, I just had one final question because I wanted it, it links in with this and it goes back to something you said at the beginning. You you mentioned that you know, in a way it was fortuitous that you were already lined up to do this um this research and had these interviews, but then you were able to sort of pivot slightly by including the additional questions in it, which makes this research, I think, feel unusually timely and and kind of um relevant to the ongoing work of practitioners. In in your experience, you know, do you think there is a bit of a challenge in trying to keep those links between academia and practice? That the the timescales and the sorts of research questions that that lends itself to are a bit mismatched. And is there anything that that other um researchers who want to keep their research um kind of relevant can do to try and make it more you know more relevant and kind of adapt in the same way?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Yeah, I think I think so that that is a a huge issue. Um, and it's something that I have dealt with throughout my career. So whether it is publications or you know, getting funding and then you know funding students to do the work, it's like this year process of of um doing it. So I think the challenges are there. I I think it's about communication. Um, so for me, when I'm working with a community partner or when I'm thinking about uh research, as I mentioned before, I do the research note before I publish. Um and so I try and do, and then I share my publications as well, because there's there are some paywalls for some of these publications. And so I will just send them to anyone who participated in the study. Um, but I think the important part is trying to be as timely as you can while also doing really quality work. Um, and I think that that is uh that is definitely the challenge. And then being able to uh pivot you know quickly as researchers in ways that make sense. I mean, this made sense given my questions around resilience that was already in the survey, and I knew I was speaking with refugee serving organizations, so it made sense that um I do this. Uh, but I think being able to, as researchers, know what's going on in the world and then being able to kind of pivot and do it um quickly, uh, you know, that's a that's a skill I'm still learning. But um in this situation, it it really benefited, I think, the field and and the work.

SPEAKER_02 42:52

If I may to add something, I think it's uh really necessary um for the nonprofits uh to know that they are not only like data sources for the researchers and academics, yeah. And uh I think it's a still a common mistake of uh many researchers, especially here. They are just asking and give me your data because I am working on my paper, yeah. And who cares? Yeah, and uh uh I think it really helps when the researcher has some um practical experience. Uh yeah, if you worked in some or for some NGO or something like that, and uh when you promise that uh you will share your results, so do it, and uh not only send it uh to the to the communication partners, but uh also, for example, try to consult again your results, yeah, and maybe just ask them, please. If you want to give me some feedback, blah blah blah, because it might be interesting not only for us, but also also for. You so not only the sources of data, it's uh it's terrible if uh the receptor behaves like that.

SPEAKER_03 44:06

I think that's a really important point. Um, listen, uh, just want to say thanks to both of you ever so much for coming on the podcast. Really interesting to hear about it and and all those sort of wider thoughts on some of the opportunities and challenges in these links between um academia and practice in this field. Um, certainly wish you all the best for the future and and look forward to hearing more uh about future work that you've got coming up.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 44:38

Okay, and then finally uh we're gonna hear from Yulia Litovchenko. Um and she's talking about a paper that she wrote with uh a few other authors, Michael Meyer, Michaela Neumeyer, and Astrid Pennstorffer. Uh, and that paper is called Charitable Giving in Times of COVID-19. Do crises forward the better or the worse in individuals? So let's hear from Yulia. Okay, great. I'm here with Yulia Litovchenko. Hi there, Yulia.

SPEAKER_05 45:04

Hi.

SPEAKER_03 45:04

Um well, great to have a chance to talk to you on the podcast. Um, and obviously, this is about one of the papers that you worked on that's featured in the latest um release of Earnop Research Notes. And the paper in question is all about the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on people's individual giving behavior um in Germany and Austria. Um so maybe you could say a bit in your words, just what the research was all about, how it came about, and what some of the key findings were.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

Uh yeah, it started because we were really interested interested in when the pandemic started, what the effect on this situation um will be on pro-social behavior in general. Because there were on the one hand news about people showing solidarity, mobilizations in neighborhoods to help each other, but on the on the other hand, many organizations couldn't continue their operations anymore. So we were interested in which effect is stronger, which dynamic does prevail in the long run. And to measure this, we we did a big quantitative survey with 2,000 individuals in in Austria and Germany. And for me, the most interesting part was that we found that actually very few individuals changed their pro social behavior during the pandemic, and that especially quite uh it seems natural in the in hindsight that those who were strongly affected were most likely to change their behavior, but interestingly in both directions. So those who were negatively affected by the pandemic changed their behavior in ways that they became more pro-social or less pro-social. And this was a a really interesting puzzle to me, what's going on there.

SPEAKER_03 46:46

Yeah, absolutely. And and just to sort of pick up on that, so one of yeah, one of the things that it's there's some interesting uh findings about how people did change their behavior, which I'll I'll uh come on to in a moment. But one of the main findings of the paper, in a sense, is the sort of negative result that actually people change their giving behavior a lot less than than some people might expect from some of the narratives. I mean, does that suggest that actually pro-social behavior is relatively inelastic, even in the face of a crisis like uh the COVID pandemic?

SPEAKER_01 47:14

Yes, it seems so. That it's very habitual, deeply ingrained behavior and people are very unlikely to have changed it.

SPEAKER_03 47:22

Yeah. Um, and I I guess one of the other things I wanted to ask about that was in did you get a sense in the research of whether people who were surveyed perceived the pandemic as a global phenomenon or a local one, and whether that had an impact on their willingness to give? Because it a lot of the discussion around COVID-19, I think, and and pro-social behavior seemed to go in both directions. There was at the same time a focus on the fact that people were feeling the effects at a very local level, and therefore there was an upsurge seemingly in kind of mutual aid and neighborliness. Um, but also obviously the scale of the pandemic as a whole was global. And so actually, people were thinking about how to address the issue at that level. Was that something that um that you looked at and did it have an effect on people's willingness to give?

SPEAKER_01 48:12

Uh, we didn't ask people about the perception, whether it's local or global or effective or ineffective, the strategies to fight the pandemic. We did, however, ask if for which areas people donated. For example, in in international aid as well as um infrastructure projects in the neighborhood or social services in the neighborhood, but we didn't find any large shifts there that people changed the causes to which they give.

SPEAKER_03 48:38

Interesting. So people just gave if they were already more inclined to give nationally, they continue to do so. And if they were more inclined to give locally, they continued to do that, and there wasn't a significant shift.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 48:49

Interesting. Um and one of the things in the paper that you talk about a bit is the difference between perhaps the what are termed the proximal effects of a crisis and the the distal effect. So that's the difference between the kind of immediate short-term impacts on people and then the sort of the longer-term attempt to understand and make sense of it. And and can you say a bit about the ways in which that those two types of effects might have a different impact on people's willingness to engage in pro-social behavior?

SPEAKER_01 49:19

Uh yes, this was a psychological theory we then found that could explain the patterns we observed, that people that were negatively affected sometimes increased and sometimes decreased their behavior. And as we couldn't make out any other demographic factors that explain these patterns, we then looked closer at the psychological theory, which states that uh when people are faced with an existential threat, they at first react with uh they want to get they just want to be safe, they react with self-defensiveness, they like to withdraw from the situation. And if they are able to to withdraw from this situation and feel safe again, then in a next step um mentally, so you you manage to survive, then your brain tries to to make sense of you still being alive, you want to extend your existence to to infinity, so to say. You try to fit in into your society in a better way. So people that tend to question social norms more, for example, after existential threats, they are more conventional again. You you try to fit in more because the the social ties, social belongings get more important, the symbolical uh layer of life, so to say.

SPEAKER_03 50:35

No, I was just going to ask, was the COVID-19 pandemic, do you think that that it was qualitatively different in any sense from many other disaster or crisis situations that prompt people to give, in that most people were themselves affected by it, you know, as well as then uh being aware of the effects on other people? Whereas in many situations, we're talking about crises that affect one group, but then another group is called upon to give in support of them. Was that an important part of there being these two different ways of potentially responding?

SPEAKER_01 51:10

Yeah, I think the difference is that in in other disaster situations, people also people that are closer to the disaster donate more, but those people are already safe. So if a hurricane strikes, you are safe when you're able to donate again. And during COVID, you were it took one and a half year, two years, and people were continu some people were continually afraid and uh terrified during that situation with uh um the media writing about it uh every day. So it's hard to get a distance to to feel safe again. That this makes a huge difference.

SPEAKER_03 51:43

Yeah, absolutely. And then then just the other thing that I wanted to ask on the contents of the paper was you've mentioned already that you looked at the question of where people's giving was going at a local or national level. Did you look at all at the question of whether when people were were giving, whether that was going to uh sort of in-groups or to out-groups, so to people who were already within their networks or perceived as being similar in some sense to them, or was it going to people who were perceived as kind of outside of their networks and therefore further away?

SPEAKER_01 52:16

Uh yeah, there is the theory also predicts that people would rather donate more for in-group causes during crisis, but we didn't find that in our data so clearly.

SPEAKER_03 52:27

And so they were just as likely to give to out-groups as they were to in-groups, so it didn't seem to have a noticeable effect on that.

SPEAKER_05 52:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:35

Yeah. Um it's really interesting. And I mean, I guess the just zooming out a bit to the bigger picture, it'd be interesting to get your sense of what you think these particular findings from this research can um offer in terms of insights for practitioners or policymakers. What are the kind of practical lessons that they might be able to draw on or take as a starting point to sort of to build on?

SPEAKER_01 52:58

Um, I think what we can learn from this paper is there that there is a huge potential for for pro-social behavior in difficult situations in in our societies. But on the other hand, that if people are continually faced with with negative news and are not able to distance themselves from the threat, then they withdraw from society. So for me, one big learning is that we need to be careful how much negative news we we expose people to, because this can in the long run diminish their their pro-social behavior, their donations.

SPEAKER_03 53:36

In in a sense, you have to enable sufficient number of people to feel uh not affected personally by by the ongoing crisis situation that they're able to have that distance and sort of shift into the distal mindset.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

They can be affected, but they need to find safe ground again. So they need to be able to draw two financial resources from the government, for example, and know they they are not really existentially threatened, but it will be fine or it it is fine again. And this feeling of eventually everything will be good needs to be conveyed by the government, I think, so that uh this philanthropic potential of the population is activated.

SPEAKER_03 54:17

Interesting. And again, kind of zooming out, even just beyond this paper, um, obviously the the purpose of these earn up research notes is to try and foster better links between academics and practitioners in in philanthropy. What's your experience so far of that relationship? Have you found it easy to engage with practitioners, um, both in terms of sort of learning from them or using their work um for your own research, or in terms of disseminating your work to practitioners?

SPEAKER_01 54:46

I have to say, I had some I find it hard to communicate between these two two spheres. Um, as I'm also personally engaged in nonprofit organizations, but the practical problems that arise there when looking for solutions within the academic literature, I often feel that literature doesn't provide that many practical things that are that are useful in the in the challenges the the organizations face. And on the other hand, it is also hard as an academic to talk to the practitioners because I feel the practitioners are often very optimistic about the potential of the sector. So they view civil society as something that is unanimously positive and uh will have a great great effect of society, but they don't check these assumptions. And um for me when from the academic perspective, I critically examine what is the democratic potential of civil society, what is the the the good effects for the individuals engaged in the organizations, and so on. And often the optimistic ideas we have about the sector cannot be cannot be proven in the data.

SPEAKER_03 56:04

And do you think that's just the the the difficulty there is that there's a fundamental difference of the perspective or what the people in question are trying to do, or are there practical barriers as well that are in the way, or are there things that we can do to overcome some of that and make it easier to get knowledge sharing between the practitioners and academics?

SPEAKER_01 56:26

I guess it's just fundamentally different perspectives from trying to be very critical and data-driven as uh academics usually are, to the perspective of we want to build something good, we want to make the world a better place. This is another approach to to society.

SPEAKER_03 56:46

Yeah, absolutely. We're just you know certainly something I've heard from other academics that I've that I've spoken to, that there is just that that gap and you can close it to a certain extent, but it's it's never entirely going to disappear. Um the the final thing I wanted to ask you is I'm I'm aware that often the work that people have done that's featured in these research notes um is actually you know done a few years ago because of the scale of academic publishing um timetables. So I'd just be interested to know what it is that you're currently focusing on, whether there's follow-ups to this particular piece of work or whether there are other areas that you're currently looking at.

SPEAKER_01 57:20

Um well, at the moment I'm doing quite different things. I'm looking at how media portrays prefigurative projects because there are many, so many initiatives within civil society and the nonprofit sector and ideas how we could build a more sustainable future, uh starting with eco-villages and city gardens and so on. Um, however, the majority of the population seems to be uh seems to have no no imagination how a sustainable future could look like. And I'm now investigating what the role of mainstream media is in how these prefigurative projects are portrayed, if at all.

SPEAKER_03 58:02

Yeah. Oh well, very different, but that sounds absolutely fascinating. Um, and certainly there's I think a growing interest within uh the world of practice at the moment on futures thinking and foresight and actually finding ways to think more uh expansively about the future. So that sounds like a fascinating piece of work. Just remains to say, Yulia, thank you ever so much for finding the time to come on the podcast. It's really great to hear about the work you're doing and certainly wish you all the best for the future.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

SPEAKER_03 58:38

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Rene, to Tara, to Vladimir, and to Julia for finding the time to talk to me and come on the podcast. Uh, I surely agree. It's really interesting to hear about all of their research. I always find it fascinating to have the chance to talk to academics and kind of dig into work that's going on in a whole range of areas. It really sort of highlights, you know, quite how multidisciplinary uh philanthropy is and how much depth I think there is to it. And certainly as a kind of growing field of academic study, I think it's really fascinating to be aware of what's going on. Um, as I said before, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find all of those research notes and the underlying papers that they're based on. I'll also put links to places where you can find some things that I've written that might be of interest. If you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, as ever, do check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com where you can find all the back issues of this podcast, including all of the previous Earn It Earn Ot Partnership episodes and lots of other episodes besides, with uh thematic deep dives and interviews with lots of interesting people working in philanthropy and civil society around the world. You can also find articles and news updates and all kinds of things. You can also follow me on social media, I'm at on LinkedIn, I'm definitely spending more time there these days. You can also still just about find me on X or Twitter. If you've got ideas for people I could talk to on the podcast or topics that we could cover on our normal episodes, do drop me a line as well. Uh, always great to hear from people with thoughts. You can find contact details at the Y Philanthropy Matters website. Other than that, just like, subscribe, do tell other people that you know about the podcast if you think they'll be interested, and I will see you next time. Bye.