SPEAKER_03 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms podcast with Rodri 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, Rodery Davis, and this episode is the tenth in our partnership series with ERNOP, the European Research Network on Philanthropy, where I speak to academics whose work has been featured in the latest batch of practitioner-focused uh Earnock Research Notes. And this week we have interviews with three more academics whose work has been featured in Earnock Research Notes. We've got Balker Klein-Tiesling from King's College London. We've got Elizabeth Dale from Grand Valley State University, the Johnson Centre of Philanthropy there. And we've got Dominic Mayer from the University of Basel. And I'll tell you a little bit more in a moment about what I'm talking to each of them about. So each interview, if you're not listened to one of these things before, is about sort of 10-15 minutes. We're just going to cover what's in the papers in question, what some of the key findings are, and a bit of context on the current state of the links between philanthropy and academia when it comes to philanthropy. So without further ado, let's get into each of the conversations. I'll introduce each of my guests as we go along, and then I will be back at the end for the usual little bit of housekeeping. Okay, so first up we have Bauker Klein-Teslink. Anna Bauka is a lecturer in philosophy, politics and economics at King's College, London. Um, and I sat down to talk to him about his paper on partisanship, political alignment, and charitable donations, which he co-authored with Georgios Melios. So here's Bauker. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Bauker Klein-Teslink. How hi Bauker. Hi, how are you doing? Yeah, really good, thank you. Well, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Really looking forward to talking a bit about this paper. Um, and the paper in question that you've written, which has been turned into a research note for this series of the Earn OP research notes, um, is called Partisanship, Political Alignment and Charitable Donations. So maybe the best place to start is if you could just tell us all a bit about what the paper's about and what the sort of key findings in the research were.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Yeah, so this paper sort of really starts from this this economics literature that tries to examine how government spending relates to charitable donations. Or, like, sort of classically, there's this idea that, you know, when the government raises welfare spending, individuals have less incentive to provide that welfare privately and therefore would reduce their donations. Now, this is still very much an open empirical question whether that's actually true. Uh, but what's really missing from that research, and that's where we come in, is that we argue that it's really not just the government spending per se, because well, people don't quite know what government spending is, how much a government spends, what it spends it on, but it's really about beliefs about the government. So do you believe that the government either has the ability or the willingness to solve the kinds of problems that you care about? And if you don't believe that the government can, should or will provide that kind of welfare, that's exactly when you have the strongest incentives to donate to those causes. So that's sort of what what set us out on um on this research question. So what we're exact examining more specifically is how does alignment with the government, so let's say I'm a Democrat and the current president, so this is all in the US, the current president is also Democrat, how does this affect my donations compared to when the president is Republican? Or the idea is that when you oppose a government, that's exactly when you believe the government will not be able to provide the welfare that you think it ought to provide. So this is so that's the question we're examining, and that's exactly what we find. So both Democrats and Republicans donate really quite considerably less to charity when their own party is in power. So that's that's sort of the the mainline story of the paper.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And there's there's a I sort of as I was reading, there were a few things that I I thought the the idea of making that distinction that it's not necessarily about the direct impact of what is actually being spent by the government, but actually the more important factor is what people think the government is spending, because actually that that is the thing, as we sort of know, in other areas that kind of drives people's behaviour. Um I wondered whether there were a few things. I mean, one was did you see um in the research whether there was any distinction um between people who were giving to things that were sort of direct service provision and those where they might be supporting something that was more focused around advocacy? Because it struck me that your beliefs about what the government was doing, you might obviously donate to things that the government is doing, but you don't think they're doing enough of or doing them well well enough, or you might want to actively kind of challenge government and support organizations doing that. So I wondered if you you you touched on that at all.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah, so so our main uh our main analysis focuses on uh non-political donations. Now, of course, there's always a grey zone of you know charities that also have a strong political character, but direct political donations or political donations to to PACs and stuff like that are not included. So in principle, it is much more or much less on the advocacy side and much more on the welfare side. Now we do also separately examine political donations and they actually go very much in the same direction. So it's not it's not mutually exclusive, uh, but this is definitely not only driven by advocacy. And in fact, so we examine a whole range of beliefs to sort of understand why this is going on. And we actually, so what's what's sort of interesting there is that we see clear shifts in how much trust people have in a central government, what things they think they ought to do, but the changes in the beliefs about how much the government is spending are actually quite muted. So this is really not so much a question of, oh, is the government spending too much or too little on something? It is a question of will they manage to provide the welfare that they should with that amount of spending. So it's an advocacy question, at least to a larger degree than it is a levels question.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

That's really interesting. So it's because I was I was wondering about this. It's kind of it those beliefs that people have um about government spending, um, whether it was more about what it was that the government actually chose to focus on, or whether it was more about a belief in how effective or efficient the government would be in delivering that. So it's more the is it more the latter or more the former?

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Yeah, so it's it's it's interesting. So so what we do is we examine how people answer questions about is the government spending too much, too little, or just about right on a whole range of issues from security to welfare to health care, etc. etc. And then we see for let's say for a Democrat, how do these beliefs shift when the government changes from Democrat to Republican to Democrat, etc.? And there, so if our story were driven by these beliefs, you would imagine that both Democrats and Republicans would have to believe that opposite side governments are spending too little, right? Because they're donating more when the other party is in power, which is consistent with the idea that the government is spending too little. And if anything, we find the opposite. So, first of all, the effects there are quite small, but if anything, uh people think that governments off the opposite side are spending too much on certain issues. And that is sort of consistent with the efficacy argument that you know people believe that the other side is simply isn't very effective. And that we can actually show in that or let's say trust in the federal government, which takes a dramatic hit when uh the opposite party comes in power. And in fact, those shifts becomes become much stronger over time. So indeed, people, the degree to which people lose trust in opposite side governments is growing bigger and bigger. Well, so what's sort of interesting there as well is that this is not only beliefs in the efficacy of government, there is an additional side about what people believe should be the role of government. So these are sort of like normative beliefs about what people think the government ought to do. And these similarly shift. So we examine a whole range of questions on, you know, should a particular set of problems be solved by the government or by private parties? Or of course, you know, when you genuinely believe that problems ought to be solved by private parties, that's exactly when you would donate to charities that solve those problems. And indeed, sort of consistent with our donations findings, we see that these beliefs about what people think the government ought to do shift in that similar direction. Where they think where they say, you know, if the opposite side is in power, all these problems ought to be solved by private parties. When my side is in power, the government should solve it. And therefore, they donate mostly and only when the opposite side is in power.

SPEAKER_03 9:28

That's really interesting. Is there any distinction there between the situation in which someone, you know, at a certain point you'd imagine, probably more on the left of the political spectrum, might donate when a party of the right is in power, but almost just pragmatically because they think that's necessary because you know there are gaps to be filled or the government isn't, and someone on the right who might have more of a sort of fundamental ideological belief that that is preferable or desirable.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

Yeah, so first of all, the so d we actually find very symmetric results between Republicans and Democrats. Uh so both sides more or less shift their donations to the same degree depending on who's in power. Now there's a tiny level difference in uh how much Republicans and Democrats donate, although that's mostly driven by wealth rather than by partisanship. But what's what's sort of interesting there is that both sides think that the government should be bigger in a sense when their own party is in power. So now when Republicans are in power, they also think that all problems should be solved by the government, right? It's it's not just an ideological opposition to government solving problems, it's mostly an ideological opposition to opposite side governments solving those problems. And that sort of like in a way removes a certain check on government spending or on the size of government, right? Assuming that it's always the power the size that is in power that decides how big the government is, well, their supporters think the government should always be big, right? And then it's always the opposition who thinks it should should be smaller. But of course the opposition doesn't decide the size of government to the same degree.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

Yeah, really interesting. I I just want to zoom out a bit from from the sort of specifics of it and just ask, you know, from your point of view, what do you think the real-world relevancy of this for practitioners might be? And obviously it's kind of very much grounded in in a real-world phenomenon, but how could people take these insights and apply them?

SPEAKER_02 11:09

Well, so I mean, right now, right, like I and I think these these issues are only becoming stronger with the degree of polarization that we're observing today. You see that, you know, there is a government that is very strongly opposed by Democrats at the moment, where I think like current levels of trust in the federal government by Democrats are probably at an all-time low, right? So the very first prediction that would directly come from my research here is that this should lead to an increase in donations from Democrats, right? Because there is a strong belief now amongst many Democrats that the government isn't solving the problems that that matter, whether that's things about welfare, healthcare, climate, etc. So when people believe that the government should, you know, that's that's when these people should step in. So there's there's a role for charities to play here, to say, like, hey, you know, there are these, let's say, reductions in uh international aid. This is the moment for people who oppose these kinds of cuts to step in to see, like, hey, can we provide at least to some degree what at the moment the federal government isn't providing? And I think charities should should play this card more. Uh, I mean, you see this a little bit now. Like, I think Bill Gage has pledged a whole bunch of money to sort of like try to compensate for the cuts of uh in the US and the UK on international aid. And that's exactly something that I think that uh charity should really play at the moment.

SPEAKER_03 12:26

Yeah, I really interesting question, I guess, about whether there is any point at which a limit, there's a sort of tipping point where the level of reduction of of spending tips people's beliefs over into sort of feeling as though actually there's their their giving is not going to be sufficient, and actually that then acts as a as a break. But um maybe that's for another piece of research. But I just wanted to ask as well, sort of zooming out uh yet again, what your experience and perception is of um the links between academia and practice when it comes to philanthropy as a as a field. Um, obviously the focus of these uh not research notes is to try and bridge that gap by kind of turning academic research into things that are more relevant and palatable for practitioners. And I just wondered what your own experience was of how easy it is to work with practice to get data for your research and also, you know, the other way around to disseminate your findings.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Yeah, so the the data I'm using in this paper are all publicly available. So it's mostly IRS data. So in that sense, I don't rely on charities. But I will say, so I've I have a few different research agendas that all centre around, you know, collective action, public goods, etc. So protests, religion, charitable giving. And my impression is that the link to the the the non-academic sector, so to say, is probably strongest uh for my charitable donations research. Although I should say, had I not I I think there is a degree to which there can be more done to reach out to academics working in this space. Like I think it's often academics who seek to sort of like try to influence practice because they care about that real-world applicability, that then find these organizations rather than the other way around. And I think there are going to be a bunch of people, a bunch of academics sort of on the margin, who either can't be bothered or don't really know how to reach out. And then if an organization reaches out to them, they'd be very, very happy to help with that. Uh so I think there's much more possible there, but at the same time, I think that the links are stronger than they are in at least other research agendas of mine.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

Yeah, that's really interesting to hear, and particularly that that idea that you know there are there's actually probably this untap pool of academics who would love to engage, and maybe it's just having those opportunities and maybe there's infrastructure that's needed. Listen, remains just to say thanks ever so much, Bauka, for coming on the podcast. Really interesting to hear about the research. And you know, certainly I'm aware there are other papers that are kind of based around the same data analysis and and others that you might have. Maybe you could just say a bit about what you've got planned for the future or what you're currently working on.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Yeah, so if uh I'm currently working on a paper, like at least in the charitable donation space, on a paper on the effect of immigration on, on the one hand, government provision of public goods, and on the other hand, private provision. So there's a whole literature in economics that sort of suggests that, you know, when immigration rises, people or natives sort of want less redistribution, less public good provision, because many people don't want to share with people in their outgroup, so to say. And what I'm sort of showing there in that research, which is which is still ongoing, is that while that may be true, there is actually also a private response to going in the exact opposite direction. So both in the UK and in the US, when there is an increase in local immigration, natives actually start giving more to charity. And again, there's this sort of like this compensatory mechanism whereby the government retreats to a degree, uh, but there is a group of people, quite a large group of people really, that steps in to sort of compensate for that increased need.

SPEAKER_03 15:46

Well, it's really fascinating, and I I love just things that point out quite how complicated the psychology and sort of behavioral uh stuff behind giving is, and actually you make make all these assumptions about phenomena, and then there's you know, it's always much more complicated than you think. Um it certainly, you know, we'll keep a keen eye out for that research. Um and yeah, as I say, remain to just say thanks ever so much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Okay, and then next up uh is Elizabeth J. Dale. Uh now Elizabeth is the Fry Foundation Chair for Family Philanthropy at the Johnson Center, Grand Valley State University in the US, one of the sort of big centres for philanthropy research. And I sat down to talk to Elizabeth about a paper that she co-authored with uh my Kent colleague, Beth Breeze, actually, um, called Making the Tea or Making It to the Top, How Gender Stereotypes Impact Women's Women Fundraisers' Careers. So here is Elizabeth. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Elizabeth Dale. Hi there, Elizabeth. Hi, Rodri. Well, really good to see you again in this case, actually, because we did actually meet in person for the first time uh only a few days ago. So that's very you know uh nice and unusual for this podcast, where often it is people that I only get to meet virtually. Um but we're here to talk about the paper that you uh have featured in the latest release of Earn Op research notes. Um paper in question is titled Making the Tea or Making It to the Top, How Gender Stereotypes Impact Women Fundraisers' Careers, which gives you a good sense of what it's about. But maybe a good place to start would be if you're able to say a little bit about the background to this piece of research and what some of the key findings were.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah. Um, this project actually came uh at the request of the Institute uh of fundraising in the UK. And they convened a group of uh fundraisers, all women, who were really interested in having more research on this topic. And so um part of why I was so pleased to have this article chosen is because it's a real example of practitioners wanting to know more and then asking two academics, me and my colleague Beth Brees, both of us who have worked as paid fundraisers in the past to carry out the work. And so we had we had a survey that went out to the Institute of Fundraising membership, and we had about 790 survey respondents, and then we um also did an additional three focus groups of women fundraisers. And our question was really around what did women fundraisers experience in their careers in terms of stereotypes and just and further discrimination and harassment. How did that impact their career progression and really what what could we do about it or what what ideas did they have to address this phenomenon? And for the for those people who maybe haven't thought about it before, the nonprofit sector is incredibly female. Um, over three-quarters of all of the workers in the sector uh identify as women, and there's a lot of female-dominated professions in the sector, from teaching to caregiving, social work, uh nursing. And so this is a profession that um attracts a lot of women, that has historically been dominated by women, but there remains uh an elite uh power structure that is male at the top, uh especially in the largest and most well-funded charities. And so so we knew there was something going on there. And the sector is not immune to larger systemic issues like sexism, racism, other kind other disparities. Um, and so we took we took on the question of of gender and what were the gender stereotypes that fundraisers were experiencing. And we really wanted to give voice to them in our study and and so drew upon a lot of the um stories and examples that our uh participants shared.

SPEAKER_03 19:50

Yeah, many of which, I mean, uh, I read the paper a few years ago because it it was published a few years ago, and remember being shocked at the time. And I I reread it in preparation for this and again was shocked at just some of the stories that come out.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

It was it was pretty shocking. And we actually, I think it's important to note we collected this data pre-COVID, not to not to say that you know, suddenly the the fundraising profession has fixed all of its gender disparities, but there were some some changes that I think post-COVID we have seen some evolution, particularly in things like job flexibility and working from home, um, which was suggested as sort of one one potential remedy, and of course, you know, changed for many of us.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

Yeah, which brings me to one of my questions, actually, which was um the I guess some of the the sort of inequalities and inequities that that women have been faced with as fundraisers are kind of more structural ones in the sense that they're to do with processes and the way in which um, you know, uh hiring procedures, for instance, are kind of implemented. And then but then there's also this whole body of kind of slightly more hidden everyday sexes. And in in the research that you did, how much of it was about some of that kind of visible formal stuff and how much was actually there's all of this stuff that women working in these roles just have to deal with on a day-to-day basis when they're interacting individually?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

It was really a mix of both. And, you know, part of our research, we wanted to understand what were examples of being stereotyped or having preconceptions based on your gender. We didn't, we didn't ask a question about, you know, have you had have you experienced sexual harassment? Because a lot of a lot of people either haven't or wouldn't characterize what they've experienced as that. And so, you know, where the examples of being stereotyped really sort of have held women back is considering, you know, if if a male and a female fundraiser walk into the room and you've never met either of them, do you automatically assume the male fundraiser is the more senior person? Right. And that was an example that was that was given a lot. Or do you expect women to do relational uh and and kind of caring home even home based work in a setting where fundraising? Takes place, like making the tea, entertaining guests or visitors, um, why is that not something that's shared among the whole staff?

SPEAKER_03 22:09

Yeah, absolutely. That one of the things I thought actually is that I was trying to get my head around is whether which way you know the causation's running there. Because it if fundraising roles, maybe you know, those that aren't necessarily at a senior level are perceived by some as kind of slightly lower status, is it that they're perceived in that way because it's kind of seen for historical or cultural reasons as as women's work in some sense? Or is it kind of there are other reasons that the status of those jobs is seen as lower, and that as a result they're seen as suitable for women by people who kind of carry those those preconceptions? Do you have any sense of kind of how you could disentangle that? Or is it, you know, basically both are happening?

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yeah, I mean, it is all it is all knotted up. I think where you can disentangle it is, you know, it first of all, we're not in the home. We're in a workplace. We want fundraising to be seen as professional work. And so um establishing some boundaries or parameters around that is probably pretty important. Certainly when you're, you know, a more uh more junior fundraiser, you might be doing more events-based logistics or community-based fundraising. But then as you progress in your role, you know, what we what we see, and and I have some other work that shows this, is that men are on a glass escalator to chief development officers or chief corporate fundraisers, major gift fundraisers, and women are really dominating the events, the donor stewardship, the annual fund, the community fundraising. Some of that is is the nature of the job. And we do mention women's kind of caring, caregiving responsibilities as something that often factors into whether or not you go for a job that might require more evenings or more weekends. But the other thing is, you know, in a in a workplace, shouldn't we all do the things that, you know, keep our offices running irregardless of our gender or who we are? And so um, you know, I've been in in some progressive organizations where, you know, meeting minutes gets rotated or there's just one person that's always appointed to do it, and that's part of their job. But it's not assumed that it'll always be the woman at the table. So, I mean, in some ways it is all nodded up, but I think the unique aspect of of this research and this study is that fundraising is relation, relationship-based work. And so the lines get blurred a lot. And that I think was was important to point out because it does serve to either hold women back andor create a different experience for them in the workplace.

SPEAKER_03 24:44

Yeah, absolutely. And and the the other thing that I wanted to ask about, I mean, you you mentioned it um and certainly touched on it in uh in the paper, is the particular question around major donor or sort of high net worth fundraising, where I think it, you know, it's kind of apparent that there are particular issues because you might have younger female fundraisers being asked to interact with often sort of older male donors in context where there's these kind of clear power imbalances. And one of the things I wondered, which is maybe you know, slightly difficult question about this, is there partly a problem here that the non-profit sector itself, in some cases, is a bit guilty of sort of implicitly or explicitly sexualizing these roles because there's this kind of narrative of, you know, let's get these pretty young girls to go and charm donations from these rich old men, which is a highly problematic idea. Did you see any fundraisers in your study kind of talking about their experiences of that?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yes, that that was actually pretty common. Um, and you know, I think a good a good delineation of where, you know, just thinking about, you know, uh a pretty uh younger fundraiser, you know, flirting to get to get a donation, or or that that donors or board members would be comfortable making a comment that they they might not make if they were sitting, you know, in the the head office of a large company, right? But because you're in, you know, an event setting, maybe alcohol's involved, you know, there there's some sort of license for people to maybe not be on their best behavior. And I think that that does carry over um into the sector and how um you know are these fundraisers taken seriously? Um is it seen as real work? Um, right? We we know it is, we know how important the fundraiser uh profession is for most organizations, but if that's the perception that donors have, that that can be uh really problematic and troublesome. Um so yes, I think, you know, whether it's supporters asking about personal issues, like do you have children? Oh, you know, you must want children or are you married, to question, you know, to making those comments that might be compliments, might, might cross that line. Or even, you know, in terms of, you know, greeting people, is it a handshake or is it a kiss on the cheek? Um, I know when I was a young fundraiser, um I worked for a very historically male organization. It was a hospital owned by the Masons, and they they frequently greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. And, you know, I didn't really, I didn't think about it at the time, but in hindsight, you know, it wasn't something that I would have chosen for myself. But I didn't I didn't feel like I had the power to to say otherwise. And so, you know, I think I think the study really highlights that and highlights that power differential. And it also doesn't necessarily go away. Um, it just changes over time.

SPEAKER_03 27:47

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I just wanted to touch on briefly, because I think it is an important aspect. You acknowledge in the paper that being a woman is is only one aspect of the the uh identity of many of these fundraisers. So you kind of acknowledge it's an important uh think intersectionally. You have have you sort of in this study itself or in other work that you've been doing, has it have you kind of expanded out to explore some of these these questions through you through other lenses as well?

SPEAKER_00 28:11

So gender was certainly the primary lens for this study, but you know, people talked about other aspects of their identity and how that also came into play, whether they were younger or older, whether they were a woman of color, maybe if they had a disability or didn't identified with a minority sexual orientation. And, you know, the the combination I think manifests in different ways, but but we do want to create an environment that acknowledges, you know, the whole person, the whole, we want fundraisers to feel like they don't have to hide parts of themselves. Um so, you know, that understanding that intersectionality is really important. Um, and and the group that commissioned this uh research initially started with gender just because that's the large sort of the largest group within fundraising. But uh other other uh work that I've done has touched on this in other ways, either through sexual orientation or uh through some work with community-centric fundraising that's really concerned with um equity and inclusion in all facets of identity. And, you know, it's it's again tough to untangle sometimes. Um and we also know this, you know, affects donors too, and what donors, how donors are motivated to give, uh, what they identify with. Um, and so I think understanding the nuances of identity within both the the profession and within philanthropy is important for for fundraisers thinking about themselves and the people they're working with.

SPEAKER_03 29:45

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in so many ways, to be good at as a fundraiser, you do need to have a very strong ability to kind of understand people as people and to empathize and to uh be a sort of you know armchair, if not professional psychologist in some cases as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

So Well, and I I always say, you know, it's important not to make assumptions, but we don't want we don't want donors or colleagues to make assumptions about us either. And so it goes both ways.

SPEAKER_03 30:09

Yeah, absolutely. Um and just zooming out a bit, you kind of touched on this already, but obviously, you know, this work is very heavily linked between academia and practice, and you kind of, you know, it's the starting point unusually maybe was practice looking to academia for support. What what's your experience more broadly of those links when it comes to philanthropy? Have you found that actually it's you know generally easy to work with practitioners as the basis for your research and and to disseminate the findings, or have you sort of had challenges as well?

SPEAKER_00 30:38

No, I really enjoy working with practitioners and have invited several to be co-researchers with me. And I've just wrapped up a year and a half project on community-centric fundraising with a with a practitioner. And it just makes the research um, I think, so much more impactful. We think about uh not just the academic audience and the theory, but we we think about the implications for practice. And for the first time ever, I actually wrote a practice guide following a research uh study. So uh, you know, that that interplay is incredibly important. And we need practitioners to understand the research enterprise, and we need researchers to understand, you know, what are the questions and the needs of the of the sector and of the profession in order to help them advance their work. And so it's again, you know, both end has been sort of the theme of this conversation. But uh I I really enjoy it and uh it's it's brought a lot of meaning to my work because I I've managed to keep a hand in in the sort of actual practice via these relationships.

SPEAKER_03 31:45

Great to hear. Um and then just finally before I let you go, I just wanted to ask, because obviously, you know, in many cases these uh research notes relate to papers that themselves were then published a little while ago, given the way that academic publishing works, and I know that's the case here. So just wondered what it is that your currently main, you know, sort of main focus is and what areas you're working on.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

Uh well, I have a new role. Uh it's less than a year old as the a chair of family the fry chair of family philanthropy at the Johnson Center. Um so one of my newest projects is on donor education and understanding what helps donors kind of progress in their philanthropy, deepen uh their own sort of understanding and reflections of their giving and hopefully increase the commitments that they're making and being more intentional as opposed to just responsive. Um, so I'm doing that work right now with some community foundation donors in the US, and then have a couple, as I mentioned, just wrapped up a project looking at community-centric fundraising, adoption, and effectiveness across the United States. Um, that's already out and available. And then also doing some work on um LGBTQ philanthropy in the US. Uh, now that the Trump administration has uh restricted funding. Um we that this is contracted work, but um has, I think, some broader implications, uh, of course, and trying to make the fundraising process a little more transparent for newer and emerging organizations that are seeking grants and donations. And so we're both taking stock and trying to create a tool or a resource for organizations that this has affected. So that's what's taking up my time.

SPEAKER_03 33:31

Great. We're really interested to hear, and I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find some more information on some of that if they want to dig into it further. I just remain to say thanks ever so much, Elizabeth, for coming on the podcast. Really interesting to hear about this paper and about all the other work that you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

Thanks so much, Rodri.

SPEAKER_03 33:54

And then last but by no means least, we have Dominic Mayer from the University of Basel. Uh so Dominic is an assistant professor of global philanthropy there, and he also has a research post at the moment um at the uh Gradel Institute of Charity at the University of Oxford. Uh, and I sat down to talk to Dominic about his paper, Compassion for All Real World Online Donations Contradict Compassion Fade. So here's Dominic. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Dominic Meyer. Hi there, Dominic. Hi, Roger. Hi, great to have you on the podcast. And we're here to talk about a paper that you've got featured in the latest um batch of Earnopt uh research notes. Uh, this paper's called uh Compassion for All. Real World Online Donations Contradict Compassion Fade. Um so I guess given that title, it would be really interesting to find out a bit more about what it's about, particularly what compassion fade is and why these findings contradict them.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Yeah, sure. Yeah, happy to tell you a little bit about uh about the study and and thanks for having me. Um yeah, so I had this uh idea for for this study when I was reading this meta-analysis about compassion fade. And compassion fate is this really interesting phenomenon where we observe, typically observe, a decrease in helping behavior. So, for example, how much people donate uh as the number of people in need increases, right? So um, so if you have a typical study, you would have, for example, uh two groups, right? Two conditions. One, they see the same donation requests, but the the only difference is that one group sees a donation request that is told, and they're told if you donate, one person will benefit, and the other group is told 10 persons will benefit, right? So what we typically observe according to compassion fate is that the group that sees only one person in need will donate more than the group that sees 10 persons in need, right? So this is quite surprising. And maybe we can later dive a bit deeper into why we observe this, but this this um meta-analysis looked at studies published on this effect, right? And it found that this effect seems to be quite robust, right? So if you look at multiple studies, this effect seems to hold. However, it also mentioned some key limitations of the literature. Um, and the the first limitation they noticed is that almost no research so far looked at so-called uh joint evaluation designs. So the example I just gave you is uh an example of so-called separate evaluation. So each person only sees one donation request, right? But the authors noted that in the real world, when people donate, more often than not, they likely compare different charities, right, different projects. So they are in what is called joint evaluation setting, right? So they can directly compare different campaigns. However, in the existing literature, this has not really been tested yet, right? Because participants only see one donation request. The second limitation they noted was that this effect has never been tested in the real world at all, right? So we know from previous um studies, uh, from a bunch of studies that um results that are that hold up in the lab do not necessarily translate to the field, right? So this is called external validity for all sorts of reasons. It could be that we find an effect in the lab, right, in this very uh controlled environment, but once we uh try transition to the field, it might no longer hold up, right? So this kind of got me thinking and piqued my my interest. And then I read another study that was published, I think it was two years later by Garinter and colleagues, and they directly addressed the first limitation. So what they did is they moved from a separate evaluation uh design to a joint evaluation design. So now each participant saw multiple donation requests. I think it was four or five. Uh again, it was the same, the same ask basically every time, right? So the same project. The only difference was that uh they they varied the number of persons or children in this case that will benefit from a donation, right? So they had, I think it was one, two, five, seven, and twelve children. Um, and interestingly, what they found is that the compassion fate effect reversed in this case, right? So now suddenly people donated more uh to projects that benefited more children. Uh again, quite interesting effect. However, there also was one limitation of the study, namely that they used hypothetical donations, right? So participants were asked: imagine you had $25, how much would you donate to this project if one child benefits? And then again, imagine you had $25, how much would you donate if two children benefit, right? And so on and so on. Uh, and you can kind of see the issue here, right? It's very easy for me to say, of course, I would donate more if 12 children benefit than if two children benefit, right? If it doesn't really cost me anything, right? It doesn't really hurt my wallet. Uh, economists call this a cheap talk. So, yeah, we might uh so we know from previous uh studies on on evaluations that this can lead to overestimation of the effect, right? So um I think it's a great study, but probably they kind of overestimate the effect, right? And this this got me thinking whether we can, but there is some real world data that we can use where we have both the joint evaluation design but also real money involved, right? And this is where I had the idea of using data from GoFundMe. So for people who do not know GoFundMe, it's the largest uh uh donation-based crowdfunding provider, uh, it's a website, and basically anyone can create a project there to raise money. And GoFundMe is kind of an ideal test bed for this study because uh when you browse uh campaigns in GoFundMe, you kind of see a grid of projects, right? So uh you are naturally in this joint evaluation condition, meaning you can compare between different projects. Uh, the second benefit is that's that we have quite of a salient measure of the beneficiary group size. So, what I did, so each project has a project profile picture, and I counted uh with machine learning the number of persons displayed in this picture, right? And I used this as a measure of I call it the perceived beneficiary group size. Uh, of course, it's not necessarily the real group size, right? It might be just one person benefits, but three persons are on the picture. Uh, but this is what I used as the group size, right? Um, yeah, and then I basically estimated the effect of the number of persons on these pictures on how much the campaigns raise, uh, controlling for confounding factors and so on, right? And I found that the effect, so the reversal holds, so there's a positive effect of the number of persons on these pictures, on the amount of funds raised, on the average donation. Uh, the effect is concave, so it is positive but diminishing, and the sweet spot seems to be around five to seven persons on the picture. So uh campaigns with these number of persons tend to raise uh the most money. So this is basically sort of the summary of the study.

SPEAKER_03 40:34

Yeah, really interesting. There's a couple of things as I was reading it that I wanted to pick up on, and you've sort of touched on a few in there. I guess the first is just sort of in brief terms, what's your sense of how we should understand the mechanism behind the compassion fade effect in the first place? Because there is something intuitive about that idea that actually people are more likely to respond when they see a single person or kind of small number of people, whereas if you see a very, very large crowd, sometimes it's kind of overwhelming or it's too abstract. But is there a point in between those two things where suddenly you kind of tip over from people being able to identify to sort of losing track and then you get this fade effect?

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's it's very interesting. And the meta-analysis that I mentioned kind of uh tested different mechanisms, and there are a few different uh theories or yeah, that try to explain this effect. So the the first one is called uh effective bias uh perspective. So the this theory assumes that if we see just one person in need, right, we can really uh empathize with that person. And the empathy is an important predictor or motivator for donate for donating and for helping behavior in general, right? So uh, but if we see 10 or 20 people in need, uh our empathy is kind of constrained, right? So this uh theory argues that our empathy is higher when we just see one or few people in need. Um then there are uh other mechanisms, uh, for example, there are studies showing that the perceived impact, so what we think the impact will be if we donate to one person versus 10 persons, the perceived impact is higher when we donate to fewer persons, right? This makes sense if we donate uh, I don't know, $50 to one person, quite a yeah, it has an impact, right? But if I donate $50 to 100 persons, it kind of spreads across, right? So the impact might not be that large. And then there's also the anticipated uh positive effect from a donation. So the warm glow is also an important predictor. It also has also been shown that this is uh larger when you donate uh for projects that benefit fewer people or a few people are in need. And this uh meta-analysis um through some mediation uh tests found that the defective bias, so empathy, cannot really explain uh defects uh that well. So it seems more likely that the perceived impact and the anticipated positive effect, so uh more kind of self-interest motivations, right, um play a role here. Um so yeah, this is this is where the literature is at the moment in terms of explaining uh the compassion fail effect.

SPEAKER_03 43:03

And and what's then in terms of that being the likely mechanism, what what then taking that further is the explanation for why it's reversed in a joint evaluation context. Is it that when you've got those projects alongside each other, actually your sense of impact or warm glow and the personal benefit that you'll get from that, you're able to kind of quantify those against each other in a way that if you were given them in separately, you wouldn't be able to.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So uh this is also uh very interesting. So uh we we call this evaluability, right? So it's easy or it's kind of hard to evaluate when you just see one project and says, okay, 10 people will benefit or 50, right? So is this is this a lot or not, right? So this is quite kind of hard. So evaluability is low in this case, but if you can directly compare different projects, right, uh this is way easier, right? So evaluability is higher in this case, um, and the the the study that found this reverse. Compassion fate effect kind of argued because of this, and because the beneficiary group size is kind of high in justifiability. So it is an attribute of the decision situation that is high, is highly justified, right? So people think that's an important attribute that should influence how much we donate. So because of these two things, they argue that the compassion fade effect is reverse, right? So now it's way easier to see uh you directly see how many people benefit. Um, and this is also more salient cue now, right? So this has now a larger effect. Um the the this study also found a concave effect, like I did, right? So it could be that these two effects kind of um play together, right? So in on the one hand, you have this justifiability of donating more to larger beneficiary group sizes, but it could also be that at a certain level, right, this compassion fade mechanism still kick in, right? So you still get this diminished uh return basically on donating, which could be why you see a positive uh but diminishing effect. But we yeah, we need more research on that. But this could this could be a likely explanation.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Yeah, and potentially, I mean it strikes me as potentially all sorts of interesting things about our ability to perceive the uh number and kind of you know, when you get into beyond a small handful into group sizes, and at what point does he say that flips over from something that enhances our ability to evaluate the potential impact, and then when it gets to a certain size, it becomes something that actually kind of diminishes um you know our understanding via another mechanism. So, yeah, really, really, really interesting. Um there's lots of other questions I'd love to ask about the the um the findings, but I one thing I really wanted to touch on was about some of the tools that used for doing this, because it struck me that this is uh very much an example of a kind of uh quite a new breed of paper in the sort of field of um philanthropy academia, which uses machine learning tools to be able to kind of access big data sets and and to test some of these um theories and hypotheses in a way that previously, you know, if you'd had to go through the number of uh GoFundMe profiles that you that you went through for this study and you know uh kind of one by one, essentially by hand, kind of categorize the the images in terms of how many people were in them and what sort of look you know uh uh expressions they had in their faces, it would have been virtually impossible, but you were able to do that because of the tools you used. Um did you find, you know, were there any sort of things that you were aware of in terms of the potential um you know risks of doing that and things that you needed to guard against? And also did you get a sense that you know there are potentially other areas that this this kind of um tool could open up in terms of things that we don't currently know about philanthropy that we might want to know?

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Yeah, yeah, great question. Um yeah, this is this is a very good point, right? So when I was thinking like how how can we learn more about this phenomenon, right? So what I could have done, maybe run another experiment with with actual money involved, right? Uh which which would also uh contribute something to the literature. Uh, but I thought it would be more interesting, yeah, to use these new tools, right? So to so I collected um uh over 30,000 of these campaigns. Um so obviously web scraping is involved, right? And you need to highly automate these kinds of things uh to the scraper runs automatically, downloads the images, the campaign descriptions, and so on, right? Uh, and then using machine learning to categorize or count the number of persons in the pictures, right? And this is, I mean, only the last couple of years has have these methods become so good to use them, actually, right? So these are very, very accurate tools. Um, yeah, and I think it opens up wide uh wide uh variety of uh of research, right? So uh it really allows us to access data that so far hasn't been able uh or we we couldn't access so far, uh, or maybe access but not really analyze, right? Also natural language processing, so I use natural language processing to control for confounding, right? So uh this is observational data, so we need to control for confounding variables, so that variables that affect both the independent and the dependent variable, and I use um the topic of the campaign um to control for that, right? Uh and all these things, especially natural language processing, now with large language models, right? They open up a wide array um uh of new of new research questions or or methods to answer them. And I think uh the field is kind of in the early stages of making use of that, right? But it's still transitioning. Uh but I think there's huge potential. And this is why I also like to use these methods, right? I think uh it's quite easy to run another experiment. Our experiments are good, um, but I think there is value to be had in yeah, kind of using real-world data as well, right? And seeing whether these effects especially hold up, especially in a field like philanthropy, right? Where we yeah we're not just interested in theory, but also in the practical applications of these things, right? So yeah, I'm really excited about these methods, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:49

Yeah, and it does strike me because there's so many kind of uh potential phenomena around altruistic behavior and giving behavior that come from the economics literature, but a lot of it is on relatively sort of small-scale lab experiments and actually having the ability to test that against natural experiments and real-world experiments and and see which of them genuinely um play out is yeah, going to be really fascinating. Um the other thing I wanted to ask, kind of zooming out a little bit, is just about your sense of where things sit in terms of those links between academia and practice. Obviously, you're kind of drawing on real-world data as you as you say. Um, how have you found it? Um, kind of being able to access that data and work with platforms or organizations in order to kind of get the raw material for the kinds of studies you're doing. And conversely, when you're trying to kind of share these findings or disseminate them, do you find a willing audience among practitioners and people actually kind of working in the field?

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Yeah. So accessing the data in this case, right, was public data. So um I could just scrape it. But yeah, organizations in my experience usually are quite interested in collaboration, right? So they they think that that research uh is quite valuable in in this case. And um, but yeah, I mean, there are some, it's often more complicated than you think at the beginning, right? So uh privacy concerns and all this, so it takes a very, very long time. Uh, I mean, research is already quite slow, right? But this yeah, especially takes a long time. Um, with regard to like the this this um dissemination from research into practice, I think this is very important, right? And probably we could do more. Um, so yeah, for research, the goal is to publish, right? To publish high-impact papers, uh, and impact is measured, for example, by citations. More and more, it's also measured in case of practical impact, right? But I think that also there the field is a bit uh transitioning. I think here in Switzerland, uh with the Center for Philanthropy Studies here, we have a very rich um exchange with practitioners, and usually practitioners are uh highly interested in what we do. But yeah, I think we need initiatives like this, right? Like the research note, Earnup Research Notes, or the safe spaces for philanthropy of the of the Earn-Up conference, right? Where we really bring together practitioners and uh researchers or academics, uh, because I mean, let's be honest, um, most uh most uh practitioners will never read such a paper, right? Maybe they will read the research note, or if they will read, they will read the abstract, but where they're really aware of like, yeah, these that the compassion fate effect only holds in in separate evaluation, right? Maybe, maybe for a fundraiser you are, but I think the yeah, this yeah, we that we could do more, but I think we are on the right track. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:30

Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanted to ask finally, um what you're focusing on at the moment, because I know often we're talking about papers that people have sort of done, you know, often a few years in the past and then been published and then been turned into a research note. So are you doing more work in the same field looking at this kind of data from crowdfunding, or are you uh kind of applying some of the same approaches in in other areas?

SPEAKER_01 51:51

Yeah, so as you mentioned, so I really like to work with this uh innovative and new methods, like especially uh large language models at the moment, to open up an array of new uh new research questions to tackle. But I'm also specifically continuing the work on GoFundMe. So, in my role as a visiting researcher at the Gretel Institute of Charity in Oxford, uh I'm uh still looking at GoFundMe. We collect collected even more data, and we're trying to see whether we can use uh machine learning like large language models to kind of identify um um the in the in the project description attributes that predict the success of these campaigns, right? So to kind of uh see which attributes uh predict the success and whether these models can predict the success of these campaigns. Because uh, while uh crowdfunding is great, uh one real downside is that most campaigns do not reach their funding goals, right? So uh roughly 20% or not even reach the funding goals. So we really need to kind of help these people. These are not fundraisers, right? These are uh regular people that uh create these campaigns. So if we can have if we can have an impact there, it would really have a huge impact in the in the field, right? So this is uh one project I'm really excited about at the moment.

SPEAKER_03 53:07

Great, yeah. Well, we'll definitely keep uh eyes uh open for that because it sounds really fascinating. I think this whole area of crowdfunding and how it sits alongside traditional giving and the factors that then make for success or that influence how people choose between different campaigns is really, really interesting as an area. Um, just remains to say, Dominic, thanks ever so much for finding time to come on the podcast. It's been really interesting to hear about this research and wish you all the best with uh the rest of it in the future.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks a lot for having me. Uh it was great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 53:44

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Bauker, to Elizabeth, and to Dominic for finding time to come on the podcast. It was great to hear about all of their work. I will put links in the show notes as ever to places where you can find the papers in question and also the UNOT research notes based on them. And I'll also put links in the show notes to some other things that you might be interested in reading that I've done or that other people have done. Uh if you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. Uh, you can sign up for the newsletter there. You can get all the back issues of this podcast, and you can get lots of long-form articles and sort of short form guides. So there's a lot to dig through there. If you want to follow me on social media, please do that. I'm on LinkedIn and a little bit on Blue Sky, but LinkedIn's probably the best place to find me. If you've got ideas for people I could talk to uh or topics we could cover on the sort of non-earn-op issues of the podcast, uh do drop me a line. Uh, you can find the contact details at the website. Other than that, just follow the podcast, like the podcast, uh subscribe if that's still a thing people do for podcasts. Do tell people that you think might be interested about it, because I think word of mouth really helps. And if you've got the time to leave a nice review wherever it is that you get your podcasts, that would also be very much appreciated. Other than that, I will see you next time. Bye.