Survey

H2: Donation requests with extended reporting on the performance of projects have a negative effect on receiving donations from incidental private donors

H3: Donation requests with extended reporting on the performance of projects have a positive effect on receiving donations from non-givers

To test whether or not if it matters how organizations perform on their projects with regard to costs/hours versus budget, we will test amongst four randomized groups with a different treatment for each group. Each group will only be shown one of the four treatments in order to control for unbiased information.

It is our aim to conduct our research in the Netherlands through the internet research organization Prolific which offers pre-screening on certain groups of respondents.

3 Research and hypothesis

group 2 (negative towards budget) and project C showed a stabilization (neutral towards budget) of the spent hours over the budget for treatment group 3 (see below).

The following text containing a request for donation, was offered to all treatment groups (see table 1, question 10):

A non-governmental organization which holds the CBF-brand, sends you the following letter:

“We have developed a couple of new projects with very promising results. Now, our

organization is even more capable of contributing to a fairly improvement of the lives of the needy.

By the help of our donors, we have already been enabled to start up two out of five projects.

For the other projects, can we depend on you by granting us a monthly donation?”

After this text, a second text was offered that the Qualtrics software randomly assigned to the three groups of respondents who would receive the treatment.

Treatment group 1 Improving performance (positive towards budget):

Three years ago, for our projects our organization started to track the real hours versus budgeted hours.

The budgets are stated in the blue stacks per annum and serve as a guide for the available hours to be spent for project A. The real spent hours are stated in the orange stacks per annum. The graph below shows that for the same activities each year, compared to budget the hours for project A are moving towards the budget.

Treatment group 2 Deteriorated performance (negative towards budget):

Three years ago, for our projects our organization started to track the real hours versus budgeted hours.

The budgets are stated in the blue stacks per annum and serve as a guide for the available hours to be spent for project B. The real spent hours are stated in the orange stacks per annum. The graph below shows that for the same activities each year, compared to budget the hours for Project B were moving from the budget.

Treatment 3 Steady over budget performance (neutral towards budget):

Three years ago, for our projects our organization started to track the real hours versus budgeted hours.

The budgets are stated in the blue stacks per annum and serve as a guide for the available hours to be spent for project C. The real spent hours are stated in the orange stacks per annum. From the graph below we can conclude that for the same activities each year, compared to budget the hours for project C stabilized.

We deliberately chose not to address a name or the activities of this ngo, as Iwaarden and Van der Wiele (2009) indicated that an organization’s activity is the first selection Dutch givers make upon giving which would influence the outcome of our survey. Because donors with distinctive characteristics are being attracted by different type of charities, for possible further analysis we requested respondents’ preferences for a charity by providing a list with categories of charities that researchers and the CBF organization use to differentiate between charities. This particular question included a link on which the respondents could click and which directed them directly to the CBF’s webpage where they could search for an

organizations’ name and find the affiliated category.

In warranting respondents were able to reply to this question properly, we also added options to choose for a local or a religious organization of which we think people may have ties with, while these might not be registered with the CBF.

3.1.3 Additional questions

Demographic data like age, social status, income and education are included in the questions 1 to 7 to serve as independent variables. Not only question 8, but also the ‘d’ question from each question 10, 11, 12, and 13 (specific questions for each treatment group) where

respondents were asked to which type of charity, considered the treatment, a donation would go to, might serve as a controlling variable for further analysis.

As earlier behaviour such as former giving may be an indicator for future donating, in our questions (14a to 14j), we asked respondents to report past donations on a yearly basis by category, including the number and amount.

Whereas giving to a charity is highly dependent on the reputation of a charity, we also requested our respondents (table 1, question 14) to indicate upon which they base their

decision on when they regard a charities’ reputation.

The latter also justifies our question 9 about performing charity work, while some people would rather contribute in time to a charity because they may lack trust or do not have the means to fund. However, there are also people who do both.

Next to possible answers such as recommendation by a friend or media, we have included the CBF-membership in two answers because membership of the CBF-brand was a third factor in the research of Van Iwaarden en Van der Wiele (2009) for people to decide to donate.

These two separate answers have a distinction in CBF-membership for domestic organizations and CBF-membership for international organizations while donating to

international organizations are often to be considered as risky, because donors also might take extra considerations in their decision of donating to countries with conflicts, lesser openness and/or lesser democracy. As indicated in paragraph 2.2.2, the CBF organizations nowadays rates efficiency, which is a threshold of 70 % over a period of three years, but does not rate project performances.

3.2 Testing Variables