Fundraising Design in a Competitive Market

Fundraising involves the simultaneous consideration of three actors the donor, the charitable organization raising the funds, and the beneficiary. Successful fundraising appeals match donor motivations to preferred organizational and beneficiary attributes while acknowledging the influence of alternative, competitive appeals. In this paper, we propose an integrated method of analysis that combines multiple conjoint analyses for understanding preferences for charities and beneficiaries, with donor text and scaled responses describing their motivations. Analyses revealed five donor archetypes (i.e., exemplars): `Cancer Carers' (24%), `Effective Altruists' (19%), `Animal and Nature Lovers' (16%), `Emergency Responders' (23%), and `Feel-good Do-gooders' (18%). These archetypes cannot be understood with exclusive reference to donor characteristics and motivations; rather archetypes combine donor characteristics with features of preferred beneficiaries and fundraisers. We show how our model can be used to conduct integrated, conditional and competitive analyses useful for fundraising design.