This article examines the transimperial fundraising practices of two major continental European Protestant missionary societies—the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) and the Basel Mission (BM)—between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1870s. It proposes a meso-level approach to global history that focuses neither on individual actors nor on abstract categories such as capitalism or religion, but instead on organizations. By analysing the PEMS and the BM, the article shows how missionary societies connected specific subregions of British India and Southern Africa with Protestant regions across the northern transatlantic world. Drawing on rarely studied financial reports, it demonstrates how these societies mobilized hundreds of thousands of donors through global financial networks spanning Europe, North America, and the colonies. In doing so, the article reframes Protestant missionary societies not merely as cultural actors but as economic institutions that helped normalize capitalist practices in both Europe and colonial settings. It thus contributes to transimperial and global history by suggesting a way to study Protestant continental Europe, the United States, and the British empire as mutually constitutive partners.

Parties in all European countries at least partially rely on private donations to finance their activities, but gender gaps in donations remain underexplored. Investigating gaps in donation frequencies and amounts, as well as which parties are likely to receive donations from women, is crucial, as parties represent the interests of donors more than the interests of non-donors, opening an avenue of potential underrepresentation of women’s interests. This study addresses this gap, leveraging data from party finance reports from Italy, the UK, and Finland over time to investigate gender gaps in donation amounts, frequencies, and recipient parties. The results highlight that while gender gaps in donation frequency exist, these differences in how often women and men donate to parties do not directly translate into how much money they donate. Rather, there is large variation in donation amounts over time and across countries. Particularly in Finland, a highly gender-equal country, differences in donation amounts are marginal. Finally, the expectation that green and left parties are most likely to receive donations from women does not hold across all cases – while in all three countries green parties are most likely to receive donations from women, right-wing parties are not the least likely to receive donations from women in Finland and Italy.

Based on a study of the Swiss mobile payment app Twint and its use as a tool for charitable giving, this article introduces a framework for studying redistributive imaginaries and examines donation ‘marketplaces’ and their implications. Engaging with literatures on socio-technical imaginaries, the platformization of payment, post-humanitarianism, and the digital-solutionist ethic, the article asks what happens when practices of giving are facilitated and enclosed by a tech-ified finance industry. Twint’s catalog-like platform for donating reconfigures digital giving and its relation to redistribution. We argue that donations platforms like Twint’s are introducing a new redistributive imaginary by interpellating users as donors, consumers and citizens who – given behavioral psychology – need guidance to exercise choice and become more ethical selves. On the basis of an interface analysis and interviews, we specify a ‘post-sovereign consumer-citizen redistributive imaginary’, characterized by a market frame and tech-solutionism. This imaginary relies on a bounded-rationality model of the human and promotes a post-political idea of democratic participation. The article notes a slippage between different semantics of ‘good’ and ‘better’ technology, which are relevant for a discursive-ideological analysis of the FinTech sector and its rhetoric more broadly. Analyzing them helps us better understand how platform operators are accruing power culturally, economically, and politically.

We examine the consequences of controversies on corporate reputation and identify a strategy that companies often adopt to restore their trust relationships with stakeholders in the aftermath of media condemnation. In the post-controversy period, firms appear to use a bolstering strategy of engaging more actively in philanthropic activities. In terms of regaining reputation, as measured by the increase in the Britain’s Most Admired Companies ranking, such strategy proves to be ineffectual. This may be because charitable giving in such context could be viewed as superficial virtue signaling rather than a fundamental change in the company’s ethical stance.

This paper discusses the relationship between corporate volunteering and civic engagement outside the workplace in Russia, proceeding from a mixed-method approach. The quantitative findings are based on a comparison between employees in 37 Russian companies who participated in corporate volunteering (N = 399) and those who did not (N = 402). Using binary logistic regression analysis, we demonstrate that employee participation in corporate volunteering is positively related to four forms of civic engagement outside the workplace: informal volunteering, formal volunteering, formal monetary donation, and informal monetary donation. In addition, we draw on information obtained from interviews with 10 corporate volunteers, as well as with all 37 company corporate volunteering managers, to develop a general explanation for why corporate volunteering might lead to civic engagement. We identify three primary explanations. First, trust in companies can be converted into increased trust in social institutions. Second, corporate volunteering can expose employees to other realities, thereby leading them to rethink their priorities. Third, corporate volunteering socializes employees to volunteering, thus making them more likely to incorporate volunteering into their personal repertoires of activities. Corporate volunteering appears to be an effective mechanism for stimulating civic engagement and volunteering infrastructure in post-communist countries.

For social enterprises (SEs), non-earned income remains an attractive and important form of financing. Yet, many of these funds are donated without serious and collective deliberation about the overall impact of these transfers on the composition of the sector. Various authors suggest that the recent professionalization of the broader third sector and the use of accounting frameworks that favour short-term measurable results—a trend which SEs exemplify—are having an impact on who and what gets funded. We test this hypothesis by investigating whether the distribution of non-earned income to SEs located in three different Canadian provinces can be explained by donor preferences for the following: (i) culture and arts-related social goods; (ii) SEs that are located in wealthier neighbourhoods; and (iii) SEs that are ‘visible’ beyond their locality. The paper briefly discusses the generalizability of the results and concludes with policy recommendations that emphasize the limits of SEs in achieving a core goal of welfare provision.

Scholars have long been interested in what influences philanthropic behavior. However, little is known about the effects of length of residency on charitable gifts to local and non-local organizations. Using 2010 survey data from 470 older individuals, we examine whether donors’ geographic relocations influence philanthropic behavior and whether these moves are a bigger challenge for some types of nonprofits than others. We find variations in giving to specific types of nonprofits based on residency duration. The giving patterns we uncover add depth to our understanding of philanthropic behavior and inform nonprofit managers seeking to better understand older adults’ giving to local and non-local religious, human services, arts, and education nonprofits.

Whether commercialization crowds out nonprofit donations has been a concern for nonprofit professionals and scholars. If the crowding-out effect exists, is it because of donors’ reactions to nonprofit commercialization or nonprofits’ decisions to reduce efforts in fundraising? Using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics on human service nonprofit organizations in the USA, this study examines the relationship between commercial revenues and donations, breaking the relationship into smaller parts to understand its composition. The results show that commercial revenues crowd out donations in human service organizations. An increase in 1 dollar of commercial revenues leads to a decrease in .14 dollar of donations. Up to 16% of the crowding-out effect is attributable to nonprofit organizations’ reducing fundraising activities. The crowding-out effect is not merely due to donors’ reactions to nonprofit commercialization.

This study presents an interdisciplinary systematic review of the literature on donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding. The literature to date has explored differences in crowd’s behavior and incentives for participating in the platform, as well as the factors governing funding and post-funding success. The authors summarize the main findings to date and synthesize the different theoretical explanations for the decision-making behavior of the crowd. The investigation reveals how the literature to date has upheld the importance of crowdfunding as a social and democratic tool, one that demonstrates wise judgment and clairvoyance in recognizing potential successes and creating value for society.

This study examines voluntary contributions from a microeconomic perspective, testing a distinction that has been prominent recently in economics but is novel in the study of voluntary contributions—between absolute and relative, or positional goods (goods whose value depends relatively strongly on position in relation to others). An experiment measuring social preferences under different conditions of positionality and visibility on a representative national sample (N = 607) revealed that voluntary contributions are largely positional, but that the positionality of volunteering is dependent on whether volunteering is visible or anonymous. These findings are discussed in the context of the economics of pro-social behavior, and implications for solicitation in different types of donors or volunteers are suggested.

Nonprofit organizations increasingly rely on earned revenue to sustain their mission-driven activities. Previous research examining the effects of earned revenue on other income streams tends to study earned revenue in the aggregate. Using panel data from 12,372 organizations from 2010 to 2015, this analysis applies a framework of revenue embeddedness to link earned revenue activities to mission and analyze the effects of earned revenue activities on donations. Earned revenue activities offering new products or services to existing donors appear to complement individual donations. These findings have theoretical and practical applications related to how nonprofits pursue earned revenue.

The Family Expenditure Survey provides a long time series of household-level data on U.K. charitable giving, which previously has not been exploited. Data analyzed for the period 1978-93 reveal a long-term decline in the proportion of households giving to charity, which persists once we control for changes in other characteristics that affect giving, such as income and wealth. The biggest declines in the number of givers are among younger and poorer households. We also draw out generation-specific trends in a way that is crucial to thinking about future trends in funding for the voluntary sector.

This article first sets out the principles of neoclassical microeconomic analysis and examines the advances in our understanding of individual giving to charitable organizations achieved within this framework of analysis. It then turns to sociology and considers alternative conceptions of sociological analysis, especially rational-action theories and the qualitative tradition. The contribution of these to our understanding of charitable giving is explored. The article concludes that rational-choice sociology can complement economic analyses in two ways but that qualitative sociology is contradictory to the economic approach.

We provide improved evidence on effects that fund-raising, government support, and program revenue of U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have on donations to those NPOs and provide improved estimates of price elasticities of donations to, and donor demand for output of, those NPOs. Applying econometric tests, we find the best-specified model is two-way fixed effects, which controls for organization-specific and time- specific factors. Results suggest that U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research NPOs fund-raise to the point where the marginal fund-raising dollar brings in zero dollars of donations, donor demand for output of hospitals and scientific research NPOs is price inelastic and price elastic, respectively, and results are not sensitive to specification of price.

We study causes and consequences of financial management in households in the specific case of charitable giving. We test hypotheses using couples in the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Study (n = 1,101). We find that more relationship specific investments lead to deciding on charitable giving as one economic actor. Furthermore, we find that the partner with the highest relative educational resources has most decision making power over charitable donations. Separately deciding couples are smallest charitable donors. Households in which the male partner decides are largest charitable donors when only larger and more structural donations are considered. This can be explained by their more conservative religious denomination.

We compare the relative influence of different celebrity endorser attributes on respondents’ intentions to donate to a fictitious charity. The celebrity endorser attributes we modeled are expertise, admirability, likeability, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. We examine the moderating effects of audience sex, and general attitudes toward charities. Finally, we examined the mediating effects of perceived endorser fit with the endorsed charity. Our results find that endorser expertise and admirability are significant predictors of audience donation intentions. Audience general attitudes toward charities are a significant moderator of the influence of endorser expertise and admirability on donation intentions. We discuss the implications of our findings for researchers and practitioners.

The predominant part of the literature states that women are more likely to donate to charitable causes but men are more generous in terms of the amount given. The last result generally derives from the focus on mean amount given. This article examines gender differences in giving focusing on the distribution of amounts donated and the probability of giving using micro-data on individual giving to charitable causes for Great Britain. Results indicate that women are generally more generous than men also in terms of the amounts donated. Quantile regression analysis shows that this pattern is robust if we take into account gender differences in individual characteristics such as household structure, education, and income. The article also investigates differences in gender preferences for varying charitable causes. Results are presented separately for single and married people, highlighting the very different gender patterns of giving behaviour found in the two groups.