Charity Begins With a Basic Connection
I asked the urchin who knocks on my door each year with her order form for Girl Scout cookies what she thinks peoples’ reasons are for saying yes to her request.
“Sometimes it’s because they like the cookie and sometimes it’s because they like me or they’re afraid I’ll cry or something if they say no.” Sometimes it is all of the above, I thought, as I gave the child an especially hefty order for my favorite Samoas. Nary a word about the Girl Scouts passed her lips. But her cookies and her person were motivation aplenty. What is likely to turn us into givers? The young scout produced a set of reasons that ring true even for those who can claim professional interest in the question. We give because we are asked; we are more likely to give if we are asked in person; we are most likely to give if we are asked by someone we know. We give because we get something we value in return. We give because we are afraid of the consequences if we don’t.
If this much insight can be collected from a single query, we might expect to learn considerably more by asking more than 1,000 people many questions on giving. In 1985 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund underwrote a national survey of charitable behavior carried out by the firm of Yankelovich Skelly and White, with findings now analyzed and published by Independent Sector. The survey indicates that 89% of Americans donated to charity in 1984 and it provides much new matter on giving--much that invites our speculation, reflection and, ultimately, response.
To begin with, the survey included an open-ended question about reasons for giving. The findings here add reasons to the list begun earlier: the belief that one gives to a worthy cause; a desire to help those in need or less fortunate than ourselves; close involvement, loyalty, personal experience with an organization; spiritual reasons. In addition, people report that they give because the gift can be automatically taken out of their salaries. Many mention some particular thing about an organization--its programs, the way it is run, its good work--as a reason for giving. From what people say about why they give to a particular charity, it would appear that what turns us into givers depends on what we are giving to: payroll deduction matters most in United Way giving; the involvement/loyalty/personal experience triad leads our reasons for giving to education; spiritual reasons are the most frequently mentioned in explaining giving to religious charities, reasons seldom advanced to account for other kinds of giving.
If we measure generosity only by the dollar amount given--Americans donated about $650 per household in 1984--the findings of the RBF survey seem to settle into clear patterns that permit some solid, sensible generalizations about giving. The most generous age group is between the ages of 50 and 64. Giving increases with income, occupational status and educational level; is highest among the married, grows with the size of the household. The picture changes if we ask about generosity as a person’s commitment to giving, which the survey does by figuring contributions as a percent of income--in 1984, about 2.4% of gross income per household. Here lines blur, distinctions, especially those based on income, are not so clear. Givers with the lowest incomes give virtually the same percent of income on average as those in the highest income range. Highly committed givers exist in significant numbers in every income range.
On second glance, the rich lode of information begins to generate more questions than answers. Why are widowed people the most committed givers? Why does giving increase so dramatically as the number of people in the household rises--even if income falls? Finally, why are the young in this survey, those under 35, so spectacularly un generous?
And why don’t Americans generally do better? They apparently think they ought to; 40% of the respondents believe they should contribute more to charities. The survey offers evidence that for many of us, how we feel about money--our own money--has a bearing on how generous we are. In particular, the survey demonstrates that two feelings go along with strong giving: that you have something left over when you have taken care of the necessities and that you have little concern about having enough money in the future. These subjective measures of wealth turn out to be more strongly linked to how we act as givers than objective measures of actual income.
Feeling that one can afford to give without robbing the present or jeopardizing the future seems to affect the size of a gift but does not get to the heart of what turns us into givers in the first place. It is clear in the survey that there is too much giving flourishing in the absence of such perceived economic security--primarily in the lower income ranges--and too little among young people with no money worries to justify adopting some formula related to discretionary income as fundamental to explaining giving.
Perhaps we are closer to penetrating the mystery of giving when the survey verifys what we may already have known: people who attend religious services regularly and people who engage in volunteer work are significantly better givers than non-churchgoers and non-volunteers. Americans donate approximately 70% of their charitable dollars to religious institutions and people who attend religious services give three times more money than people who do not. These findings may encourage us to speculate that people simply give out of the goodness of their hearts. This goodness is cultivated in religious settings and seeks expression in actively helping others as well as in giving. The altruism hypothesis may be more satisfying than any other yet advanced. But our own experience of the world, of particular gifts and givers, even of ourselves, may make it impossible to accept altruism as the last word on motivation.
In an odd way, the survey encourages skepticism. The best givers of all, it turns out, may be churchgoers but they are also planners . They may be giving from the heart, but they use their heads: those who plan their giving, have certain amounts or, even better, percentages in mind are the very best givers among us. Altruism doesn’t preclude practical planning but this last finding of the survey challenges us to find a common denominator. The churchgoer, the volunteer, the person who plans for giving share an awareness that is better than average. Planning for giving implies an acknowledgement of giving as a part of living. It could be that the more people think about giving, the more they are likely to give.
It could be that the way to get more people to give is to get more people to think about it. This hypothesis, teased out of the survey, may help explain the spectacular success of U.S.A. for Africa and Live Aid. Presumably many of the millions they raised came from the same younger generation found to be under-performing in the survey. Simple awareness may have played a part in turning them, in large numbers, into givers. The media’s intense--and for a time unrelenting--treatment of the tragedy in Ethiopia acted as a sort of massive consciousness-raising campaign, forcing people to think not only about the need, but also about their response. The media began to include information about how to respond: giving became an explicit subject in the news.
U.S.A. for Africa and Live Aid, with music and pictures, with a breathtaking marriage of imagination and technology, galvanized whatever instinct produces participation. It was not their organizations--impressive but transparent to the giver--and not purely their means, spectacular as they were, and not just the life and death need for which they stood. U.S.A. for Africa and Live Aid created a sense of global community. The message was not simply that people are starving in Africa; the message was indeed “we are the world, we are the children.” They made the vital connection between living and giving for us and identified giving as an expression of our shared humanity, our belonging to a world community. For millions of people, including the young, this was a reason to give.
Harvard University, raising $350 million in five years, was another of the 1985 giving phenomena. Those who answered Harvard’s call were also acknowledging a belonging, embracing a connection, establishing membership in a community. The root similarity in two such different cases makes us think we are on to somethin: a longing for connection underlies giving; giving is the natural consequence of accepting connection.
Some of the oddities of the survey--the widow’s extraordinary commitment to the church, the steady increase in household giving that parallels the increase in the number of people in the household--lose their mystery in this light. The theory also provides a way to understand the more serious conundrum of the survey’s ungenerous young who nonetheless are swept up by U.S.A. for Africa and Live Aid.
Does this turnabout mean that young people are more at home with a global or even cosmic connection than with the more mundane kinds of belonging that underlie their elders’ generosity? If they are unlike their elders in their giving behavior, they may be presumed to be unlike as well in the sorts of connection they will accept. Are these capacities that will grow and change as they mature or will those now between 18 and 35, as a generation, be forever deficient in the instinct that stimulates generosity? If they are not responding, is it merely because we have not reached them or are they temporarily unreachable? The future of giving may depend on the answers to these questions.
The future of giving is a particular concern of the RBF. While foundations may have become accustomed to thinking in terms of partnerships with corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and other foundations, partnership with individuals is difficult to conceptualize, difficult to act upon. It is, however, an increasingly logical partnership.
The nonprofit sector derives nine times as much of its support from individuals as it does from foundations and corporations. The fund’s goal in commissioning the survey was activist: to know what might be likely to encourage increased individual giving in this country.
The study encourages us to believe that dramatic change in giving must be linked to changes in how people think about giving. The key to change may be even cruder than that statement might imply: before we see any sizeable increase in individual philanthropy we have to get people simply to think about it; imagine the difference if people paid the same attention to giving as they do to matters of health, nutrition and physical fitness.