Transcending Egoism and Altruism: A Motive-Based Approach to Identifying Individual Charity Preferences

This project examines the role of individual donation motives in the charity selection process. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and multiple regression models, we first refine the measurement of donation motives and then investigate their effects on the likelihood to donate to 15 different charity types. Our findings demonstrate that the current approach to the measurement of donation motives can be improved by including religiosity, reciprocity, karma, and appreciation dimensions. Our findings further demonstrate that the effect of donation motives on donation likelihood depends on the charity type. Taken together, we provide researchers with an extended tool to measure donation motives and nonprofit managers with a toolkit that helps identify potential donors that are likely to support different charity types.