Maximising the impact of online fundraising

在过去的三年里，布里斯托尔大学、华威大学和麦克马斯特大学的研究人员与Justgiving开展了富有成效的研究合作。主要工作领域是对Justgiving的100多万用户（主要是筹款者和赞助商）进行大规模调查。研究人员还探索了Justgiving交易数据的一个小样本的研究潜力，用它来分析捐赠中的同伴效应。该调查提供了大量关于个人特征和动机的信息，但关于筹款者和赞助者实际行为的信息有限。相比之下，交易数据有筹款和捐赠的详细信息，但关于个人本身的信息很少。该项目的目的是匹配Justgiving提供给调查受访者的交易数据，以创建一个独特的丰富数据集，该数据集结合了个人特征和动机以及实际筹款和捐赠的信息。这将使我们对在线筹款行为有更深入的了解，并检验有关个人特征和动机如何影响捐赠的假设。该项目将包括准备和清理数据，并进行一些描述性分析，以阐明人们如何以不同的方式参与Justgiving，以及决定筹款成功/赞助水平的因素。Justgiving开发了可以利用这些数据解决的即时研究问题，以帮助他们更深入地了解自己的业务。随着描述性工作的进展，我们将与Justgiving一起举办为期一天的研讨会，讨论新兴的研究成果，让他们从自己的经验和补充性的定性焦点小组研究中提供见解，并就可能进一步加强在线筹款的潜在机制提出想法，这些机制可以很容易地通过在线实验进行测试。在项目结束时，我们将与Justgiving联合组织一次研讨会，以便更广泛地传播主要发现。我们在2012年2月举办了一个类似的活动，吸引了学者、慈善机构和政策制定者作为演讲者和参与者。这是非常受欢迎的，在研讨会之后，Justgiving渴望邀请更多的客户慈善机构参加类似的活动。

Over the past three years researchers at University of Bristol, University of Warwick and McMaster University have developed a productive research collaboration with Justgiving. The main area of work has been the administration of a large scale survey to more than one million of Justgiving's users (primarily fundraisers and sponsors). The researchers have also explored the research potential of a small sample of Justgiving's transactional data, using it to analyse peer effects in giving. The survey provided a wealth of information on individuals' characteristics and motivations, but has limited information on fundraisers' and sponsors' actual behaviour. The transactional data, by contrast, has detailed information on fundraising and donations, but little information on the individuals themselves.The aim of this project is to match transactional data provided by Justgiving to the survey respondents in order to create a uniquely rich dataset that combines information on individual characteristics and motivations AND actual fundraising and donations. This will allow us to develop a richer understanding of online fundraising behaviour and to test hypotheses about how individual characteristics and motivations shape giving. The project will involve preparing and cleaning the data and undertaking some descriptive analysis that will shed light on how people engage in different ways with giving on Justgiving and what determines fundraising success/ levels of sponsorship.The immediate research questions that can be addressed using these data have been developed with Justgiving to help give them greater insights into their business. As the descriptive work progresses, we will run a one-day workshop with Justgiving to discuss emerging research findings, to allow them to provide insights from their experience and from complementary, qualitative focus-group research and to develop ideas about potential mechanisms that could further enhance online fundraising that could easily be tested via online experiments. At the end of the project we will organise a seminar jointly with Justgiving in order to disseminate the key findings more widely. We ran a similar event in February 2012 that attracted academics, people from within charities and policy-makers both as speakers and participants. This was very well-received and following the seminar, Justgiving were keen to invite a larger number of their client charities to a similar event.