Better Giving Through Chemistry

Just two days after the earthquake in Haiti last month, the Red Cross had received $5 million in text message donations. After a week, total mobile donations ballooned to $30 million. Haiti relief efforts may not have generated as much aid money as other recent natural disasters, but the devastating earthquake marks a watershed moment in electronic aid.

Electronic donations have been increasing steadily over the past decade. While old-fashioned donations have declined recently due to the recession, online giving actually grew in 2009. One online charity portal, Network for Good, reported that the number of donations nearly doubled last year, and the dollar value of donations increased by 42 percent. However, trends in online giving, including cutting-edge methods like text-message donations, vary markedly from traditional non-profit donations, and their growing importance will have a significant effect on the quantity and character of charity worldwide, and not necessarily a positive one.

A 2006 study by Network for Good found that the dynamics of online donations particularly benefit disaster victims. People instinctively want to help when they see news coverage of a humanitarian disaster, and the ease of online giving leads to impulse donations. Clicking a mouse or sending a text certainly isn’t as onerous as writing and mailing a check, and it allows donors to act immediately, while their emotional response to the news is still fresh.

In addition to a rise in number of donations, online gifts tend to be larger, which reflects the nature of the technology. A study by Blackbaud found that online donors tend to be younger people with higher income, a group that matches the demographic of internet-savvy people in general. While offline giving still makes up the lions’ share of charitable donations, online giving will likely grow to surpass it, which means that the amount donated each year will also keep growing.

Increasing the quantity of individual donations through technological means is unquestionably a positive good. Even the most cynical scrooge would admit that domestic charities make our cities more livable and that foreign aid boosts our country’s reputation abroad. However, the shift to online forms of charity will lead not only to more aid dollars but also to fundamental changes to how the aid is administered.

For instance, online donors may be less particular about their choice of charity. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because niche or religious charities can sometimes impose irrelevant political or cultural values on foreign aid, such as religious organizations restricting condoms in regions devastated by AIDS. Yet the reality is that web legitimacy is easy to fake, and certain charities that accept online donations may simply be frauds. The FBI warned donors last month to ignore unsolicited emails, avoid sending personal information via e-mail, and be wary of people claiming to be surviving victims, which is a testament to the scope of the problem. In fact, the perception of fraud has likely discouraged many donors from giving. Beyond outright fraud, some charities may be simply ignorant about the region they purport to be helping. Many misguided donors sent warm scarves and other winter clothing to victims of the 2004 tsunami, despite the fact that nearly all who were affected lived in the tropics.

Online giving is also problematic in that it tracks very closely with news coverage. An initial flurry of donations follows the initial reports of a disaster, as donors click on links embedded in news stories. But as the stories move off the front page, online donations dry up, even though aid is often still needed. Add to that the issue of some mobile donations not reaching the aid organization for months, and growing electronic donations may cause further distortion to the temporal pattern of relief aid.

Further, the spread of online giving runs the risk of devaluing charity by making it routine or even trivial. If future generations come to believe that charitable donation merely means typing “HAITI” on a Blackberry keyboard as a knee-jerk response to sappy news coverage, it may become harder for aid organizations to recruit dedicated employees and volunteers who are willing to devote their life to a cause.

Finally, if online giving grows at the expense of offline donations, causes that don’t get much news coverage, like ending homelessness or stopping deforestation, may begin to lose funding as public attention shifts to the issue of the week. Some research shows that online donors tend to spend less when they later send an offline donation, although it is unclear how this will affect the overall distribution of charity dollars in the long run.

If nothing else, the fact that online donations track so closely with media coverage means that the newspapers and broadcasters may soon have even more control over which relief efforts receive aid dollars. This puts an even greater burden of responsibility on media outlets to cover the regions that need the most help.

Adam R. Gold ’11 is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.