A Framework for Measuring People's Intention to Donate Online

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature written on online payments, few authors have combined these two issues to take a look at online donations. Accepting donations online helps nonprofits, which typically face budgetary constraints, to accomplish their tasks more effectively and efficiently and to put their resources to use where they are needed most. In this paper we first present a framework that illustrates several antecedents of online donations. We use the results of two surveys to test the scales we have developed and present the respective factor loadings. After discussing the descriptive results, we compare two user groups (members of nonprofits and students) regarding their attitudes toward online donations. The results suggest that most of the scales we present exhibit sufficient validity and that significant differences between the two groups exist. While the former is useful for researchers planning to conduct an empirical survey to assess the importance of online donations, the latter results demonstrate the applicability of our instrument to segment user groups according to their preferences. This can help nonprofits to address their (prospective) members with better target communication efforts.