Drivers and Inhibitors of Online Donations to Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature on electronic commerce, few authors have combined these two fields to tackle the issue of online donations to nonprofit organizations. In this paper we first present a framework that illustrates several antecedents of online donations. After discussing the descriptive results from two surveys, we compare different user groups regarding their attitudes toward online donations. The results suggest that our scales exhibit sufficient reliability and validity and that the two groups differ significantly. Further-more, we conduct a regression analysis with the cause, trust in the organization, trust in the Internet, and privacy as independent variables and the people's intention to donate online as the dependent variable. Trust in the Internet turns out to be by far the most important influencing factor, exhibiting a significant influence on people's attitude toward donating to nonprofit organizations online.