The Pentera Blog
Women Donors Care More About Personal Experience with a Charity
One of the key ways that women donors think and act differently from their male counterparts is that women donors care more about personal experience with an organization when making philanthropic decisions.
Until recently there has been very little academic research on women donors, but The 2011 Study of High Net Worth Women's Philanthropy conducted by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy provides a comprehensive look at the differences between male and female donors in philanthropic motivation and behavior.Personal experience is defined in the high-net-worth study as volunteering for an organization or actually receiving services from that organization. While both high-net-worth men and women rated this as the No. 1 factor influencing them when deciding which specific organizations to support, it was more important to women by a statistically significant margin of nine percentage points (82 percent to 73 percent).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more American women than men volunteer at all socioeconomic levels. In the high-net-worth study, 86 percent of the women volunteered, compared to 78 percent of the men. Those who volunteer more tend to give more to charity, including planned gifts. Thus it behooves organizations to look among their volunteers and the recipients of services for donors—women donors in particular.
You can read more about the behavior of women donors in the Pentera whitepaper "Women in Philanthropy: They Have the Wealth. Do You Have the Tools You Need to Work with Them?" It is available for free download at https://pentera.com/whitepapers/women-in-philanthropy
