Generosity can be contagious in a healthy way.
Brother David Steindl-Rast

Christian Smith is a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. The university gained funding to start the Science of Generosity initiative from the John Templeton Foundation. The initiative tag line is “exploring an essential human virtue” and they consider this the infancy of a new science focused on human generosity.

In a recent article in Science and Religion, Smith tells of the current research projects they have going:

• Ariel Knafo, a psychologist at Hebrew University is working on “The Family Cycle of Kindness and Generosity.” This uses studies of identical twins to find how nature and nurture (child development, genetics, and environment) work together in children in the development of a generous disposition.

• Carolyn Warner , a political scientist at Arizona State University,  is working on “The Role of Religious Beliefs and Institutions in Generosity” by looking specifically at Catholicism and Islam. She hopes to help us better understand how specific religious beliefs and practices differ between these religions, how they help foster or create obstacles to generosity, and investigate whether they encourage generosity toward outsiders or toward their own communities.

• James Andreoni, an economist at the University of California, San Diego has a project called “The Inherent Sociality of Giving and Altruism.” It takes his research on the positive emotional experience charitable donors experience (the “warm-glow”) and expands it to understand the relationship dyadic between the donor and recipient. He regards generosity as a principally social act and seeks to understand the role that empathy plays in the donor-recipient relationship.

• Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist at Harvard University who focuses on social networks. He hopes to investigate how much social networks rely on generosity to keep them solvent and functional. He will also research how generous acts can spread and cascade through social networks.

Here we have the fields of psychology, human development, political science, religious studies, behavioral economics, sociology, and communications all studying the trait of generosity. And the John Templeton Foundation is funding research beyond just the work going on through Notre Dame. It seems that generosity studies have become popular. Smith says, “The science of generosity is in its infancy.” Indeed!

It’s not that you’ve got to be generous, but you get to be.
It’s not haranguing or threatening. It’s liberation.
Dr. Martin E. Marty

Love heals, love reconciles,
love helps us move when we are stuck,
love helps us cast out all fear…
- Rev. Laurel Hallman

Stewardship is a holistic concept that encompasses and connects how we understand and appreciate:  what we have been given and inherited, what we have earned, how we track and account for those resources, what we decide to do with them (according to our values/beliefs), and how we ensure that they are skillfully used to those purposes. As such, it is integral to our spiritual, ethical, and philosophical lives.

As people of faith, our programs and communications addressing stewardship must be congruent with our core belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. These approaches follow the same paths that we have learned are effective in challenging sexism, bias against sexual preference, and in anti-racism: We seek to reduce generalizations and discrimination (based on giving and economic status or the indicators of status), to encourage self-examination, to promote consciousness-raising, and to understand all people as interdependent, multi-faceted, and developing over the lifespan. Shaming, judgment, assumption, reproach, guilt, pressure, elitism, censure, and demanding language (or programs built on these concepts) are inappropriate and ineffective tools to open people’s hearts to deeper stewardship.

Aligned stewardship programs and communications use:

• Orientation toward individual spiritual needs as well as the needs of organizations
• An appreciative inquiry approach
• Empowerment and choice models
• Facilitation of personal development and spiritual growth
• Inspiration and leadership
• The provision of rich information (mission, planning, accounting, etc.) to increase motivation
• Respect for each person as a rich repository of diverse resources as well as individualized needs
• Caring systems (not cold, inhumane processes)
• A respect for the challenges inherent in countering our consumer culture by aligning our values with our resources
• An understanding of the reasonable fears and past wounding that may challenge a broadening of generosity
• A view of giving and receiving as dynamically linked

Below is a hotlink to a chart intended to provide language for responding to people who are negative, frustrated, or angry about the stewardship of others. Just click on the line below:

Language Choices in Stewardship

How do you see loving stewardship as opening hearts and hands to both give and receive in your congregation? What language do you use to help you convey that?

The great challenges of our time — poverty, the environment, war — should inspire humility, but also creativity and bold action. They cry out for large-minded generosity — that is, the magnanimity that springs from wholesome self-esteem. Without humility, we elbow others aside. But without magnanimity, we bury our talent in a napkin.
- Dean Brackley

Here comes the rainy season! Governments and organizations from all over the world have sent people, equipment and supplies, and funds into the country.  These organizations are there for the long haul and hope to better Haitians lives well beyond pre-earthquake levels. Many individuals from all over the globe have contributed as well with generous donations. What do we know about how that giving has continued beyond the initial response, when the Haiti earthquake was the lead story and horrifying pictures were in the media every day?

Data about giving by individuals beyond the first few days is hard to come by. Historically, individual giving has dropped off as soon as the initial crisis is over. It is possible to imagine many people sending an initial donation, one that is as generous as the person can afford at the moment. This may give the feeling that an appropriate response has been given and nothing more needs to be done.

Network for Good reported on January 22nd of this year:

After the Haiti earthquake, donations peaked within two days of the event and then steadily declined. New media coverage of aftershocks and on-the-ground response complications slowed the decline of giving one week out. The House of Representatives bill to include Haiti donations on 2009 tax returns may encourage more charitable contributions in the weeks ahead, further slowing the donation drop-off that usually occurs post-disaster.

Here is a chart from Network for Good, showing the donation amounts per day following the disaster:

Now the United Nations and the Red Cross are warning that on top of their other troubles, the rainy season is coming to Haiti and, if they cannot improve sanitation, water, facilities, etc – falling water and standing water will just add to people’s illness and suffering.

What have you decided about your contributions to Haiti earthquake relief?

• Make a single donation, as large as I can make
• Work with an organization to help gather donations, supplies, etc.
• Make regular donations until the Haitians are out of danger
• Leave it up to governments and the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to support disaster relief

The donor does not go without reward.
-The Buddha

Bill & Melinda Gates, photo © 2009 Kjetil Ree, some rights reserved

For the second year in a row, Bill Gates has published a rather sprawling annual letter. It is about what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is seeing in all of the worldwide data they have access to, and the foundation’s activities. Gates is frank, appreciative and optimistic about what we can achieve together with our generosity. In light of the tough problems the foundation is directly confronting, this is inspiring.

Despite the tough economy, I am still very optimistic about the progress we can make in the years ahead. A combination of scientific innovations and great leaders who are working on behalf of the world’s poorest people will continue to improve the human condition.
- Bill Gates

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation takes a more global view than countries or even groups of countries (the European Union or United Nations for instance), so the letter is pretty broad in perspective. The 2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates covers 12 “chapters”, including of the foundation priority areas. This makes it easy to read the parts that are of most interest to you on the web.

One thing that particularly concerns Gates is the amount of foreign aid given by individual countries. He measures this “generosity” by taking foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). By this measure, the United States, although the largest giver in total dollar amounts, falls far below other industrialized countries.

The United States is the biggest giver in absolute terms, but in percentage terms gives only 0.19 percent. In recent years, a significant portion of this assistance went to reconstruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If Congress passes President Obama’s proposal to double giving, however, the United States will get up into a very respectable range.
- Bill Gates

Here is the chart showing the 2008 figures:

As part of their efforts, Bill and Melinda Gates are working to spread the word about how highly successful aid effort have been. Gates says,

The public may not prioritize keeping foreign aid at high levels because so many of them have not heard how effective it is. Some formed their image of foreign aid during the Cold War, when money was sent to buy the allegiance of a dictator with very little control to make sure it was well spent. We need to get the successes to be far more visible than they are today.

To that end, they created the presentation, Why We are Impatient Optimists. This is available in its entirety on the web, in parts according to topic and there is a highlights video if you want get an idea of what type of information is covered. I have embedded the entire video below but if you click through on the hotlink above, you can select just a potion to watch if you wish. Enjoy!

UN Photo/Logan Abass

The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give.
- Walt Whitman

The recent tragedy of the Haiti earthquake has resulted in an amazing outpouring of generosity on the part of Americans. This has included charitable responses by aid organizations, medical and emergency rescue assistance and supplies, the US military lending its resources, and the contributions of countless private citizens. This is a bright spot in a bleak catastrophe, one that provides the potential for people’s generosity to keep growing.

The most recent total of financial giving for Haiti is $560,000,000. This is an astounding amount of generosity, especially when you consider that these donations are over and above people’s existing responsibilities and charitable gifts. This is $560 million dollars donated by Americans, most of which would not have been donated before the tragedy – which still continues. Hopefully the giving will also continue to sustain the effort until Haiti gains some rebuilding.

What does this mean for the average person (who may or may not be experiencing financial difficulty herself during this time)? What might she learn through responding to the Haiti earthquake disaster?

• She may understand in a new way that her money can be a blessing to someone else.
• She may feel as if, in the face of this unspeakable horror, that she can contribute to making the survivor’s lives better – even in a small way.
• She may use this as an opportunity to teach young people (her children or others’) about being generous.
• She may realize that, no matter how much or little she has, she has something to give to people in need.
• She may learn something about doing basic research to ensure her donations are made skillfully.
• She may understand that she has more resources than she thought.

Cynics may decry that human tragedy is needed to free up people’s generosity, that we are reactive givers instead of responsive givers. There may also be doubts about how well these donations can be managed to make the most difference. Concerns over the sovereignty of the Haitian people and government may arise as they are surrounded by aid efforts. Eventually there may be stories of mismanagement, and scam artists are already trying to take advantage of people’s desire to contribute.

Still, a door has opened in people’s hearts. Something is moving that was not moving before, and new levels of charity mean that some of those donors will discover something in this process. Neuroscience teaches us that as we do new things, our brain can develop new neural-pathways, new links, to accommodate those actions. Each new action is an opportunity. In this case, hundreds of thousands of opportunities to grow in our generosity have occurred.

Nothing, no amount of money or aid or support, will undo the terrible devastation, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the actual collapse of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The good things that may grow out of the Haiti Earthquake are incidental and will be shadowed into darkness by the suffering the Haitians are enduring. Still it is worthwhile to keep our spirits up, and theirs as much as we can by noticing any bright spots in the grief. To me, the generosity of thousands of Americans like you is a bright spot which bodes well for our future.

The practice of generosity is about creating space.
We see our limits and we extend them continuously,
which creates an expansiveness and spaciousness of mind that’s deeply composed.
- Sharon Salzburg

Photo www.giselagiardino.com.ar

Generosity is more charitable than wealth.
- Joseph Roux

This is the time of year when many people are focused on giving gifts, be they Christmas, Hanukkah, or year-end gifts from many other traditions. It is a time to be generous to the people we care about. It is also the time to think about our final charitable gifts of the year; for many people December is when they give most of their donations. So how do you decide where to give your charitable donations? If your resources are more precious this year, in light of economic challenges, your focus may be even more important. Here are some ideas.

First of all, your resources are not limitless so give your gifts to causes and organizations that you really care about. You can make a difference in the world with your charitable gifts, as you can with your time, energy, intelligence, and muscle. The greatest benefit will occur where you give all of these, so learn to say no to charitable causes that you don’t care about and give your all to those you do.

Take a risk! Be more generous than you think you can be and be willing to fund efforts that may or may not “cure” the problem. Organizations that are really trying to make a difference may be trying new tactics or may be taking a real risk themselves. That is when they need our generosity the most. If you care about an issue, do not let your need for success limit the creativity and vision of people who are committed to addressing that issue.

Consider making fewer and larger gifts instead of many smaller gifts. This will allow you to make a real connection with the organizations you support and be more thoughtful in your contributions. It will not only make more of a difference, it will also reduce the amount of solicitation mail and other wasted communications you get from other charities.

Do you want to support organizations that work outside of systems or those working inside the system? For instance, if you are interested in childhood education, you may want to support a charter school, which works outside of the public school system. Or you may want to support an organization like Teach for America, which places talented young people in low-income area public schools. Almost any issue will have organizations that are finding a new way, and ones that are trying to support the systems in place to work better.

Consider what kind of results you are looking for. Are you interested in engaging as many people as possible, in leveraging the most resources to make a difference, or are you more interested in measurable change for those who are affected? For instance, if you are passionate about childhood hunger, would you support an organization that works worldwide and moves a large amount of food aid into needed areas? Or would you support an organization that works more directly with a specific population area to reduce the number of children living with malnutrition? These are complex situations and help is needed everywhere; you must decide what makes the most sense to you.

You may also want to think about your own role over time. Are you someone who wants to support an ongoing issue and see it through your entire lifetime or are you more inclined to try and do something about an urgent and topical problem? If you are someone who needs to see clear results quickly, you might keep that in mind when deciding on an organization to support.

An organization’s cost to raise a dollar (CTRD) is something donors are often encouraged to consider. However, this equation is not as simple as it appears. All donors want to ensure that most of their donation is going to the cause of beneficiaries, and there are industry standards about the maximum amount that should go to fundraising expenses. However if an organization is changing it scale to try to have a broader effect, or is reorienting its mission, the CTRD may for a time be justifiably higher. If it is an organization that uses has a public communication mission (to raise awareness of AIDS for instance), their fundraising may be more costly, since it may include public campaigns as well. The best way to understand these issues is to know as much as you can about the organization you are supporting.

Many donors also want to know that their donations are going directly to a program and not to pay for running the charity; thinking this will ensure their donation will have the greatest effect on the problem. Although this may be true, it is also important to consider that if you support the capacity-building of a nonprofit, they may be better able to address the issue you care about. After all, you are contributing to an organization because they do something. Without the capacity, they cannot do it.

This list of factors to consider may be overwhelming. However, if you are willing to do a little research and communicate with nonprofit organizations that you are considering, you will gain the knowledge that will make your decisions easier:

• Learn as much as you can about the issue you care about; this will inform you about which organizations are making a difference and how
• Find an organization’s annual report on the web or request that it be sent to you
• Research the organization on the web and on charity rating websites
• Make a small initial donation to see what kind of information is provided to donors
• Volunteer with the organization; this personal contact will tell you a lot about the issue and how the organization is addressing it

This is also the season for thanks. Thanks to you for carefully considering your charitable gifts – and for being so generous!

Mary did it, George! Mary did it! She told a few people you were in trouble and they scattered all over town collecting money.
They didn’t ask any questions— just said:
‘If George is in trouble—count on me.’
You never saw anything like it.
- The film It’s a Wonderful Life

Here comes Thanksgiving, the American holiday built around food. This is not only distinct from holidays that include gift giving; it is also one where many people act charitably to others. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, however much of the traditional Thanksgiving foods were hunted and gathered rather than farmed.  To celebrate the holiday, here is a post about an anthropological study which finds that hunter-gatherers who share generously are better cared for when they need support than those who keep their food resources for themselves.

Why do individuals give away valuable fitness-enhancing food resources to other individuals? Answers from anthropology generally fall into one of three categories: nepotism (supporting relatives), reciprocal altruism (mutual back-scratching), or tolerated theft (not giving up ownership, but not prosecuting people who need and take). In “It’s a Wonderful Life”: signaling generosity among the Ache of Paraguay, Gurven, Allen-Arave, Hill, & Hurtado from the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico show that,

…those who shared and produced more than average (signaling cooperative intent and/or ability to produce) were rewarded with more food from more people when injured or sick than those who shared and produced below average.

Although they currently reside on permanent settlements, the Ache of eastern Paraguay were full-time hunter-gatherers occupying a 20,000-km area of the upper Jejui watershed up until the time of contact with researchers in the mid-1970s. They continue to spend up to 33% of their time on extended foraging trips.

It is important to note that consistently high food producers who give more than they receive, gain the least risk-reduction benefit from daily pooling of food resources because they are the least likely to go without food on any given day. The study shows that, even though these generous individuals do not receive the proportion of food they give, they receive additional food during hard times. These hard times might include episodes of sickness, disease, injury, or accidents which are fairly common events in traditional societies and can render individuals incapable of producing food.

What seems to be important in this research is that these people have a reputation for being generous that endures over time. So even when they are not able to share, they are known as people who would if they could – based on their past behavior. It also seems important that, by sharing generously, they build a reputation for being able to produce large amounts of food. For that reason, there is motivation in the rest of the community to support those people, so that they can recover and return to high levels of food production (and then share it). The authors conclude:

If altruistic behavior is analogous to paying a high premium for long-term health insurance, then extensive food sharing can be construed as risk-averse behavior in the long term, even if it may appear as risk-prone behavior in the short-term.

Are you generous with your food resources, during Thanksgiving and throughout the year? If so, why? If you are not generous, why not? This time of year is also traditionally a time of reflection, so consider what you are gaining and risking with your habits and practices.

Not what we say about our blessings,
but how we use them,
is the true measure of our thanksgiving.
- W. T. Purkiser

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.
- Lilla Watson, Murri (Aboriginal Australian) visual artist, activist and educator

Over time a theme has emerged on this blog; that is the relationship between charitable contributors, organizations who engage them, and the beneficiaries who are supported by their efforts. This can be seen in many of the postings under the category Contributor Relationships (in the gold bar on the left).  Kim Samuel-Johnson recently posted a frank and poignant essay about her struggles as a philanthropist to be in relationship as a contributor. She says:

I’ve noticed that isolation, or at least a feeling of bleak separation, can occur in the very act of philanthropy; that sometimes the manner in which the gift is made diminishes and isolates both the person who is seen as giving and the person who is seen as receiving.

Ms. Samuel-Johnson is the president of the Samuel Foundation and a board member of The Synergos Institute. Synergos publishes the online newsletter Global Giving Matters and this essay is the first to look at the inner journey of a philanthropist.

Samuel-Johnson is concerned with the isolation that comes from having financial resources out of scale with others; this can make her feel like an outsider. She is advocating that the contributors, service providing organizations, and beneficiaries join together as a community of concern. This is reflected in postings on this Generosity Path blog such as A Relationship with Beneficiaries. She says is beautifully here:

So, far from feeling separated out as “the person with the money,” or the outsider in some other way, I feel the boundaries between the “me” and the “they” disappear. I feel welcome as part of, if you like, the family. This means a lot to me.
And yet – and this is important – there has to be a clarity and an honesty about what it is that each of us can bring. In my case, I try to bring a lot of passion and very high standards, two qualities I consider essential for philanthropy, because we all need to engage both the heart and the mind. I’ve also brought monetary resources, which are generally not unimportant.
In the case of others, though, they have brought resources of comparable or greater value, including knowledge of the community, management or other skills, creativity, hard-won knowledge, or a commitment to see the project through. In a way, mine may have been the easiest contribution to secure!

In the essay Samuel-Johnson also connects giving and receiving into one dynamic, where both givers and receivers benefit in their own way. She says,

I finally understand that if the giving and receiving is done with the right spirit, from all corners, bearing in mind that we are all giving and receiving simultaneously, then money is a facilitator, not my “gift” per se but instead an expression of my commitment, and an important one at that.

And here she lays out a vision of how this contributor/beneficiary relationship can honor everyone’s contributions and reduce isolation for all of the collaborators:

If the giving and receiving is shared and if everyone is able to come to the table, roll up his or her sleeves, and work together with an understanding of the interests, experience, passion, and goals that brought us together, then each of our needs will have already been factored into the initiative.
What is left then is simply a group of people creating something new together, in harmony, where no one at the table and from there outwards to the various partners or constituents feels like they are ever alone. I interpret this kind of collaboration as stemming from a wholesome and generous spirit of giving and receiving, a place of being included.

This is beautiful, brave, and counter-cultural work Samuel-Johnson is doing. It is also a spiritual journey, where she is working to live out her values. BRAVO!

A true vision of peace sees a continuous mutuality between giving and receiving. Let’s never give anything without asking ourselves what we are receiving from those to whom we give, and let’s never receive anything without asking what we have to give to those from whom we receive.
- Henri Nouwen

Tara Brach

For Tara Brach, generosity can come as spontaneously as our breath; it is the natural outflow from receiving, from being grateful. Brach is an author, a Buddhist meditation teacher, and leader of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (DC). She guides her students to use meditation, their acute sensory awareness, and to cultivate a consciousness of the present moment — which she calls Natural Presence.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2007, Brach gave a talk called Gratitude and Generosity. In it she pointed out that breath can become a guide to living life fully; that you can breathe in, let the breath come in fully and deeply, and understand the experience as an expression of receptivity. Then breathing out and really letting go of the breath, surrendering it, can be understood as an expression of generosity, of offering into the world.

Gratitude has everything to do with happiness.
- Tara Brach

For Brach, gratitude is a recognition and appreciation, which confirms a sense of abundance in the world. This leads naturally to generosity.  She notes that people who are happy are appreciating life and that their happiness flows out naturally into the world, as a gift. However this recognition and appreciation, which precedes gratitude, is only possible by being truly present in the moment and place we inhabit, by seeing things as they are, and by letting reality as it is flow through us. She contrasts this with being caught up in our thoughts, memories, and judgments about the present reality, which distracts us from what actually is.

Since she lives near a river, Brach uses the river metaphor to deepen her explanation of being in natural presence. She says that similar to when we are standing in a river, if we allow the water to flow through and around us rather than trying to fight the current or control the flow of the water, we are more stable and secure. With our consciousness, if we allow the flow of life we are more present and free, and giving also flows more naturally. In this way generosity is an expression of inner freedom.

Brach believes that the basic way of expressing our abundance, freedom, and generosity is to give our blessings to other people, to give our love. She tells a tale from Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, My Grandfather’s Blessings. When Remen was young her grandfather would spend time and tell her about her goodness. He gave her a name, Neshumela, which means little beloved soul. After his death, Remen realized that she had learned to see herself through his eyes, as blessed. She says, “Once blessed we are blessed forever.”

So breathe in as a practice of receiving, practice meditation as a way to cultivate natural presence, as a way to feel the abundance of the world. And breathe out, giving your presence as a gift. Brach exhorts us to then: tell the people in your life about their goodness, bless them, and let them know your love – out loud.

Gratefulness is flowing from my heart.
- Hezekiah Walker

Listen to the Gospel song Grateful by Hezekiah Walker:

People are spending lots of time in online social networks and many nonprofit organizations are looking for ways to engage those networks. Nonprofits know that they can help with advocacy efforts; can they also support the organizational fundraising? A recent study using Facebook and Harvard undergraduates explored financial altruism behaviors within existing social networks. The results may not surprise you: people are more altruistic to those closer to them in the network, and friends who cluster together tend to have the same relative level of altruism.

In the study, Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks, a group of researchers from Harvard , Iowa State University, and Singapore Management University (Leider, Möbius, Rosenblat, & Do), engaged Harvard undergraduates, examined their online social network (to decipher how near or distant they are were to friends), and then engaged them in a number of games. Surprisingly, a total of 5,576 out of the 6,389 undergraduates at Harvard participated, either by being a player in a given task or in being named by a participant. In these online games, subjects made unilateral allocation decisions for several types of named partners and one anonymous partner (a randomly selected participant from the subject’s dormitory).

These experiments with real subjects in their own social network were conducted solely online. All communication with the subjects was by email and they submitted all of their choices to a password protected website through their own web browsers.

Here is how one of the games went:

In the helping game, each decision-maker was endowed with $45, and each partner was endowed with $0. The decision-maker was asked to report the maximum price that she would be willing to pay in order for the partner to receive a gain of $30. A random price between $0 and $30 was determined, and if her maximum willingness to pay was equal or greater than the random price the partner received $30 and the random price was deducted from the decision-maker’s endowment. Otherwise, the decision-maker’s payoff equaled her endowment of $45, and the partner’s payoff equaled his endowment of $0. Effectively, the decision-maker revealed how much she valued a $30 gain for the partner.

Results:

• Close social ties induce directed altruism (toward someone you know). Allocations to friends are substantially higher (on average 52 percent more money) than allocations to distant partners/strangers.
• Giving is motivated by the prospect of future interaction. The data showed that future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24 percent. This implies that the partner would rather repay the favor than damage the friendship.
• Baseline altruism and directed altruism are correlated, that is subjects with higher baseline altruism have friends with higher baseline altruism. Subjects who give more to nameless partners also give more to specific named partners, and are treated more generously by their friends. However, the data shows that friends do not reward intrinsic kindness, but rather, that kind people tend to have friends who exhibit greater baseline altruism themselves.

Using online methods, the researchers are able to document and distinguish altruism to close friends, more distant acquaintances, and strangers. However, the results correlate with what traditional fundraising experience and donor studies in other formats document. That is, people tend to give more to people they know, that the idea of future engagement also increases giving, and that if there is no personal connection, giving can be expected to be low. What is true in traditional methods of personal interaction is mirrored on line. What is not studied here is how easy or difficult it is to create social closeness online as compared to developing social closeness in live meetings, phone calls, and other formats. That is where many nonprofits see the advantage of online relationships lies, and where, since the phenomena is so new, not as much is known.

Our result that friends cluster by baseline altruism raises another interesting question for future
research: do our friends shape our social preferences (treatment effect), or do we seek out friends with similar social preferences (selection effect)?