Searching for recipes to compete in the charitable contributions market: A configurational approach

Nonprofits that compete for charitable contributions often question which are the most effective factors that lead to high levels of donations. To date, the research has been dominated by linear models mainly based on the economic model of giving, and has reported mixed and sometimes conflictual findings about the net effect of certain individual organization-specific factors on donations. In this study, we introduce a configurational approach to explore how the factors considered by the economic model of giving may be combined with each other in multiple configurations with the goal of obtaining high levels of donations. Applying fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, we focus on a sample of British community foundations and identify four combinations that lead these organizations to collect large amounts of charitable contributions. The results show that, whereas young foundations should rely on high levels of program spending and large amounts of online disclosure combined with, alternatively, efficiency or aggressive fundraising, old foundations should contain administrative costs and strengthen fundraising efforts while, alternatively, spending the most part of their resources on programs or disseminating large amounts of information through their public websites.