Characteristic Affecting Charitable Donations Behavior: Empirical Evidence from Malaysia

Abstract:

Giving to charities comes from two major forms, which is through time (volunteering) and money (donation). The recent World Giving Index 2013 had shown that there is increasing rank for charitable donations in Malaysia. Generally, charities have to depend on individual donors and less on the government for fundraising in order to survive in the competition. As charities need to depend on individual donor, it is compulsory to study on the individual donor characteristic which can helps to identifying and describes recognizably the individual donor features. Furthermore, in Malaysia, there are limited studies on the characteristic of individual donor. Thus, this study aim is to investigate the characteristic of Malaysian charitable donors and the study followed the study on donor characteristic in Britain, Australia, Brunei and Pakistan to develop a better understanding of Malaysian donor’s extrinsic determinants (demographic determinants and socio-demographic determinants) and intrinsic determinants (psychographic determinants). Data is collected from the individual donors in the Central Region of Malaysia that consist of Selangor, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Negeri Sembilan and Melaka. To measure the results, factor analysis is used in the development and evaluation of test and scale. Later, logistic regression is used to analyse the relationship between variables. It is basically used when dependent variables is categorical (donor/non-donor). Findings show that age, income, education and religious factors does affect the charitable donation behavior in Malaysia. Further, the research also identifies major differences between donor characteristic from Malaysia with Britain, Australia, Brunei and Pakistan. The findings indicate that the characteristics of donors differ between each country and more exploration is needed in this field.